Ghostrunner II

1. Summary

Ghostrunner 2 is judged almost entirely against the first game. 40% of all reviews bring up Ghostrunner 1, and so do 57% of the negative ones. Positive and negative reviews alike credit the core: one-hit-kill sword fights, wall-running and dashing that make you feel like a cyber ninja, a hard-hitting synthwave soundtrack and striking cyberpunk visuals. Some fans of the first game also single out the boss fights, the reworked Cybervoid sections, the late-game wingsuit and the scripted motorcycle chases as upgrades over the original.

What the sequel added around that core draws the complaints. Reviewers dislike the open-world motorcycle level, the hub where you walk around talking to NPCs between missions, and levels that are bigger but emptier, and they say these slow down a game whose appeal was speed. Some veterans find movement slower and less precise, and the new block button makes combat easier. 18% of reviews mention technical trouble (stutters, frame drops, crashes, getting stuck in geometry, keybinds that reset), and nearly a third of negative reviews do. Most people still recommend it, some with advice to wait for a sale or to play the first game first. Reviews were 89% positive through the end of 2023 and have run at about 70% since mid-2024.

2. What keeps coming up

What players praise

Fast one-hit-kill combat and parkourHigh

Combat and movement are the most common praise, from short reviews and long ones alike: being Jack still feels incredible. You die in one hit and so does everything else, checkpoints are frequent, and restarts are instant, so each death teaches you something about the room. "Imagine a game so fun that dying is actually fun," one player wrote. Players like the new tools too: shurikens available from the start, the Shadow decoy, Tempest pushes, ultimates and a motherboard full of upgrade chips that lets you build around a playstyle. Some negative reviews still say the moment-to-moment slicing is good, and most of the complaints in the frustrations panel below are about what surrounds this loop.

Visuals, art direction and set piecesMedium

Reviewers often call the game beautiful, especially the neon interiors of Dharma Tower, the giant cathedral-like spaces and big moments such as the chase with the giant mechanical worm. Some think the outdoor wasteland looks drab next to the tower, and several note stiff, nearly expressionless faces on the human characters in the hub. The environment art itself is rarely criticised.

SoundtrackMedium

Players praise the darksynth soundtrack steadily, naming artists such as We Are Magonia and Dan Terminus, and several say they listen to it outside the game. A smaller group feels it falls short of Daniel Deluxe's score for the first game; one reviewer notes he returns for only two tracks here. Players also notice long stretches with no music at all, mostly in the outdoor levels. One reviewer described the second half as "a quiet driving sim with occasional bouts of (mostly silent) kill-sets".

The wingsuit and the final levelsLow

The wingsuit arrives near the end, and players who mention it mostly love it; a few call its levels the best part of the game, even in negative reviews. What they want is more of it: "The wingsuit was awesome, that should have been used for way longer."

Improved Cybervoid sectionsLow

The slow switch puzzles of the first game's Cybervoid segments are mostly gone. Reviewers who disliked them in Ghostrunner 1 say these sections now use your full moveset and feel like proper levels. A minority still find them a pace-breaker.

Roguerunner and Hardcore modesLow

The roguelike Roguerunner.exe mode, with branching routes, limited lives and perk choices, earns praise as extra replay value, though some say it runs out of variety after a few clears. Reviewers report that Hardcore mode arrived in an update after launch. Some call it the best way to play, with remixed enemies and hazards. Others say it mostly adds instant-kill barriers and laser wire.

Where players are split

The motorcycleHigh

The bike comes up more than any other new feature, and opinion splits on how it is used. The scripted chase levels, the ride down the tower and the worm boss get warm praise, and one fan wrote, "The motorcycle driving in this game is among the best I've ever experienced." Elsewhere the same bike causes much of the frustration. Reviewers describe it getting stuck on small rocks and debris with no way to recover except reloading a checkpoint ("I have never played a game, where the vehicle of the game could not be reset"), loose handling at speed, and a fixed camera that hides the track when riding up walls and through tunnels. "You can't move the camera while riding (yeah, seriously), so often you have to stop, leave the bike, watch what you're supposed to do and then do it blindly." Praise for the bike tends to mean the linear set pieces, and complaints tend to mean the long open-world rides.

