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Exploring Hekseville with your newfound abilities is a thrill; you’ll find precious gems and challenge quests littered throughout the city. Your extraordinary powers make GR feel like a proper superhero sandbox game, on top of the great adventuring. Nabbing hidden gems offers the same satisfaction that some of you might have experienced while grabbing green orbs in Crackdown, and so do those exhilarating moments found in the best Spider-Man games of leaping off gigantic buildings and swooping to the ground with the grace of a bird.
Gravity Rush immediately brings the films of Studio Ghibli to mind: the gorgeous art design mixes anime-style cityfolk with color-saturated vistas, and the melodic symphony soundtrack has the same peppy and harmonious cadence you’d expect from a Miyazaki movie. Each district of Hekseville has its own mood and appeal – there’s the soothing serenity of Auldnoir, or the hustle and bustle of the Pleajeune entertainment district. If you’re a fan of games oozing Japanese style, Gravity Rush will utterly entrance you from the moment you boot it up.
It’ll take you around 10 constantly-engaging hours to complete the main story, but there’s a wealth of objectives to conquer once you’ve concluded (as well as some incoming DLC). Many of the challenges are punishingly difficult to get a gold reward in; fortunately, finishing them is a bonus and not a requirement. There’s a caveat for gamers who experience motion sickness in FPS games and the like – GR requires that you spin the camera around at any given time, so if you have a weak stomach or vertigo, you’ll feel queasy within seconds.
With a nondescript name like Gravity Rush, you wouldn’t be the first to mistake this game for a low-budget title worth skipping. But it’d be a crime to overlook – this adventure has such a vibrant world, exhilarating gameplay systems, and a delightful narrative that it deserves a spot in every Vita owner’s library. It’s the kind of game that wouldn’t exist on any other platform, and honestly, it’s so perfect for the medium that it wouldn’t need to.
