The elevator pitch for the original Ghostrunner was ripped straight out of the idle daydreams of a late 90s teenage boy. Set in a cyberpunk world, Jack is a Ghostrunner, a cyber-ninja who dashes through the world, wall-runs, dodges bullets and then deals deadly single slash kills with his samurai sword. What’s cooler than a cyberpunk ninja though? Well, Ghostrunner 2 would contend that it’s a cyberpunk ninja on a motorbike.
At the heart of Ghostrunner 2 is this over-the-top power fantasy This is a game of split-second reactions as you race to close the distance on enemies spread out around an area, always sprinting, leaping to wall-run and jump, sliding, grinding on rails, now being able to grapple to hook points, and rapidly reducing the gap to nothing before dealing out a slice that’s deadlier than a poisoned cake. Add to this things like shuriken throwables, and you can absolutely dish it out.
The thing is that their bullets are pretty deadly as well. Jack is a glass cannon, and an enemy landing just a single hit will send you back to the last checkpoint. The main new concession here is that Jack can now block in-coming attacks, not just dodge and evade them.
From that, though, comes a compelling zen-state of ninja-like action. Broken up by slick platforming sections and some light environmental puzzles, encounters that you come to through the game’s opening hour gradually grow in scope until they’re multi-levelled sandboxes of death. It won’t be for everyone, but I found it particularly gratifying to gradually, iteratively work your way through a particular arena, working out which approaches work over the course of half a dozen runs. I don’t know what the challenge deeper into the game will be like, but I was a little surprised by how quickly I was able to get to grips with it.
One of the other appeals of the first game was being right on the cutting edge of graphics tech for the time, combining Unreal Engine with early ray-tracing effects through Nvidia’s RTX technology. Naturally the second game is able to make use of the last few years of rapid improvement, jumping to Unreal Engine 5, and making the most of GPUs two generations newer, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S hardware as the base level. The cyberpunk city of Dharma Tower that the game starts in is well realised, the vast megalopolis featuring vast chasms for you to cross, sheer drops into endless feeling expanses, and more than a few neon-lit passageways and plazas to battle in.
The newer generation of hardware surely enables the new motorbike-riding sections, the city backdrop whizzing by your viewpoint as you race down twisting motorways and take improbable jumps while racing against the clock to escape the tower. It’s tricky to handle at pace, spotting diverging routes, controlling the bike through jumps to reach adjacent pathways and platforms, but there’s the same quick-fire approach to reload and go again if you fail – though where the combat is now imbued with more flexibility and approaches, this straightforward challenge could grate with too many failures. As shown in the game’s trailers, it builds up to bursting out of the tower and then racing down its side, in a spectacular cinematic moment.
Ghostrunner 2’s demo has me sold on this sequel, a slick follow up that looks to take everything that was appealing about the original and expand on it with new ideas and possibilities. Turns out a cyberpunk ninja on a motorbike really is cooler.
Want to try out Ghostrunner 2 for yourself? While the full game will release on 26th October across PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, the demo is now available on PC via Steam.
