By Tim Biggs
One of the PlayStation Vita's only great exclusive games, 2012's Gravity Rush was a beautiful, clever game that won me over with its unique gravity-shifting mechanics, cute characters and indefatigable optimism, despite some deep flaws.
Mixing comic book looks, fun perspective-shifting gameplay and a quirky story with very Japanese quest-and-collect sensibilities, Gravity Rush did just enough right to make up for some disappointing jank and repetition.
Kat the Gravity Queen returns, and she's as simultaneously goofy and powerful as ever.
The sequel, now on PlayStation 4, repeats just about every mistake the original made, but in spite of that I fell in love with its sprawling world, goofy characters and thrilling aerial acrobatics all over again.
The first game saw the endlessly exuberant amnesiac Kat wake up in the floating city of Hekesville with the uncanny ability to control how gravity works in her immediate vicinity. By the game's end she had become a full-fledged superhero called the Gravity Queen, protecting the city with her rival-turned-ally Raven from the constant threat of amorphous creatures known as Nevi. It's a lot of story details to take in, and if you didn't play the original you better get Googling because Gravity Rush 2 drops you right in without telling you a thing.
Gravity Rush 2 features new powers, new styles of gravity and new locations, but it's mostly more of the same.
Over the course of three large acts, the sequel sees Kat struggling to get back to her old life after somehow ending up being stripped of her powers and put to work like a slave for a mining company. After a first section filled with new character introductions, awkward tutorials and endearingly lame dialogue in a familiar comic style, the Gravity Queen is back in action and free to explore the gorgeous, massive new land of Jirga Para Lhao.
The headline feature of the game is Kat's "shift" ability, which serves as your way to get around. Hit a button and she'll become momentarily weightless, then point in any direction and press the button again to make that the new "down", sending Kat plummeting laterally or even straight up. It's a bit more complicated than flying, but falling to get around can be incredibly satisfying and also lets you run around on the sides and underneath of the flying structures in your constant search for collectibles, upgrades and mission objectives.
Playing with gravity soon becomes second nature, and you can physically tilt the PS4 controller to get the same fine aim you got in the original game. Other fun uses of Kat's abilities, like flinging barrels at enemies or tilting gravity slightly to slide rapidly along flat ground, also make getting around a blast. Along with a host of returning unlockable abilities, a handful of new ones (like being able to make yourself lighter or heavier for different gravity effect styles) keep things from feeling too familiar.
As you might imagine, the freedom of movement makes for some awesome world design. One second you may be exploring the walls and hidden crannies of a dense, colourful metropolis, but leap of the edge and you'll find there's a slum far below in the shadows, made up of dozens of rickety floating houses and islands.
Kat has no love for outdoor settings.
The narrative is epic and anime-esque, with dozens of weird and wonderful characters weaving their way through. One pleasantly surprising undercurrent through the tale sees Kat make a poignant realisation about her mining company's wealth and the oppressed people living below the city. Its reach never exceeds its grasp in terms of getting too political, but it makes for a much more interesting conflict then you'd usually see in a game this light.
As I did with its predecessor, I have some issues with Gravity Rush 2.
Kat's best friend Raven plays a much bigger role in this sequel.
The combat, which makes up a good third of the game, is a rinse-and-repeat affair that can devolve into button-mashing. The unpredictable camera can also be very disorienting and result in you shooting off in random directions mid-battle.
Worst of all, almost every mission has you complete a task and then complete the same task several times over (and many also strip you of one or more of Kat's powers, making the fighting and platforming inarguably less fun). Many missions consist wholly of travelling to a place, talking to a person, then travelling to a another place and maybe having a fight.
Side missions and optional conversations are incredibly numerous, but there's no way to tell which will yield important details integral to your understanding of the plot and which will lead you to another pointless wild goose chase (or duck chase, as was literally the case in an early mission).
Yet for every misstep there's also a reason that I kept coming back for more.
Raven plays a bigger role this time and the interactions between her and Kat are great. Even the spotty combat is made better when Raven joins in, adding a Sailor Moon style superhero gal team-up feel to the proceedings.
The writing is funny, with the weird gibberish language everyone speaks (it sounds like a mix of German and French) adding a touch of unreality that binds the characters to the abstract fantasy world. Like an anime, I became deeply invested in finding out more about the people Kat met on her travels, even if they had nothing to do with the story.
Most of all the gravity shifting is just fun, and zooming around the colourful and beautifully-animated world looking for gems is great all by itself. So often my good times were interrupted by a lousy boss fight, a frustrating and poorly-designed stealth mission or a long period of having to kick stuff for way too long, but the game always recovered with a cheeky conversation, a hilarious situation or the opportunity to zoom around a brand new section of the sky.
Gravity Rush 2 is out now on PlayStation 4.