Sony's Japan Studio is incredibly famous for one series, Siren, a series that has been at the forefront of Playstation survival horror since the early days of the PS2. Now they branch out onto the PS Vita with a very different kind of game, enter Gravity Rush.
Gravity Rush is a 3rd person action game with a heavy emphasis on 'shifting' which is the process of changing your characters direction of gravitational pull in order to progress through the game. A task that at first seems mind bending but quickly becomes second nature.
You play as Kat, a young woman who awakes in a city with no memory of what happened previous to this. She finds a cat named Dusty and quickly realises that Dusty has given her the ability to shift gravity. Soon after her arrival though the city is attacked by an alien race known as the Navi, though Kat protects the city she is blamed for bringing the Navi to the city. Soon Kat begins to learn about some of the city's secrets, has to rebel against a marshal law set in by the government and save the city from certain destruction on many occasions. Just another day as a shifter.
They city in Gravity Rush is of a very reasonable size for the Vita's capabilities. It'll take a good 5 minutes or so to shift from one side of it to the other and the place is full of side quests and collectibles (there is a trophy for collecting 3000 collectibles just to put it into perspective). There are 21 main missions which play out as 'episodes', each one is opened with either a comic book style cartoon strip or a cinematic and follow a general patter of go here, kill the aliens and complete the objective. During the first couple of hours this is extremely repetitive and can be quite boring, but this is where the characterisation takes place, you really begin to understand who Kat is and her role in both helping and hurting the city. The side characters are just as well written and help provide weight to some of the later missions. Once you get past the first half of the game or so the story picks up and finds direction helping hook you in more, but I never found myself playing Gravity Rush for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time.
The biggest gameplay factor to note is shifting, the R button put you into a hovering state where you can aim where you wish to go, press it again and you will begin to fall in that direction. Circle can be used to create a stasis field around you to carry objects, L will return your centre of gravity to normal and Square/Triangle is used for normal/special attacks respectively. All of this drains your energy meter in the top left corner and when that goes you must wait a few seconds for it to recharge. If you fall of the map you don't die but are instead teleported back to the objective and I never died in the game due to it being relatively easy, the final missions though certainly provide a challenge.
The combat is rather awkward which is disappointing, you can punch and kick whilst on the ground and you can lock onto an enemy's weak spot to fall into it and cause large amounts of damage but besides that there is nothing else and the dive kick is very inacurate when used against certain enemy types. You have the ability to upgrade Kat's powers by collecting the collectibles but they never feel like they have done anything to what you upgrade, you never feel stronger or feel as if you are flying for longer.
The game looks fantastic, an art style heavily inspired by Japanese Animé is on display and it fits the theme of the game perfectly. Environments have that distinct hand drawn look to them but they don't look like say Borderlands environments. The game sounds great too with a great score, the voice acting is kept to a minimal level though and its in Japanese, though the game is subtitled.
The game cant keep a steady frame rate though, this is most notable when grabbing collectibles and in big battles, but it never drops to anything lower than about 20FPS.
Gravity Rush is a game every Vita owner should get, but its no reason to buy a Vita. The game is lengthy at around 10-12 hours and there is more to do after the main story finishes. It is a great game that showcases the Vita's potential and a great game to play on long journeys.
Gravity Rush – 8/10
+Fun To Play
+Visually Appealing
-Repetitive
-Awkward Combat
