Gravity Rush Remastered Review

Hello kind reader, this article marks the first extended review from the short and compact twitter reviews I did in the past. My goal with all my reviews is to make you curious enough for you to try the game for yourself so I hope I do a good job making you curious about the fun gravity bending gameplay this game has so that you too can enjoy your time as much as I did.

A PS Vita game remastered for PS4, playable on PS5

Gravity Rush Remastered has fantastic gravity based gameplay that intuitively combines exploration and combat.

Exploration is a joy, sure you can walk around the game world but that is so boring when you can literally bend gravity and fly around everywhere. There are some restrictions but at the end game when you fully upgrade Kat's abilities (the protagonist) you will be an unstoppable force that flies around the map going wherever you want.

How do you upgrade your abilities you say? By grinding hours and hours defeating enemies and getting XP? By completing missions? Well I am happy to say that this game has none of those. No dreaded XP bar. Just floating crystals tucked away everywhere, under the map, on top of tall buildings, the game encourages you to see the map from every angle and side to collect these crystals so that you can go further, strike your enemies harder and overall feel like a badass. Enemies drop crystals as well so the crystal focused currency is very simplistic and effective way to just focus on what matters most: flying around and helping people like every superhero must do.

Speaking of enemies, the enemy variety is decent at start and expands as you go through the story making you strategise what powers you need to use, yes at first you use your gravity powers to kick the smaller enemies but however as you unlock more powers, tougher enemies appear encouraging you to use every tool you have in your arsenal.

Challenge missions exist as well to master the newly gained powers that rewards you with a decent amount of crystals. Some challenges also transport you into an closed environment where the game throws a lot more enemies at you making you use your abilities and special powers at the maximum making it super satisfying seeing so many enemies being smashed by your gravitational prowess.

The free DLC missions packs are fun and welcome to an otherwise beautiful empty world that provide more story content if you enjoy Kat's adventure.

While fast travel exists, I found myself using it very rarely considering the joy of traversal and collecting crystals while going from objective to objective made it a feature nice to have, especially in the late game where you want to zip around the map to clear challenges to complete trophies or save your game.

Speaking of story, Kat's adventure starts slow but some events happen making it into an explosive climax that I enjoyed. The rollercoaster is steadily going up the only down to earth events are the very few side quests that makes our beloved heroine take a breather.

I don't want to spoil the simplistic story I can say that the theme of this game's story is very much a quintessential HERO story when the protagonist who has amnesia is a good person that wants to help everyone. You might be bored the first half of the game especially when building up your powers but once the second half comes in and more lore details are provided the game is very rewarding.

The dialogue is typical Japan Studio staple: gibberish 🤣 Yeah the language you will hear is a mangled mess mixed with grunts and yelling. Just be prepared to read the subtitles to understand what is actually going on.

The art style is simply sublime, the cell shaded style goes perfectly well with the theme of this game. Character designs are interesting and unique, the world design is charming especially the entertainment district where we have neon lights across the whole biome and the subtle hint of steampunk is making this a superb eye candy delight.

The story cutscenes are relayed through a comic book style pages you flip through which is a unique approach to storytelling since nothing is animated.

Now look while I glazed the gravitational abilities and powers Kat has, not all of them are as useful as the others, especially the stasis power while is cool in concept however it is badly executed and it doesn’t feel satisfying to use, I always struggled grabbing objects in due time despite the power being max upgraded later on. This gripe is especially visible in the stasis challenges where you are being timed and you have to move fast to complete the objective.

You can feel and see that this was originally a PS Vita game

Ok that sounds a bit rough but I noticed some things that really made me scratch my head considering the power of the PS4 why this game has some performance hiccups especially in some challenge missions where the monsters overwhelm you and considering it is not a graphically challenging game.

Let's talk about the world, there are 4 biomes, let's call them floating neighbourhoods, with different themes which is good because you won't get bored of the same building aesthetic however these biomes are small and feel dead since there aren't a lot of NPCs walking around.

In the commercial district the NPCs pop-in is noticeable when you fly around crowded areas which is very immersion breaking. Speaking of pop-ins, in late stage of the game when you can comfortably travel in between these biomes with your powers the buildings themselves are there but the details tend to load a bit slower and the draw distance is poor because of the fog implementation, while it gives it a unique vibe, I know why it's there.

Rating and Verdict

Now onto the grades, cuz people like it when you give scores, so let’s see:

Graphics & Art style - 9
Performance - 4
Gameplay - 8
Fun - 8

Overall the score for Gravity Rush Remastered is a solid 59/100, gameplay and art style shines amidst poor lore presentation and slow start of the story. Overall the game is fun and it has potential to be great. I am curious if the sequel addresses the gripes I have with this game.

The final score is not an average of the separate reviewed elements but the game as a whole package. A gift wrapped nicely by the developers for us, gamers.

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