If you own a Vita, you probably own Gravity Rush, or should anyway. Project Siren (a SCE Japan studio) created a beautiful steampunk-like world with an addictive and exhilarating gameplay design centered around gravity. Originally released in 2012, the complete game with its DLC packs has gotten a graphical update, reduced load times, and a massive 600+ art gallery in its transition to the PS4.
As far as remasters go, Gravity Rush Remastered is pretty basic in that it does not alter the original game, add new content, or anything as far as I can tell other than what I just mentioned. Still, it’s a valuable release because it makes this gem of a game more accessible to a wider audience and it sets the stage for the sequel, due natively on the PS4, later this year.
So Gravity Rush, known as Gravity Daze in Japan which is actually a more fitting title, is a single player, third person action adventure game in an open world setting. Similar to other sandbox games, players have freedom to roam and explore the regions of the game world they have unlocked. The vast majority of Gravity Rush’s 10+ hour campaign takes place in Hekseville, and within its handful of different provinces that unlock as the story progresses. The adventure begins in Auldnoir with the protagonist, Kat, waking up with amnesia and next to a strange cat that seems to have befriended her. Her name is actually given to her by an NPC you meet, Syd, who works for the local police force. Lately, Auldnoir has been dealing with an increasing gravity storm issue and these monsters known as Nevi. Parts of the city of Hekseville have literally broken off and disappeared into this storm, and the number and aggression of the Nevi continues to grow.
Kat may not remember anything about who she is or why she’s there, but thanks to the cat, who she names Dusty, she has the abilities of a Shifter, or specifically a gravity shifter. This is obviously the game’s core mechanic, the ability to fly, float, and fall around by manipulating gravity. For the most part, this is used for traversal of the environment, but you also unlock a few abilities like a gravity kick, slide and slide kick, and a stasis field used for moving items and people (or ‘pitching’ them). Three special attacks are found in key areas too that give Kat devastating offensive weapons against the ever-increasing army of the Nevi.
Getting comfortable with your shifting ability is an early and constant requirement. But being proficient doesn’t take a lot of time as the controls and gameplay feel natural. Between cues from your DualShock4’s speaker (which you can disable from the in-game options if you want to) and the HUD, knowing which direction you’re facing, how much gravity shifting ability you have, HP, where enemies and waypoints are, etc, is all info that’s readily presented. Watching the flow of Kat’s hair as you stand on a wall also indicates the direction of gravity, so if your gravity meter runs out or you press L1 to disable shifting, you know what direction you’ll start to fall. To start shifting, simply press R1 and then aim the blue reticule that appears with the sticks. Or, you can tilt the DS4 and then press R1 to start flying/falling that direction or square to do a fast, long-distance kick in that direction, or X to “fall” or dive faster in that same direction. If you’re on the ground, you can slide with L2+R2, and if you slide into an enemy Kat does a nice, powerful kick that you can upgrade. Overall, the controls and gameplay are intuitive and accessible.
If it sounds like Gravity Rush is limited by managing meters, that’s hardly the case, especially after doing a few quick upgrades. There are several upgrades split across four main categories and all upgrades other than the special attacks are available to you at anytime, provided you have enough precious gems to spend. Precious gems are the floating purple pickups seen around all of Hekseville, although I liked that they weren’t adorning every single rooftop or wall. In many cases, you have to go slightly out of your way to pick them up, but this is just fine because gravity shifting abilities get you there fast and they’re fun. Precious gems are also used to ‘fix’ various devices like elevators and Nevi-warning systems. You simply deposit the amount of gems required (it varies depending on which area you’re in) by pressing X when prompted, watch a short cutscene, and then you have both helped the citizens and unlocked a new Challenge mission. These ‘fixes’ are not over-used and they’re unique to one another too which is good design. As you repair more things, your reputation increases and this opens up higher levels for your abilities that you can purchase with the gems.
Gems are earned strictly from finding them in the world and through completing challenge missions. These two gameplay elements are a significant portion of what makes up the game. Typical flow sees you bringing up the world map, choosing a location marker of interest, and following the compass waypoint there. You might get distracted on the way by picking up gems or re-trying a previously unlocked challenge mission, but typically it doesn’t take but a few seconds to get to where you’re going. Challenge missions take several forms, from slide-racing to ‘defeat as many enemies as you can in the time limit’ to gravity shift racing against the clock through a dozen or twenty-plus checkpoints. How long a challenge takes depends on the criteria; some can go on perpetually if you continue to defeat enough Navi to extend the remaining time for example. Typically, challenges are over in about two minutes and your awarded a few hundred gems dependent upon if you achieved a good enough time or point total to meet the level of Bronze, Silver, or Gold. Fortunately, there are always multiple worthwhile upgrades to spend your gems on. For a humbling experience, I checked the leaderboards which show Vita-players’ scores that are sometimes orders of magnitude greater than my own.
While having the freedom to travel around Hekseville is great, knowing what to do next to progress the story is always clear and it’s of course what you’ll always fall back to eventually. Story Missions have a special icon in the world map and they’re started by navigating to their location and pressing X when prompted. Actually the same goes for the three DLC packs which include two missions with the comicbook style cutscenes used throughout the game, more gems, higher level caps, and new costumes for Kat. Usually these missions (both story and side) start with a conversation between Kat and another main character like Gade, Raven, Syd, or Cyanea. Most of these twenty-plus missions are not timed and require that you work your way through checkpoints and ultimately to a boss fight against a large Nevi.
Like the rest of the game, including challenge missions, Gravity Rush is forgiving in its difficulty. This is the type of game that’s more about the story and journey than it is about technical skill, at least when it comes to getting through the story missions. If you’re looking to ace challenge missions and move up the leaderboards, than yeah, you’re going to need to be polished. But I appreciated that Gravity Rush was not trying to be a “hard” game. I didn’t need a stout challenge to have a lot of fun, and being able to progress steadily through the story and take my time exploring and messing around was much preferred to death screens and restarting encounters. Some additional examples of this ‘forgiving’ design include things like any damage sustained in challenge missions does not carry back into the main game, there is no damage sustained for falling from immense heights onto structure, if you run out of gravity shifting and fall to the abyss below, you are instantly teleported back to a safe spot rather than dying.
In my experience, the ‘cons’ column for Gravity Rush is pretty bare. I had a great time with it and will likely replay some challenge missions in the coming days. I did experience one critical glitch in the third province of Hekseville where I literally got stuck halfway in a wall and the gameworld got really flaky to where I was glitching through floors and the like, but fortunately there was an Autosave just a few minutes prior. Other than that there is some clipping and brief camera wonky-ness, especially when you have objects in stasis and you’re moving about rapidly, but this is honestly understandable given the free-roaming nature of the game. You could also point a finger at how ‘formulaic’ the game design is, at least on paper. The flow generally sees one unlocking a new province, exploring it, finding challenge missions and NPC conversations (which are marked on your map automatically anyway), and then doing the story missions, and basically repeating that. Each area, while having some visual difference, is otherwise rather similar to the others. You could knock the game for that I suppose, but I didn’t think it really detracted from my own experience in any tangible way, but I am very curious what Gravity Rush 2 will do in this regard as it is being developed for the PS4 from the start, rather than a PS3-to-Vita build like Gravity Rush was.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
