Ghostrunner 2: Only the sum of its parts. I tentatively recommend it, but with the disclaimer that it has a lot of flaws. My relationship with GR1 goes deep, and I was skeptical on how OML would handle a sequel. Studios like this with games like this can never seem to avoid messing with the best parts of a game during a subsequent release, and such is the case here. The overhauls to movement are perfect if you play GR2 the way it was meant to be played. If you try to play outside the box, the game will fight you as much as possible. This has had severe negative impacts on speedrunning, as well as the new level design, but I'll avoid speedrun talk for now. The movement no longer has a dash restriction, it has a stamina meter. This has advantages and disadvantages, but can be a severe detriment to the game's flow and have devastated the usage of advanced movement techniques. The *act* of slicing and dicing feels less impactful than before in its VFX and SFX, but what is a much greater loss is how it handled reflecting projectiles, parries, and the new blocking feature. I would call the new parry system an absolute catastrophe on all fronts except for boss fights, to which end it's still a mixed bag. To reflect a shot, you can no longer swing at it, you must time your fully distinct block action. This has many problems, the most immediate of which is that the block has a DELAY to it. Not a long one, but enough that you can't act as reflexively as you once could. Additionally, the feedback on reflecting shots is miserable, so you often won't know if you actually did so until you've burned through stamina by blocking. Parrying melee attacks has a finisher animation (which I absolutely DESPISE, but some people are into that) that destroys the pace of combat just like any other finisher animation, but at least it isn't mandatory. It's more efficient to just perform a normal attack in the first place which makes you wonder why they even bothered. Grappling is now a miserable experience as you'll find yourself constantly hooking on to points that you weren't looking at. There's a complex "priority" system in place that is just awful. Abilities were overhauled to now use an energy meter instead of an all-or-nothing ability charge. This was a good choice. Additionally, the upgrade menu saw SIGNIFICANT improvements, even if I liked the old "tetris" menu. Now you're no longer forced to build for only one ability at a time, which is important as GR2 now requires ability usage to navigate the levels. You cannot progress without using tempest, shuriken, and shadow. This has benefits and drawbacks, but it overall makes movement more involved, and ability usage more fluid. This comes at the cost of abilities being more powerful, which I'm indifferent about. Two new systems were added for combat, both of which I would call incredibly bad decisions that I'm surprised made it past the concept stage. The first is an "ultimate" ability system which feels so crowbarred in that you'd think you're playing as Gordon Freeman. Most of the abilities are underwhelming, one is overpowered, you cannot manually charge it, and must wait on a timer, in a game about moving through as fast as you can. Blink was shuffled over here and made worse which baffles me. It would have been good for level traversal and was already the second least useful ability in GR1, so nerfing it and putting it on a long, purely timer-based cooldown makes no sense at all. The other new system is the combo system where your combo count builds up with each kill. Many upgrades trigger effects at certain combo milestones, which makes absolutely no sense because it means you have almost no control over when they're used unless you have the levels memorized. This is due in part to the awful level design in most of the game. GR2's levels have a few great sections and otherwise range from mediocre to bad. Combat arenas were meant to be less restrictive in how you approach them, which is good on paper, but the end result is that arenas feel like a disorganized mess with no clear or useful path through, intensified by adding enemies which run around quickly, meaning you can lose track of where they are. Replacing the old hang rails with under-foot grind rails was also a horrible decision, mainly due to how utterly MASSIVE the hitbox is to magnetize to the rails. You'll constantly be yanked onto them when you don't want to be. One problem overshadows the entire experience though, and it's that the levels are just too fucking long. All but one of them drag on far more than is necessary. There are many new enemy types, some of which return from the Hel DLC, but all of which come with questionable implementation or obvious flaws. I won't get into the specifics, but there is one significant problem with the "scion" enemies. They all sound the same. Human enemies mostly had callouts in GR1 that let you identify what they were and what they were doing. When you have a collection of enemies that only gargles, this incredibly important gameplay element has been stripped away. As for the whole motorcycle mechanic... it's undercooked, which is made so much worse by how much of it you're forced to do in succession. Turbo Overkill made its vehicle sections short, novel, and spaced out as to not get annoying. GR2 puts all of its vehicle sections in one spot and makes up almost half of the game. To give an example of how badly this was implemented, you can only aim your mounted guns upward if you're BOOSTING, and steering/aiming is done with movement controls. So not only are we back to keyboard aiming, but your ability to slowly aim upwards is tied to your forward movement speed and you can't go backwards. To aim down, you have to wait for your guns to slowly lower. I've never seen a game handle aiming this way because it's a terrible way of doing it. I don't think ANYONE who enjoyed GR1 went "I like this gameplay loop, but I really wish it had more sections where I was playing a different genre of game." As for visuals, they're nice, but the game's optimization is TERRIBLE. Even on lowest settings with a mid-grade PC, I got massive FPS drops in some areas. The sound design is fine, nothing special, the music has some absolute stand-outs, and a few that are just whatever and highly forgettable. The story is more in-depth than the first game, which is like saying a kiddie pool is more in-depth than a birdbath. The pacing is a complete mess compared to the first, due in part to a hub section you return to between most levels. There's a lot of NPC dialogue, but none of the characters are actually that interesting, just well-voice acted, but Jack was given much more personality this time around, and they did a great job with his character writing. The main plot motivation isn't bad, a bit more creative than the first, but it boils down to "stop the baddies and kill the roster of bosses". Hardcore mode is vastly worse than in GR1. Too many environmental hazards, not enough level remixing, and they didn't even cut the filler sections, just made them more unpleasant. One of the levels on normal is so bad that on hardcore, I just used an exploit to skip the level. I'm not even going to bother. The """roguelite""" mode is a sloppy add-on and should have just been another wave mode. It's not fun and the difficulty fluctuates like a seismograph. The season pass indicates an upcoming endless mode for the bike section, which I'm pretty sure less than 1% of the playerbase is interested in. Why would you create an endless version of the weakest part of your game? There's far more nuance to the pros and cons of GR2 than I can fit in a steam review, so I'll leave it at this for now: GR2 is just fine as a game, not as fun as GR1, and it makes several DSJs in the wrong direction. The replay value is borderline non-existent and the lower number of speedrun submissions reflects that.
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