Gravity Rush 2

Gravity Rush 2: Loving Gravity Rush 2 is a job. One that can bring considerable pleasure and leave behind a feeling of deep satisfaction, but it is work. Sometimes annoying. Sometimes it’s tedious. And what is most offensive, the thought is constantly spinning in my head that this could have been avoided.

At one time, the first part of Gravity Rush made a truly indelible impression. Fresh, quirky, experimental: its world was addictive, its characters were engaging, its gameplay promised a never-before-seen experience. The shortcomings then did not care: flirting with gravity made even the most monotonous missions interesting. But now that a sequel has been released five years later, the novelty effect no longer works. And the problems never went away.

Changing gravity on the fly and throwing people into bottomless abysses is still fun. When it turns out without errors to perform some particularly cunning somersault or a spectacular combination of actions, the player’s spirit soars to the heavens no worse than Kat, the heroine of the series. But for such take-offs, one has to pay with painful blows to the ground. The lack of control during controlled falls gives the series its zest, but that zest starts to get stuck in your teeth the tenth time you’re trying to crash Kat onto a small platform. The inability to fix the camera on a specific enemy, which has long become one of the most familiar functions in 3D beatmaps and even console shooters, now and then prevents you from enjoying a good and fairly diverse combat system.

But the worst culprit is definitely the camera. Thanks, of course, to the authors for keeping its advantages: Gravity Rush 2 still allows you to direct your gaze not only with the right stick, but also with gyroscopes, which makes point aiming much more convenient than in many console shooters. But it was not enough not to break — it was necessary to repair. When Kat is close to some surface, the camera does not move away to help orientate, but on the contrary, it approaches as much as possible so that it is impossible to understand not only where the heroine is from the gray spot under her feet, but whether the wall is under her, whether the floor , or the ceiling.

Kat also knows how to glide over any surface at high speed, smoothly changing gravity – a hefty exciting activity, which, nevertheless, is unpleasant to do precisely because of the camera. That brute jumps on every bump, and since Kat likes to move from the sidewalk to the stairs, from the stairs to the balconies, and from the balconies to the lampposts, she constantly shakes during such trips .

Alas, instead of finalizing the basic elements and dealing with the existing problems, Team Gravity chose to simply throw more content into the game. Kat got the ability to change the intensity of gravity, essentially adding two more moves to the basic set of moves – fast, but weak, and slow, but destructive. There are two cities. The main plot has become longer, and the missions have become more diverse. Every now and then, photos taken by other players appear on the map, some of which also lead to small treasures. As a result, there is no need to complain about the lack of classes in Gravity Rush 2. But for some reason it is doubtful that many will want to spend enough time playing the game to see everything that it has to offer – for this, the authors had to work much more seriously on the basics.

Not everyone will even know why Gravity Rush 2 was called the finale of the dilogy – its script is very strangely built. Yes, the promises did not lie: this is really the denouement, answering questions and closing almost all the central lines of the franchise. But you better not know when the game remembers them – do not believe it. Just be prepared for the fact that this will not happen right away, and at first Kat and her friends will throw new characters and their new problems into society over and over again, which really have nothing to do with anything other than the obvious hostility of the Gravity Rush 2 scriptwriters to rich, successful and powerful people.

… Some wrong text came out. Negative. And all because loving Gravity Rush 2, as already mentioned, work. And you should be ready for this. But it is important to understand something else: this is a job worth giving a chance. Not everyone will be imbued with a unique style. Not everyone will be breathtaking from falling on the ceiling and trips on the walls. Not everyone will look at a city that has turned into a giant mobile boss with its mouth open. But if the world, characters and gameplay of Gravity Rush still sink into your soul, then you will get a unique experience from this dilogy, for the sake of pleasant moments of which it is worth putting up with a bunch of annoying, but not critical problems.

Gravity Rush 2 never really unlocked the potential of the series. But she still deserves her place in the sun.