Ghostunner 2 adds a lot but can’t match the precision of the original

The First Ghostrunner It was the epitome of excellence in simplicity: A lean, cyberpunk-based parkour platformer where you and your opponents both die in a single hit. It was a tight game with a minimal story and a utilitarian environment. It felt as if the entire game had been built around Ghostrunner’s stellar kineticism. Levels were finely tuned so that each encounter pushed the game’s difficulty exactly one step further than the last, always providing a new challenge without ever feeling out of reach. It’s a game that will challenge you to the limit. Ghostrunner 2One More Level is a developer that tries to improve on the bare bones approach from the original. However, every new addition seems like it interferes with the wall-running and jumping gameplay, as well as the dashing and killing, which made the first so great.

Ghostrunner 2This sequel is set shortly after the events in the first title and takes players to Dharma Tower. A futuristic spire, it stands out as the sole beacon of civilization within an otherwise desolate wasteland. Players control Jack, one of the few remaining Ghostrunners (basically the tower’s now-defunct team of supercops), as he works with a small band of people hoping to keep the tower out of the hands of religious fanatics.

Jack’s home base is reminiscent of a high-budget role-playing game. It has an area for NPCs where they can be contacted via dialogue. The jokes are bland and unfunny. When he isn’t in the middle of a mission, Jack heads back to a home base that feels pulled directly from a big-budget RPG — each of the game’s NPCs has a small workspace area where players can chat with them via dialogue trees, asking questions about the world and their thinly sketched backstories (which usually amount to stereotypical hacker or ex-soldier origin tropes).

Jack from Ghostrunner 2 holds a katana and faces off against an enemy

Thankfully, you can still enjoy the benefits of your purchase. Ghostrunner 2 emerges from its slog of forced story interaction, the levels themselves are still well designed, though these, too, rarely live up to the quality of the original’s. The series’ mechanics shine brightest in massive areas with dozens of enemies to dispatch via quick movements and perfectly planned timing. It’s a trial-and-error series about finding the right path to fit your preferred play style before executing it flawlessly — much like last year’s fantastic platformer Neon White. Instead of focusing on the finely detailed combat arenas. Ghostrunner 2The game is also full of small, cramped rooms and hallways that are reminiscent of traditional adventure games.

These smaller rooms are still fun — after all, Ghostrunner’s kinetic action is always enjoyable — but they don’t invite the kind of inventive solutions that the original game did. Fighting so few enemies often becomes either trivial or frustrating, with limited approaches to eliminating opponents, rather than the freedom offered by the original’s larger, free-form environments.

Jack from Ghostrunner 2 runs through a cyberpunk city

Ghostrunner 2’s best moments arrive in the few levels where Jack acquires a new ability. The levels have been designed to be unique, and you will need to use your ability creatively while also testing your platforming skills.

Jack can use a power that lets him create clones to stop lasers from opening and closing doors, or despawning platforms. To get through this power’s “tutorial” level, you have to summon and dismiss the clone in rapid succession, all timed to an intricate series of tricky jumps. Another level tests Jack’s Force-push-style ability to move a series of platforms as momentum flings you toward them at speeds that mean even a slight error in timing will get you killed. There’s even a high-speed motorcycle sequence that makes for the game’s most unique and unexpected challenges.

All of these are incredible, discrete pieces of game design that give brief glimpses at what the rest of the game could have been — but through the eight or so hours of the game I’ve played, One More Level never manages to make those powers feel necessary outside of the levels they’re acquired in. Even worse, it does not feel like combining many of the powers together at one time. Instead, rather than building toward challenges that require you to juggle all of your newfound tools, each subsequent mission feels more like a reset — a start from square one every time.

This is not the case. Ghostrunner 2It’s not a bad video game per se, but its basic mechanics and design have still delighted me several times. The game lacks the cohesiveness and momentum that the original game had, and it’s many add-ons don’t lead to an interesting or more complex game.

It’s never an easy task to make a follow-up to a game, and it is especially difficult to do so for a platformer. It’s easy to expand too little on a game and make it feel like an expansion pack. But if you go overboard, the experience becomes mediocre. Sadly, Ghostrunner 2It is in this latter group. The quest to up the stakes is driving this game. Ghostrunner 2It loses identity. While the game can find its groove every so often, these moments are far too rare. There’s still nothing quite like the feeling of nailing a perfect run through one of Ghostrunner’s areas, hitting the exact right line of jumps and grapples, cutting enemies at the perfect time, and adapting on the fly when needed. It’s just a shame the sequel hinders so much momentum with AAA tropes.

Ghostrunner 2The game was released on Oct. 26, 2010 for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. This game was tested on PC with a 505 Games pre-release download. Vox Media partners with affiliates. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.