Boss fightsMedium

Some fans of the first game call the bosses the biggest improvement: "Biggest improvement is the boss fights hands down, instead of restricting you to pure memorization there's a lil bit of free styling allowed." The parkour-based fight and the three-phase Dismantler are singled out. Critics say most bosses became health-bar sponges you whittle down with the sword, which they feel goes against the one-hit concept: "Now its just mindless hacking with the occasional dodging." A few reviewers find the final boss underwhelming, and a few call its dialogue "cringe". The first boss, Ahriman, draws complaints about attack hitboxes that kill you after you have dodged behind him, mostly from players with little time in the game.

Easier combat, blocking and the new upgrade systemMedium

Players who compare the difficulty with Ghostrunner 1 call the sequel easier more often than harder, and they disagree on whether that is good. The block button, which spends stamina, lets you absorb volleys of bullets instead of timing a sword swing. Newcomers and players who bounced off the first game welcome it. Veterans call it dull: "Blocking bullets in GR2? Hold right click = godmode." Moving perfect deflects onto the block button also annoyed GR1 players. The motherboard upgrade system is praised for its flexibility, while a vocal minority miss the first game's Tetris-style grid and dislike that upgrade capacity depends on finding collectibles.

Story, characters and writingMedium

The story has a bigger role this time, with cutscenes, more voiced characters and a Jack who talks more. Some players like it and call the world-building a step up; one even said, "The dialogue is so funny that I died multiple times in some parts just laughing." Others find the banter grating. They describe the dialogue as quippy "Marvel"-style or "millennial" writing, single out Kira and Connor, and say constant radio chatter during fast sections makes the plot hard to follow.

One-hit deaths and trial-and-error for newcomersLow

Fans accept the one-hit rule as the series' identity. For players new to it, it is a wall. A few short-playtime negative reviews describe dying over and over in the first minutes, and one ends: "Played 17 minutes, died about 30 times and requested a refund." A few point out that Ghostrunner 1 had an assist mode and ask for the same here.

What frustrates players

Slower, less focused than the first gameHigh

More than half of negative reviews bring up the first game, and the usual charge is that the sequel is slower, clunkier and less flowing. Jack feels slower ("Ghostrunner? No. Ghostwalker."), air dashes kill momentum, the stamina bar limits dashing, and arenas are larger with enemies spread far apart, so chaining kills feels less like the tight combat puzzles of the first game. One negative review sums it up as "1 step forward and 3 steps back." A few in this group still call it a decent game on its own terms, and some recommend replaying the first instead.

Stutters, frame drops and crashesHigh

Performance complaints appear from launch through to this year's reviews. Players with high-end hardware report traversal and shader stutter, frame rate dropping sharply in specific arenas, the outdoor levels and late-game boss fights, and crashes, particularly in DirectX 12 and during the Dismantler fight, where some had to switch to DirectX 11 to continue. "Even months after launch the game has some really nasty stutters," one reviewer wrote. A minority report smooth performance, and some say later patches helped. A few describe a sudden frame drop getting them killed, which in a one-hit game sends you back to the checkpoint.

Bugs and movement jankHigh

Beyond frame rate, reviewers list a long series of smaller problems: wall-runs that fail or stick to the wrong surface, ledge grabs that do not trigger, grind rails that pull you in or send you the wrong way, falling through the floor, getting stuck in geometry above a death plane, enemies that fail to spawn and lock a door, and the pull-in drone platforms of the final levels. Keybinds that reset on every launch also come up ("But the keybindings reset every time you quit."), and a few players lost save files. Some call the game unpolished compared with the first.

