Gravity Rush 2 is a sequel to one of the more imaginative games on the Vita. This time, it is exclusively for the PS4. This does mean a massive upgrade in graphics though and it retains the awesome unique aesthetic from the first game. The beginning of the game is slow as the game spaces out the tutorial fairly far apart. You’ll spend the first two hours or so waiting for the game to unlock most of Kat’s moves.
If you have played the first game (and you should), then you’ll naturally get used to the controls quickly. Kat has the power to control how gravity affects her and this allows her to effectively fly everywhere. It’s a fun system but the swinging camera can cause some queasiness if you’re not expecting it.
Using the R1 button will cause Kat to float. You can then aim where Kat falls towards, or to aim her signature gravity kick. She can also use her powers to pick up loose items to fling them against enemies. The automatic lock-on theoretically means that you don’t have to worry about pinpoint precision. Kat also has her gravity slide which is quite fun to use if you manage to find a decent amount of space.
Scattered all over are red gems. These are used to improve Kat’s abilities. These aren’t collectibles per se since they are so numerous and it is infeasible to collect them all. Despite that, since it is tied to unlocking new combat abilities, you’ll spend hours scouring the environment for them. Increasing Kat’s health and her gravity bar though is done by completing missions so you don’t feel the same sense of gradual improvement. Maxing Kat’s powers takes a ridiculous amount of grinding for the gems, way in excess of what you would get over the course of the story, even if you have diligent in spending a few hours on getting everything in the environment. It follows the philosophy of the rest of the game: put more filler in, waste more of the player’s time.
There are two extra styles unlocked as part of the story where Kat controls differently. Lunar Style has Kat feeling a lot more floaty and weightless, with her failing speed drastically reduced. Jupiter Style has Kat with increased weight so she cannot kick as fair but the benefit is that her attacks are much greater in power and has an area-of-effect. Unfortunately, you’ll probably stick with the normal style most of the time unless the game forces you to use one particular style.
The first game had Nevi as the enemy, which are black shadowy monsters with glowing red orbs that serves as their weak points. You're immediately shown larger and more complex Nevi in this game, only for them to fall into the background and most of the game having Kat fight against other humans and their giant machines.
In terms of story, Kat and Syd has been sucked into a gravity storm and put into the void where they are staying with miners. These miners go into the rift planes in order to mine ores to sell. This means that a rudimentary village in the rift is the initial replacement and it is not fun to explore. It takes two to three hours before the game really opens up with a huge area that is much larger than what was available in the original game. There are a lot of people roaming around the streets, giving life to the city. Just when you thought you have explored most of it, it suddenly reveals another huge area.
The game focuses on quantity rather than quality. There are a lot of side missions. In an effort to spice up the variety since there’s really only so much you can do with the gravity shifting, the side missions have stealth missions, time limits and other restrictions which suck out a lot of the fun of having those powers in the first place. These are instant fail missions, so having the game restrict your abilities, and in essence the very reason you are playing this game, is a horrible idea.
If it is not a stealth game, then stealth missions should never exist. Gravity Rush 2 gets that point across when the side missions are filled with them. The abundance of enemies that spot you, the inability to use your powers forcing you to stay on the ground and the lack of proper stealth abilities all combine into a terrible experience that continually ours the game. You are forced to do trial and error until you find the one correct path the developers wanted you to take. This is some pretty hefty BS in a game where any sort of stealth doesn’t belong in it at all.
Side missions can be frustrating and overly long. The game is filled with early PS2 open world design. The amount of bland fetch quests is lazy and they stretch them out for much longer than necessary by having the quest giver request another and another and then another item. Then there are the missions with no objectives and just tasks you to find the person or the item by flying around. It’s not hard but it is a massive waste of time when so many missions do it. The game overall just feels like fluff and the majority of it is filler that is neither fun nor relevant to the plot.
The overly restriction mission designs rears it ugly head again and again. For every five or so missions you play, four or five of them will leave you frustrated and annoyed at how they gimped your abilities for no good reason. These restrictions are your typical crappy and lazy ideas such as time limits, being chased, tailing missions, escort missions, no damage runs and being relentlessly attacked. If the side missions actually reward something worthwhile then it wouldn’t be so bad. However, they don’t so it just feels tedious and pointless.
The story missions are equally horrendous in that you are forced into tight corridors so it is hard to get your bearings. Coupled with a camera that constantly get in the way due to the tight space and it is a nightmare to get through. Several story missions require you to do things in a very very specific order. It becomes tedious when you have to keep repeating the same section. It manages to keep surprising you at how it continues to get worse and worse, even when you thought it had already hit rock bottom. When it hits rock bottom, it will manage to go even lower with its annoying gimmicks to make it artificially harder than it should be. The controls and speed of Kat is not designed for those specific objectives and yet it keeps forcing you on ot, it is infuriating.
Even boss battles somehow manage to become really bad. The first game had different stages of the boss that you progress though, with a tiny bit of pattern recognition. Here, they’re all messes where you just smash the weak points without the boss really doing anything meaningful. When they do their attacks, it expects Kat to be able to dodge but she does not have the proper range and moves to pull it off. The constant encounters with small quick enemies that like to zip around causes the camera to be your biggest enemy. You’ll struggle to keep them in frame. Then you have to worry about the wonky aiming, which fits well with the rest of the poorly designed game to be honest.
The story ends up just being like the gameplay: filled with filler. It’s split into three separate story arcs that are little more than side stories. They add nothing to the lore of the game and all the events feel disjointed and unrelated. Each section is bursting with mundane tasks and events; it’s as if the game itself had no idea what story it is trying to tell.
The fourth part, which is the finale, sets about answering all the questions raised by the first game. The developers should have really done this from the beginning and fleshed it out because what we get is bare-bones, filled with even more tedious activities and is rushed as a result. Block puzzles come out of nowhere and then quickly disappear. You get sections where Kat does little more than walking. We don’t even get the satisfaction of an exposition dump because it’s so poorly paced.
The ending is as disjointed as the rest of the game. It explains some things but doesn’t explain others. Naturally, it has a series of bosses but continues to restrict your abilities until the very end. You end up just wanting the game to end but it keeps on going and going. The game takes around 15-35 hours to complete depending if you go for the sidequests or not, the sidequests actually takes more time than the story itself.
As an apology for the delay of the release of the game, the DLC was made free for everyone. Another Story - Raven’s Choice have you controlling Raven as it follows a plot thread from the first game. In it, we finally get to find out what happened to the Ark and the lost children. While it is marginally better than the main game, it’s still shockingly poorly designed. We continue to get crippled in terms of powers with a heavy reliance on boring events such as running around through areas without trying to be seen, escort missions or battles that involve tedious gimmicks. It only takes around 1.5 hours to complete and the story is equally disappointing in that it’s filled with filler and the ending leaves a lot to be desired.
Overall, Gravity Rush 2 lost everything on what made the first game good. It has disgusting game design as if the developers had never played what they were making. It is simply not fun and not what you play the game for. Everything negative about the gameplay and mission design, which is around 90% of the game, overwhelmingly drowns out all the positives of the aesthetics and charm of the characters. They have somehow managed to pick up the first game, which had its flows but was still fun, and ruined absolutely everything. The idiotic fixation on crippling your powers and having instant fail stealth missions justifies why this game bombed so badly and killed the whole franchise. This is one of the worst first-party games by Sony, and one of the worst games in general. To be honest, it would have been better if the game was never made, so that the memories of the fun and lost potential of the first game would not have been tarnished like this.
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