Ghostrunner: the cyberpunk super bad-ass robot ninja adventure

Ghostrunner is the name of one game in particular that took the headlines very recently. The game was originally announced at Gamescom 2019, being developed by One More Level with some help from 3D Realsm and Slipgate Ironworks, and it's being published by All In! Games.

Ghostrunner captured everyone's attention through the game demo the was only recently made public. The game let's you take control of an unknown character at this point in time, a character that has spectacular ninja abilities and also seems to have robotic parts, his hand for example as it can be seen in the beginning of the demo.

The game is set in a dystopian future with a very clear cyberpunk vibe around it. The entire action is happening in a mega city built like a tower, called Dharma tower. The tower is built in such way that it contains everything a city need to survive. It is also quite obvious that we are talking about class separation in Dharma, with the poor class of people working hard at the bottom levels of the tower, providing what the city needs to keep going on, while the rich class enjoys their privileged lives at the top.

The story is not the most complicated, or the most original, but it helps pushing the game forward. The Ghostrunner, which is controlled by you, is some sort of samurai-like peacekeeper. As it seen in the demo, he wakes up at the bottom of the tower with no memory. A mysterious voice, identified only as the Whisper, is the only guide you have of navigating the environment. After the initial quest of freeing the Whisper for the prison, your ultimate goal is to reach the top of the tower and get your hands on the Keymaster, the one who runs the whole city.

In order to move the story forward, the gameplay is absolutely hitting the mark. Ghostrunner is a first-person action game, that hands you a samurai sword as your only weapon and parkour skills to navigate your surroundings.

In your run to the top you can jump from level to level, do wall runs, use your dash ability which slows time for a bit and also gives you a little boost. The combat is not overly complicated at all, with enemies dying from just one swing of the sword. On the other side of the coin, if you're not careful you can also die from one hit.

The secret of the game seems to be the trial and error approach. The design of every level is very detailed and it offers you different options of traversal. It all depends on you how you can combine your parkour abilities with your dash and sword attacks in order to cut through the levels as fast as you can, because the game does measure your time. This is a very simple feature that wouldn't be so important, but it pushes you to master every ability and the way the Ghostrunner moves around in order to go and play the levels again only to get a better time.

Since it's announcement, with trailers and demos the game did delivered a lot on what it promised. Ghostrunner is set to release later this year on multiple platforms.