The open-world levelMedium

The semi-open wasteland mission, usually named as Pillars of Creation, has you ride between three distant towers. Players describe it as long (some say close to an hour), empty, hard to navigate without a map, quiet, and full of terrain that traps the bike. A few liked the change of pace, but most reviewers who mention it think an open-world section does not belong in a game people enjoy "for having tightly designed focused levels," as one negative review put it.

The hub between missionsMedium

After most missions you return to a hub where you walk around, buy upgrades at a terminal and talk to NPCs with dialogue options. Reviewers who bring it up mostly say it breaks the non-stop pace of the first game, and they criticise the stiff animation and awkward pauses in those conversations. "If there's one thing a sequel to Ghostrunner needed, it was more time wasted in a safe hub area talking to shallow NPCs." Some players enjoyed the extra world-building, and the two guards' banter has fans.

Short for the priceMedium

Players report finishing the campaign in roughly 5 to 12 hours, and some say that is too little for the asking price. Advice to wait for a sale turns up even in positive reviews: "This game is not long enough to warrant $40, wait for a sale."

Paid extras and missing ray tracingLow

A smaller group objects to cosmetic DLC and a season pass in a single-player game, and especially to Endless Moto being sold separately: "Endless Moto Mode, essentially a feature that already came with the base game, got an 8€ price tag." A few players with high-end GPUs also say ray tracing was promised but never worked or never arrived.

3. The player conversation

Fans of Ghostrunner 1 split on the sequel: some see a richer, more varied game with better bosses, others a slower, padded version of a game they loved. Short positive reviews mostly praise the speed, the swordplay, the bike and the music. Short negative ones usually just tell you to play the first game instead.

Who raises what differs by playtime. Reviewers with under two hours played bring up movement that feels slower than Ghostrunner 1, constant one-hit deaths, the first boss's hitboxes and early stutters. Those with 10 hours or more talk more about the motorcycle getting stuck, the open-world level, the hub, late-game frame drops and how short the game is.

Through the end of 2023 the game was 89% positive (1,470 reviews). That period includes a one-week burst of almost entirely positive reviews in late November 2023, and a few of them mention nominating the game for the Steam Awards. From May to August 2024 the share fell to 66% (772 reviews); reviewers in that stretch mention buying it in a deep sale or through a Humble Choice bundle more often than at other times. In 2025 and 2026 it stayed around 70%. Later reviews repeat the complaints of launch reviews, and several note that the stutters and the keybind reset were still present a year or more after release.

4. What the developers could do

1. Fix the stutters, frame drops and DirectX 12 crashes. Technical trouble appears in 18% of all reviews and nearly a third of negative ones, and in a one-hit-death game a freeze usually means a reset.
2. Let players reset a stuck bike and move the camera while riding. Reviewers describe the bike getting trapped on small rocks with no way out but a checkpoint reload, and a fixed camera that hides the track on walls and in tunnels.
3. Split or trim the open-world level and add navigation aids. Players describe the long, quiet, map-less ride between three towers as a drag and ask for linear bike levels instead.
4. Make the hub optional. Some reviewers want a way to go straight to the next mission and manage upgrades from a menu instead of walking around and talking to NPCs between levels.
5. Make movement and keybinds reliable. Inconsistent wall-runs, ledge grabs, grind rails and drone platforms cause deaths players feel they did not earn, and some reviewers say the keybind reset on every launch alone stops them recommending the game.
6. Tighten boss hitboxes, starting with Ahriman. Players report dying after dodging behind the first boss, and a few short-playtime negative reviews say they gave up at that fight.
7. Offer settings for both kinds of player. Veterans ask for deflecting with the sword like Ghostrunner 1 and air dashes that keep momentum, while newcomers ask for an assist option like the one the first game had.
8. Fold Endless Moto into the base game and deliver the advertised ray tracing. A few reviewers object to paying separately for the bike mode, and a few say the promised ray tracing never worked.