Ghostrunner is a game all about movement. Yes, it has a great story too, hitting those classic cyberpunk themes of corruption, power, and technologies gone rogue, but its moment-by-moment mechanics are somewhere between the instakill ultraviolence of Hotline Miami and the breathtaking free-flowing movement of DOOM.
There are many fun ways you can traverse Ghostrunner’s fallen setting of Dharma Tower, and we’re going to chat about some of our favourites.
Wall-running
It sounds terrifying in real life, and in games it’s the kind of parkour stuff that can cause endless finger cramps if poorly implemented. You’re going to spend a hell of a lot of time running along walls in Ghostrunner, and it’s just as fun but not as hard as it sounds.
You can run along almost any flat vertical surface in Ghostrunner. Just jump at the wall and you’re away. In a game where you die in a single shot, walls are a great way to keep moving, baffle your enemies, and get the jump on them. There’s an extra layer of fun where you can leap straight from one wall to the next, continuing your seamless sprint.
Dash
The next fundamental to being a great Ghostrunner is the dash - a lightning-fast move in any direction that gets you out of harm’s way. But this move, which we’ve seen executed so well in top shooters like DOOM and Shadow Warrior, has a couple of extra hooks here.
Quickly pressing the Dash button will instantaneously move you in whichever direction you like, but if you hold the button instead, then time slows down for several seconds. During this time, you can slowly glide in a single direction, evading bullets or obstacles coming your way. Then when you let go of the button you dash forward from your new position, catching enemies completely off-guard.
Add to that the fact that you can get an upgrade that lets you double-dash, and the possibilities for lethality are endless.
Blink
A move that will be familiar to fans of another legendary first-person game, Dishonored. The Blink ability slows down time for a moment, letting you line up a distant enemy in your sights, then hit the attack button to instantly appear in front of them and quite literally slice them in half.
Again, it’s the layers that make this especially effective. Position yourself so that two or three enemies are directly one behind the other, target the far one with Blink, and you’ll cut through every enemy between you and your target, making for gloriously gory insta-kill combos.
Grappling Hook
This one probably needs no introduction, but when you combine it with the arsenal of agility-based abilities you’ve seen already, it turns gravity into a non-entity for the Ghostrunner.
The Grappling Hook can be used from the ground or in mid-air, letting you leap vast distances. With fast enough reflexes, you can get out of many a death fall by looking around for those precious grappling points then swinging yourself to safety. Enemies can forget about hitting you when you’re in full swing, and it’s incredibly satisfying to slide down a slope, duck under a pipe, before leaping with full momentum off a ledge and grapple-hooking away from the abyss.
The Cybervoid
Yes, everything we mentioned turns you into something of a dystopian cyberpunk Spiderman, but with the Cybervoid you have a whole extra dimension to traverse. This stunning cyber-dimension is only accessible to the Ghostrunners of Dharma Tower, and is where you learn new abilities courtesy of a mysterious AI known as the Architect.
It’s a weird space of shifting geometries, psychedelic cyberscapes and strange puzzles that help your Ghostrunner rediscover his skills and identity, and really hits home the sense that whatever you are in this broken world, it’s a little more than human.
If you’re ready to leap, slice and slide through the spaces and cyberspaces of Ghostrunner, then head on over to its Steam page, where it’s available to buy now.