Reviews

What a cat-astrophy!

Games like Gravity Rush don't come along very often. Sony Japan's latest masterpiece blends action gaming with RPG elements, throws in a brilliant campaign, gorgeous cel-shaded art, an incredible world filled with amazing characters, and then marries it all to the PlayStation Vita so harmoniously that you simply won't be able to imagine playing it on anything else. If you've got a PS Vita and want something new to keep you hooked, this is absolutely the game you've been waiting for. If you've been looking for a reason to pick Sony's latest handheld up, you've now got no excuse. Get on it.

The story's completely bonkers, mind. In Gravity Rush, you're cast as Kat, an amnesiac newcomer to the floating city of Hekseville. Your best friend is a magical feline called Dusty, and you've been granted a weird power: with a press of a trigger, you can float the air and attach yourself to distant surfaces, altering gravity as you go. That means you can fly around the game's huge open-world environments at will, and you can walk up walls, stroll underneath buildings, and even zip from lamppost to lamppost without your feet touching the ground.

Topsy Turvy

It's a brilliant way to get around some truly massive levels, but it also ties into the game's combat. Hekseville's in the process of being torn apart by a vicious gravity storm, and the streets are filled with gooey alien menaces known as the Nevi. The city's after a hero, in other words, and Kat's the woman for the job. Using your gravity-warping powers, you can blast across gigantic combat arenas, taking on a vast array of enemies and bosses using gravity kicks, standard kung-fu moves, and even a bunch of elaborate power-ups. The mission structure blends exploration and combat together brilliantly, and it feels amazing to smash the Nevi to pieces, targeting weak spots, taking on vast groups of foes at once, and saving the citizens of this bizarre metropolis as you go.

On top of all that, you're often sent into Rift Plains - weird fantastical wastelands where parts of Hekseville have been broken off and stolen away. As you steadily piece the city back together, you'll see some genuinely crazy environments, from mathematical playgrounds where you hop from one gleaming cube to another, to fungal models of the solar system, with planetoids made out of living mushroom. The more you travel, the more you'll bring the game's oddball narrative into focus, and all the while you'll be earning new powers and attack moves, while levelling up your character stats. Gravity Rush offers around ten hours of fast-paced missions, and with plenty of side quests to get stuck into, you'll be captivated for days on end.

Dancing on the ceiling

It's incredibly pretty, too, with brilliant manga-infused comic book panels telling the story, and gorgeous, intricate environments for you to traverse as you make your way through the campaign. The PS Vita gets a real workout, since you swipe the screen to dodge during combat, use the gyroscopes to tilt the unit around to aim your movements when you're floating, and even use the back touchscreen to page through cut-scenes. On top of that, every five minutes you're given a new element of the game to mess around with, whether it's a mini-challenge that sees you unlocking new costumes, gems to collect to level yourself up, or pedestrians to hunt down and chat to in order to get a little more insight into the weird city where you've suddenly found yourself.

Sure, we'd have loved a little multiplayer to round things out, but Gravity Rush is so stylish, so crazy, and such fun to simply get around in that we can't really begrudge its absence too much. If you love Japanese games like Ico or the Jet Set Radio series, or if you're a fan of Western open-world sandboxes like Crackdown 2 or Prototype 2, this is pretty much the perfect combination. It's a beautiful, insane adventure from start to finish, in other words, and a game that every single PlayStation Vita owner must get hold of as soon as they can.

GAME's Verdict

The Good

• Brilliant art
• An incredible traversal system
• Amazing combat

The Bad

• No multiplayer
• The storyline doesn't make that much sense
• We have to wait for a sequel?!