I picked at this over the course of a few years in denial that it's just mediocre. After each break, my memories rebelled. The art style’s great! The concept is cool! It’s not that long, why did you stop? And while pleasant, each return could only hold my attention for a couple missions before another eight months had passed without my noticing.
The ability to shift gravity in any direction makes for some very cool promotional material. The imagination races at getting to redirect your vector in mid-air. There is a real appeal to falling upside sideways, of your brain rethinking an urban setting as crooked lines between sewers and skylines. Having dumpsters and townspeople unintentionally caught in your local gravity field as you rocket around is silly. But once your focus on waypoints makes the city a blur, robbed of fear or novelty, falling is tedious.
In practice, this mechanic introduces serious control problems. How should the camera behave? How should your two two-dimensional control sticks orient your character in 3D space? Thankfully the game has gyro controls for fine-tuning movement, an input method that better mirrors the game environment. Which is sadly also a double-edged sword, as gyro controls are not used when the player character is walking on the ground. Whenever I relaxed my grip during a cutscene, the camera spun out of control when next I took to the air.
This game has combat.
This game has part of a story.
While I know so much of the experience of playing the game definitely deserves my 2 star, C rank rating, Gravity Rush has soul. The hub world’s large, labyrinthine, floating metropolis feels so superfluous in its landmarkless, multilayered emptiness. But at the same time, ignoring it with the power of flight wouldn’t have the same charm if you couldn’t so easily get lost, trapped in dead-end alleys when you accidentally fall from the sky. The looseness of movement, the sloppy chaos, is part of Gravity Rush’s identity.
Once I had beaten the game and was poking around at extra challenges with a fully-upgraded ability tree, my heart opened to the game a little more. Targeting enemies is such a pain, but feels balanced when they die in one hit. Free from having to conserve my gravity powers and essentially having endless flight, the movement system felt like it encouraged more lateral thinking than when it was a limited resource. I feel like if the game had less pressure to include video-game-y elements and progression systems, it could have been an excellent zen exploration / puzzle solving game like The Pathless.
The ability to shift gravity in any direction makes for some very cool promotional material. The imagination races at getting to redirect your vector in mid-air. There is a real appeal to falling upside sideways, of your brain rethinking an urban setting as crooked lines between sewers and skylines. Having dumpsters and townspeople unintentionally caught in your local gravity field as you rocket around is silly. But once your focus on waypoints makes the city a blur, robbed of fear or novelty, falling is tedious.
In practice, this mechanic introduces serious control problems. How should the camera behave? How should your two two-dimensional control sticks orient your character in 3D space? Thankfully the game has gyro controls for fine-tuning movement, an input method that better mirrors the game environment. Which is sadly also a double-edged sword, as gyro controls are not used when the player character is walking on the ground. Whenever I relaxed my grip during a cutscene, the camera spun out of control when next I took to the air.
This game has combat.
This game has part of a story.
While I know so much of the experience of playing the game definitely deserves my 2 star, C rank rating, Gravity Rush has soul. The hub world’s large, labyrinthine, floating metropolis feels so superfluous in its landmarkless, multilayered emptiness. But at the same time, ignoring it with the power of flight wouldn’t have the same charm if you couldn’t so easily get lost, trapped in dead-end alleys when you accidentally fall from the sky. The looseness of movement, the sloppy chaos, is part of Gravity Rush’s identity.
Once I had beaten the game and was poking around at extra challenges with a fully-upgraded ability tree, my heart opened to the game a little more. Targeting enemies is such a pain, but feels balanced when they die in one hit. Free from having to conserve my gravity powers and essentially having endless flight, the movement system felt like it encouraged more lateral thinking than when it was a limited resource. I feel like if the game had less pressure to include video-game-y elements and progression systems, it could have been an excellent zen exploration / puzzle solving game like The Pathless.