Gravity Rush was one of the rare moments in gaming history where everyone who played had the same thought cross their mind: how hasn’t this been made before? A game solely dedicated to manipulating gravity to fight enemies, solve puzzles, complete sidequests, and explore an expansive world from every angle imaginable - Gravity Rush immediately established itself as a new IP worth paying attention to.

The first title focuses heavily on combat, primarily with defeating enemies and collecting Gems to power up Kat to learn new abilities that makes fighting and navigating more convenient and enjoyable. While the story of the game was one that felt relatively small and episodic, it nevertheless built a pantheon of charming characters in a stylized, memorable world.

Three years after the original title’s release, Gravity Rush 2 had the ever-difficult task of having to followup the original. This sequel didn’t have the privilege of introducing players to the idea of manipulating gravity freely for the first time. Rather, Gravity Rush 2’s main hurdle was taking what made the first game special, and expanding upon its ideas to make for a better experience. In some ways, Gravity Rush 2 accomplishes just that, but it also unfortunately stumbles in other spots. While Gravity Rush 2 is certainly an admirable expansion to the world, characters, and gameplay systems first introduced in the first title, Kat’s second adventure mismanages in other areas, preventing it from having the same kind of impact that its predecessor left.

If anything, Gravity Rush 2 immediately establishes itself as tonally consistent with the first game. We pick up some time after the events of the original Gravity Rush. After going through a Gravity Storm, Kat gets separated from Raven and her cat Dusty, finding herself in Banga Village, a town filled with working-class Gravity Ore miners. Despite not having abilities, Kat befriends the workers of the village, including Lisa, who enlists Kat to assist with mining the Gravity Ore with the villagers. After a while, Kat reunites with Dusty, restoring her gravity shifting powers, after which we’re introduced to one of Gravity Rush 2’s most prevalent additions: its inclusion of Side Missions.

As the name suggests, Side Missions are mini-stories that occur after completing certain Story Missions and/or certain Side Missions. This was partially featured in the first game via its DLC, however the original game’s Side Missions amalgamated to an additional hour or two of gameplay, whereas it’s much more substantial here. If you tackle them all, Side Missions will take up nearly half of your overall playtime. With these making up a sizable portion of the game’s run time, Side Missions’ presence in Gravity Rush 2 serves as a double-edged sword. On the positive end, these Side Missions give additional opportunities to flesh out Kat and the wacky characters and situations she comes across. These give the world of Gravity Rush 2 more depth than in the first game, ultimately helping me attain a greater understanding of the kind of character Kat is. However, these Side Missions also present one of Gravity Rush 2’s most severe weaknesses.

Many of the Side Missions to be uncovered in Gravity Rush 2 will quickly reveal themselves to be limited in variety. Most Side Missions will have you talking to NPCs and travelling between them, occasionally taking pictures with the game’s new Picture Mode that all PS4 exclusives feel inclined to have. Other times, you’ll occasionally fight enemies and, most crucially, enter stealth sequences where you have tail an NPC or avoid detection altogether.

What makes the stealth sections in particular be problematic in this context is that they inherently put limitations on gravity shifting - the game’s central mechanic - for the sake of having slower-paced gameplay segments that the game clearly wasn’t built around. These stealth missions are baffling because of how counter-intuitive they are to Gravity Rush’s typical gameplay loop. To put it bluntly, they don’t enhance the overall package in any meaningful way. Unlike Challenges (which will be talked about momentarily), Gravity Rush 2’s stealth sections don’t encourage mastery of the game’s mechanics and navigating the game’s unique world. Instead of making the player more skilled at utilizing the game’s mechanics through side content, the stealth sections - and by extension, many of the Side Missions - end up feeling like a waste of potential. While I appreciate their expansion to the game’s overall narrative, they ultimately fail as being meaningful side content, as your only reward for completing are poses for Picture Mode and occasional upgrades to your health and gravity shifting capacities. You don’t even acquire Gems to upgrade your gravity abilities, making it difficult to recommend doing all of the available side Missions, barring diehard completionists.

Thankfully, there’s far more to do than just Side Missions. Other than finding NPCs to talk to and collecting Gems scattered throughout the world to upgrade your abilities, you can proceed in the game’s main story, which offers more variety than the first game. There are a few missions towards the end of the game that take a lot of control away from the player - with one particular story segment taking far too long and dragging down the pace of the game -, but overall, the main Story Missions are well-paced and keep the plot moving.

The plot itself, much like the first game, feels episodic in nature, akin to a light-hearted anime in terms of structure and tone. Within this story are depictions and themes about identity, the separation of people based on their wealth, and how classism impacts culture and peoples’ relationships with one another. However, these themes aren’t explored in any deep capacity. For better and for worse, Gravity Rush has distinguished itself as a series that’s more concerned with having charming character interactions with minor character arcs occurring over time rather than telling a story that explores any particular idea or theme. This makes sense given the context of the game’s mission-based structure, though the smaller-scale storytelling on display throughout most of the game makes it difficult to be eager to continue on with the main story at times.

Challenges make their return here, and they’re as addicting as they were in the first Gravity Rush. Much like that game, Challenges have you compete in minigames to complete objectives as fast you can or with as high of a score as possible within a time limit. Meeting certain thresholds within these Challenges (i.e. completing a race under a certain time or having a set amount of points from defeating enemies, etc.) reward you with medals and Gems.

