I’ve played plenty of games where your main character can fly or glide to a limited degree.  I had often thought that it would be pretty cool to play a game where you can fly to your heart’s content.  And that game, dear readers, is Gravity Rush, where you play as a girl named Kat who can shift gravity thanks to her magical starry cat Dusty.  In order to do so, you press R1 to float, then press it again to start flying in your desired direction.  Simply tap L1 to change gravity back to normal.  Admittedly, learning to control Kat properly took me the whole game to master, but that didn’t stop it from being fun.

Kat spends much of her time in the city of Hekseville, which is under the threat of the Nevi, a truly bizarre species of monsters with some of the most original designs I’ve ever seen.  The game is also visually unique, with comic book-style cutscenes and neon-colored skies.  Though the city is not terribly colorful, it makes up for that by being incredibly detailed, with every brick accounted for.  Kat is also well animated, from the way she awkwardly zips through the air to the way she crashes into the ground at high speed, which I always found rather amusing, no matter how painful it looked!

As far as the story is concerned, the plot is very disjointed indeed.  I had expected certain plot threads to reach their conclusion, only to be dropped, and certain characters to be more important, only to be underdeveloped.  The game is decently long, with 21 episodes and 6 additional DLC episodes spanning 10-20 hours, but certain episodes felt more like “filler” than something that truly moved the story forward, and I think the game would have benefited from a greater focus on the main plotline.  Nevertheless, the writing is good with just the right touch of humor, and Kat is a very likable protagonist, which is saying something, as I find most main characters to be boring.

Despite the disorganized story, I wouldn’t say this is the game’s biggest shortcoming.  In a way, Gravity Rush almost feels like a TV show where the level of danger fluctuates from episode to episode, and the stakes don’t feel as high until the season finale.  Though keep in mind that, like a TV show, the game’s conclusion is rather open-ended and hints that Kat will be facing more danger in the future…which I’m assuming is addressed in the sequel, which was released in 2017.

My biggest gripe with this game is actually the combat.  The more the game progresses, the more frustrating the combat feels as we are forced to fight more and more enemies in battles that begin to drag on for far too long.  Even as I upgraded Kat’s abilities (by using the gems we can collect around the city and earn from completing challenges), I found myself lagging further and further behind my enemies in terms of strength, making these battles all the more aggravating.  It also doesn’t help that Kat has terrible aim and often dashes right past enemies.  Having her aim automatically would have helped a lot with the combat!

Lastly, I didn’t think that most of the DLC was really worth it.  Of course, it comes with the Remastered version on the PS4, and at this point, I doubt anyone is paying the extra $3.99 each (roughly $12 in total) to get the DLC for the original version on the Vita.  Nevertheless, I still thought I’d address my opinion that most of the DLC wasn’t that much fun.  The Maid Pack was pretty mundane, and the Special Forces Pack included the most aggravating challenges in the game.  The Spy Pack, on the other hand, was at least pretty entertaining, especially the second half.

Overall, Gravity Rush is a unique experience that you won’t find anywhere else.  As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed flying around, and I found Kat to have a very charming personality.  And as odd as the story is, I didn’t find that to be a deal breaker.  My only true complaint was the combat, which tended to slow the game down whenever it appeared and distracted from the actual fun parts of the gameplay.  Despite my annoyance with the battles, I’d recommend playing Gravity Rush if you’d like to experience a game with an original concept that hasn’t been done a million times before.  Gravity Rush is now available remastered on the PS4 for $29.99, though you can get it on sale for half that at a very fair $14.99.