I have finished playing through Ghostrunner 2 in a matter of 2 days.
My thoughts:
I think the voiceover audio works better than the stilted facial animation stuff they tried to do with the hub world. Frankly it feels like there doesn't even need to be a hub world at all, but it's pretty ignorable.
The levels feel like more of the same stuff from the first game, but they spiced things up with a couple new enemy types, more collectibles to grab, and a couple new mechanics here and there which add to the variety. You are switching between like many different buttons and actions all the time in a way that feels very fun to play. Good additions to the basic concept.
The augment system is really well done for what it is. There's a lot of cool modifiers, rearranging the grid as you go feels nice, and having to puzzle around where best to put things to get all the bonuses you want is a good balance between being interesting without being constricting or frustrating.
Also, there's a ton of augments which let you stack combo and gain movespeed and bonuses per combo meter, along with extending dash distance and rocket jumping, I am super excited to see what the speedrun for this game does with all of that tech. I ended up just getting 20 combo and then throwing myself off a ledge with +100% movespeed but im sure people more skilled than me with be able to do a lot with it.
I think I like some of the boss fights from the first game a bit more, there's not a ton of boss fights overall to be fair, but the Humanoid boss fights just feel a tad less interesting in places. That said, the bossfight on motorcycle is dope as hell.
Actually, the entire motorcycle section is awesome! Feels really good to control, the fact you can jump off it and grapple back to it feels sick as hell, it's implemented well to pace out this frankly enormous level which feels like half open world and hearkens my brain back to the days of the Hotwheels game on the gamecube. Legitimately an incredibly cool addition to the game, and every level section based around it they just went super off with making it as cool as possible.
The story in the first game felt a bit more tightly wound than it did in this one. I think part of that is because the way the story is happening feels a bit like you're being sent on sidequests a lot of times instead of having the same sort of linear progression feeling that the first game did. Maybe some of that is just because I didnt know the world at first and so learning more about it felt in the shoes of the character more, idk.
It uses the same general engine as the first game, so a lot of the things that existed in the first game (buggy out of bounds wall runs on jank geometry, occasional walls in places that are missing proper collision, dash->slide->jump cancelling to go super fast ((very fun, best part of the first game was mastering that "mechanic"))) which is both a plus and a con in some places.
All in all, I had a ton of fun with it. The roguelike mode was also surprisingly fun, though I wont likely play it much more. A lot of the fun comes from the levels themselves for me, and there seems to be limited level variety in that mode.
TLDR; Bladerunner 2 is everything I wanted from a game I never knew was even being made. Big fan.
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