Just as in the last game, Challenges serve as some of the best experiences that Gravity Rush 2 has to offer. These Challenges provide you with situations to test your understanding and comfort with the game’s mechanics. Some gold medals have really tight requisites, so optimizing how you do these missions serve as a great way of learning and improving at the game’s mechanics, especially if you haven’t played the original and are still adjusting to Kat’s gravity shifting ability. I was left wanting more Challenges to complete. While I’m unsure as to whether this title has more or less Challenges than the first game, Challenges are farther between from each other, making them feel like less common occurances than they did in the first Gravity Rush. As unfortunate as that may be, that doesn’t detract away from the fact that Challenges continue to serve as some of Gravity Rush 2’s best content. Additionally, there are even Challenges that help teach using Gravity Rush 2’s new mechanics.

The most noteworthy addition in Gravity Rush 2 in terms of its gameplay is the addition of Styles with the inclusion of Lunar Style and Jupiter Style. As their names may imply, these styles change Kat’s state of gravity. Lunar Style provides slower descent speeds in exchange for floatier and higher jumps, whereas Jupiter Style dramatically increases your descent speed and attack power in exchange for having nearly no directional control of Kat while shifting. While I admire these Styles for introducing new methods of movement in a game all about finding out how to optimally navigate the environment, they’re essentially too situational for their own good. Since Lunar Style slows you down while descending and Jupiter Style makes Kat too difficult to accurately control, I found myself sticking to Kat’s Normal Style of gravity shifting most of the time. I never saw much reason to change Styles outside of some specific combat sequences where attacking in one Style would be more efficient than another. Outside of those instances, these Styles don’t really make you reevaluate how you navigate the environment around you.

That said, controlling Kat in general feels as good as ever, with gravity shifting, kicking, and sliding all making their returns here. However, using Kat’s abilities to navigate the environment is all a waste if the environment isn’t interesting to traverse. Thankfully, Gravity Rush 2’s strongest aspect happens to be its diverse, fun-to-explore vistas.

After briefly being introduced to the small area of Banga, we quickly find ourselves in Jirga Para Lhao, offering three cities in three different layers, all of which have different vibes and structures to them. The middle layer is a vibrant, sprawling city, with alleyways and skyscrapers making for interesting tools for navigation, with energetic ska music accompaniment. The bottom layer is a cluttered, dreary environment where the poor and homeless reside, which as a result, makes the area the most difficult to seamlessly gravity shift in. The top layer features mansions all spread out from each other, with an energetic jazz accompaniment showcasing the luxurious, carefree lifestyles of those that live here - with music and NPC characters that clearly clash with those found in the previous two layers.

After some time, Hekseville, the main area from the first game, returns as well. To boot, the town has also seen some changes since the last time Kat ventured through it, so shifting through the old town feels both nostalgic and exciting for returning players. Overall, each of the game’s environments feel distinct from one another, changing the way in which you need to shift gravity. The only negative aspect of the environments is their overall size. While boasting that the game’s map is 2.5 times bigger than the first game was probably a great thing for the marketing team at Sony, in practice, the size of the game’s areas feels quite bloated. Sometimes, I would find myself gravity shifting for minutes at a time just to get to a Side Mission that was on the other side of the town I was currently in. There is a fast-travel system to somewhat mitigate this issue, but it doesn’t entirely eliminate it. Getting from point A to point B with environments this large doesn’t feel as snappy as it could be, which ultimately brings down the game’s pace at points.

Gravity Rush 2 pushes itself into a peculiar corner. On one hand, it shares many of the same strengths as the original. The game offers great Challenges that elevate your mastery of the gravity mechanics, which control as well as they did before. Moreover, Gravity Rush 2 offers a story that’s as equally entertaining as its predecessor. On the other hand, though, Gravity Rush 2 has difficulty with introducing new, meaningful content that leaves any impact. Side Missions, while plentiful, aren’t always enjoyable to play through, as they occasionally feature gimmicks and sections that severely slow the game’s pace. Environments, while fun to navigate and visually pleasant to look at, feature segments of land that are too spread out, leading to moments where the player is just gravity shifting through the environment without anything of interest going on.

In a sense, Gravity Rush 2 struggles to understand what made people fall in love with the original Gravity Rush. Challenges, learning new abilities in difficult trials, entertaining boss fights (which, by the way, are certainly of lesser quality in Gravity Rush 2), and the compactness of the game’s world made for a game that was quick-paced and constantly fresh. Gravity Rush 2 tries too hard to be bigger and not better. While it’s ostensibly ambitious with its increase in scale and overall story content, Gravity Rush 2 plays it perhaps too safe with new mechanics. This makes for an experience that doesn’t have the same degree of excitement that the original had.

This shouldn’t detract from what Gravity Rush 2 does right, though. Despite failing to introduce anything substantial, everything that it carries from the original Gravity Rush still works here. This is certainly a “more of the same” kind of sequel, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. If you liked seeing Kat overcome small challenges as she worked up her reputation in Hekseville, you’ll doubtlessly enjoy seeing the same here, with some new locales thrown in to diversify the action.

With this series having such a unique style and tone to it, though, I’d love to see this series be more experimental in the future. The magic of exploring a world while shifting gravity for the first time won’t be captured again - so instead, future Gravity Rush titles should embrace significantly changing how we can manipulate gravity, rather than maintaining the foundation while adding minor additions. As is, Gravity Rush 2 is undeniably delightful, if a bit less groundbreaking than the adventure that preceded it.

Final Grade: B-

What do you think of Gravity Rush 2? How do you think it compares to the original Gravity Rush? And how would you like the series to move forward? As always, feel free to join the conversation and let me know what you think either in the comments or on Twitter @DerekExMachina. / Images courtesy of PlayStation.