Ghostrunner Review: One Hit, Two Directions, and a Tower Worth Climbing

Ghostrunner wastes no time on ceremony. One hit kills you. One hit kills the enemy. The game hands you a blade, a wall to run along and a tower full of people who want you dead, then asks you to keep moving. It came out on PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One in October 2020, reached Nintendo Switch the following month, and arrived on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in September 2021. The version worth playing now is the one on current hardware, where the speed holds together.

Trailer, via GameTrailers.

Dharma Tower Is the Whole Map

Ghostrunner takes place after an unspecified global cataclysm called the Burst. What is left of humanity lives inside Dharma Tower, a vast skyscraper-like arcology. The Architect, Adam, built and ruled it and designed the Ghostrunners — technologically enhanced super humans who served as a peacekeeping and policing force. Mara, his confidant, betrayed him in a coup that destroyed most of the Ghostrunner units. She is the Keymaster now.

You play Jack the Ghostrunner. He wakes with no recollection and gets his orders from the Architect, whose preserved consciousness still runs through the tower’s systems. A group of rebels called the Climbers found Jack and repaired him; their uprising was put down just before he came back online. Zoe, a surviving Climber, makes contact when Jack tries to call for help. She gives him the name Jack, a pseudonym the Climbers used while fixing him.

The social order is the sharpest thing in the writing. A person’s worth depends on the category of implants they got in childhood. The implants decide which group you belong to for life. If you did not get a good one, there is nothing you can do about it. That is the whole reason the rebellion starts, and Ghostrunner does not dress it up.

One Hit, Two Directions

Combat is first person and lethal in both directions. Jack can dash, jump, wall-run, grapple and slide through dangerous environments. He has a mechanic called Sensory Boost that slows time so he can dodge and deflect bullets in midair. Enemies die to a single hit. So do you. The result is a game that punishes hesitation harder than it punishes bad aim.

Progression unlocks new abilities and upgrades, which you apply using tetromino-like pieces on a grid system. It is a strange, tidy little puzzle bolted onto a game about sprinting at armed men. It works because it forces a pause between fights without ever feeling like a menu.

Jack fights in the physical world and in cyberspace. The remaining Cybervoid systems — the digital network connecting Dharma Tower and the basis for the Architect’s intelligence — are open to him. That access lets the Architect repair damage to Jack’s coding. It also gives the campaign a second kind of space to move through, one where the rules are different and the tower’s history sits closer to the surface.

Mara Turns Off the Air

The plot escalates in a way that makes the tower’s politics concrete. Mara disables the air filtering systems in the district where the uprising happened. Without them, the residents could die from the radioactive dust in the outside atmosphere. The Architect does not want Jack to intervene. Zoe asks him to. Jack agrees to reinitialize the turbines at her request, against the Architect’s wishes.

That is the moment the game stops being a revenge errand and becomes a choice about who Jack is. He was built as a tool of enforcement. Here he acts against his handler for people he does not know. The game does not linger on it, but it does not need to.

To reach Dharma City, the tower’s elite sector, Jack takes the Amida elevator. He proceeds to the Repository, a protected Cybervoid space. From there the campaign keeps climbing, and the secrets of the superstructure and of Jack’s own origin come apart piece by piece. Solve the riddle or be killed. There is no third option.

What the Release Schedule Looked Like

The rollout is worth reading as more than a calendar. Ghostrunner landed on five platforms inside thirteen months, then got a current-gen pass a year after launch, then a story expansion, then a sequel. That is a studio and a publisher treating a new property as something to build on rather than something to ship once. It also means the version you buy matters. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S release is the one that matches what the game is trying to do.

The Blade Does the Talking

Ghostrunner’s best idea is that it refuses to let you play it slowly. Sensory Boost exists, but it exists to buy you a fraction of a second in the air, not to turn the game into a turret. Deflecting bullets is a timing problem, not a power fantasy. When a room goes wrong it goes wrong in about two seconds, and the reload is fast enough that you will try again immediately. That loop is the entire game, and it holds.

The weaker parts are the ones that ask you to stop. Platforming sections that demand precision rather than speed sit awkwardly against combat that rewards momentum. The upgrade grid is a pleasant distraction, but it is a distraction. It never changes how a fight feels the way a new traversal route does.

The story does more than most games in this genre bother to. Dharma Tower is a real place with a real hierarchy, and the implant system gives the class conflict a physical form. Mara’s move against the district is a villain decision that makes sense as policy, which is rarer and better than a villain decision that makes sense as spectacle. The Architect is not a trustworthy narrator, and the game knows it.

Where Ghostrunner falls short of the very top tier is in how much of that story it trusts you to find. The Burst, the coup, the Climbers, the Repository — all of it is there, and all of it is delivered in fragments while you are sprinting. Players who want the lore will assemble it. Players who want to run will run past it. The game never insists.

The Climb Is the Point

What Ghostrunner insists on is the climb. Ascend the tower. Conquer your enemies. Discover the secrets of the superstructure and your own origin. Obtain the power to challenge the Keymaster. Every system in the game points at that single motion, and it is disciplined about not adding anything that would slow it down.

The sequel arrived on 26 October 2023, and the original had sold over 2.5 million units as of September 2023. Those numbers say the audience found it. What the numbers do not say is that Ghostrunner is one of the cleaner designs of its generation — a game with a thesis, a short list of mechanics, and the nerve not to pad them. The current-gen release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S is where that design runs at the speed it was built for.

Score: 8.2 of 10.

cyberpunk games · Dharma Tower · first-person action · Ghostrunner · Ghostrunner review · parkour games