Gravity Rush is thrilling, but a lack of refinement and missed opportunities keeps it from being as great as it could.
The game begins with a young girl who's lost her memory and is accompanied by a rather strange cat. This feline companion seems to be made of the very space that houses the stars themselves. Exploring the city of Hekseville, she's soon given the name of Kat, and calls her own pet Dusty. Almost immediately, Kat stumbles across a man in desperate need of help. He's lost his son and Kat promises to bring him back to him, but in the attempt, they lose their house to a gravity storm and blame her for losing their home. Kat tries to find herself fitting in by helping people around town, but she soon learns of her true destiny as a Gravity Shifter when she meets the Creator himself. Now she begins her quest to restore the city of Heskeville and fight off the Nevi that terrorizes its citizens.
The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, at least in Gravity Rush, because a straight line would you plant you face first into a wall. Rather, the shortest distance would be up and over buildings or underneath the bowels of the city. Locomotion in Gravity Rush works by first hitting R1 to levitate Kat, either using the right analogue stick or tilting the Vita to aim her center of direction and then pressing R1 again to "shift" the point of gravity in that direction. She then starts falling and you can press R1 again to return her to suspended gravity and readjust her trajectory at any time. If you gravity shift to a wall or ceiling, those surfaces become the new floor, so the environment takes on a trippy perspective Flying-by-falling all over the city is incredibly liberating and it's a feeling that never gets old.
Gravity Rush will have you exploring just about every inch of the city, which is broken up into four different areas, looking for gems. They're everywhere from being lined up along walls to resting atop smoke stacks to being scattered all over the underside of the floating islands. These gems are invaluable as they allow Kat to level up her powers. She can increase everything from her maximum health to the strength of her combat powers to the duration of her gravity shifting and descent speed.
There's basically three things to do in Hekseville when you're not spending your free time gem hunting. You can talk to people to gain new information of on-going events, undergo main story missions or improve your reputation by fixing broken down machinery using a small sum of gems. In doing so, you unlock challenge missions, and the degree of fun changes based on the type. Some have you killing as many Nevi as you can in a time limit while others are races that have you zipping from checkpoint to checkpoint. Some of these challenges are very frustrating at the start, and you'll find you can't achieve a gold ranking until you advance your powers further. These gives a bad first impression, because it makes you feel as if the game wasn't giving you the ability to succeed.
One such mission has you using your stasis field to lift objects and fling them into a goal or fire them off at Nevi, but these kinds of missions are incredibly frustrating because the mechanic of lifting and throwing is broken. When you generate a stasis field, Kat begins to float in the air with items float next to her. The problem here is that the screen begins to move around a bit, forcing you to realign it to get your target where you want it. You'll almost always have to hit L1 to return to terra firma to run away from obstacles that will almost surely be in your way. Another problem is that multiple items might get picked up at once, and they can float and crash into each other before you fire them off. In challenges where time is of the essence and every second is crucial, fuddling around with a game mechanic is the last thing you want to be doing. It's not executed very well and doesn't even suit itself to be useful in combat.
As for the combat itself, it can be fun, but it also can be pretty irksome. Your main method of attack is the Gravity Kick, which gains more power the further away from your target you are when you execute it. It has a mild homing ability that guides your attack home if your focal point is generally close to the enemy, but it misses quite frequently with others. There are a few airborne Nevi that move out of your way just as you're about to hit them, causing you to overshoot and have to move your camera all around trying to find them again. In the heat of battle, disorientation sets in too frequently, which adds to the frustration. A simple snap-to lock-on could have alleviated this. In time attack challenges, missing becomes teeth-grating irritating. There's also a special attack known as the Spiral Claw that can sometimes completely screw itself by embedding Kat in the center of a Nevi's body instead of gliding her across all its weak points wasting precious energy.
On the ground, Kat can execute consecutive kicks to form combos to fight off the smaller, less threatening Nevi. She can evade attacks by swiping your finger across the touch screen, but this can also pose a small problem as it takes your finger away from the face buttons for a fraction of a second. It takes a bit of getting used to but thankfully, it's a skill you can upgrade and it becomes more functional as you progress. Also, you can execute a devastating counter-kick after you evade. Lastly, if you hold the lower corners of the touch screen together, Kat will enter into a Gravity Slide, which lets her slide quickly across whatever surface she's on. If it has any kind of curvature, she glides across it without losing adherence. When she encounters any Nevi in her path, she automatically Slide Kicks them, which is very effective to take out many ground-based enemies at once.
Even though the cityscapes have an alluring charm to them, there's only so much exploring that you can do before you find yourself looking for a change of scenery. Thankfully, the game links each part of the city with realms. These separate realms have different themes such as ruins, volcanism and plant life. Not only are they a fresh visual experience, they also contain a rare Nevi that is much, much harder than their basic counterparts. If you succeed in defeating them, you are rewarded to a a bountiful cache of gems. The only problem with these levels is that they simply aren't long enough. At one point in the game, you even descend thousands of meters below through a giant pillar only to surface and return to the city, wishing there were more different areas and realms to explore.
And thus lies the major problem of the game. When the game's story missions begin to improve in the later half of the game and it gets really good near the end, it ends suddenly and abruptly. You remember the realms and the giant pillar you've traveled through and suddenly, the city of Heskeville looses a great deal of its majesty. Maybe if the game filled its towns with more things to do than just speak to people and participate in the random challenge, the city itself would have more subsistence. It just leaves you wanting more and currently, the DLC packs are costly running at four dollars a piece, containing just one costume and two extra side missions and challenge missions. Also, the file size of these content missions are only 100 KB, alluding to the fact that the DLC could very well be in the game itself.
Graphically, Gravity Rush is very impressive. Characters and special effects have a terrific cel-shading to them, and everything animates very smoothly. Wisps of air rushing past Kat as she's falling portrays a great sense of speed, and the architecture is both antiquarian and interesting. Color tones are limited depending on what zones you're visiting, but they help establish individual atmospheric themes. The factory district is usually grey and dusky while the entertainment district glows a purplish haze. The story is told through graphic novel panels, some of which animate, and the perspective changes when you tilt the Vita, which is a cool effect.
Gravity Rush's audio is perhaps its best facet presentation wise. The sound design is terrific as there's a satisfying slam each time Kat touches down on a wall, floor or ceiling. Nevi have glowing orb-like weak points that shatter like glass whenever Kat smashes into them, and the giant Nevi produce earth-trembling rumbles when they slam their appendages into the ground trying to obliterate her. The music is wonderful from area to area, making you want to find and download an official soundtrack straight to your iPod. There's barely any voice acting, but as a result, the game retains more of its mystique.
It's easy to see how many will be able to overlook the shortcomings of Gravity Rush, but they do exist. The novelty of gravity shifting across Heskeville may last longer for some, but one thing is abundantly clear: the game needs more. There could have been countless more missions to do instead of just talking to people who don't offer up any quests, and the challenge missions themselves won't hold your interest for long. Some may even turn you off to the game entirely. Also, you might find yourself struggling with the tilt controls since they work in conjunction with the right analogue stick, and you might end up disabling titl all together. Still, there is enough good to the game that makes it worth playing on your Vita because it's so unique. Gravity Rush has a solid foundation for a much more promising sequel.