Gravity Rush is SCE Japan Studio's gravity-bending Vita debut, and pre-release looked to be the console's system seller, blending unique gameplay with a gorgeously rendered expansive environment. Unfortunately, the parts don't quite come together and the final result is underwhelming, made all the more disappointing when the mind wanders to what could have been.
You play as Kat, a typically amnesiac protagonist who seems to have fallen into a city suspended high above the clouds, and accompanied by Dusty, a cosmic cat who grants you the ability to manipulate your own gravity. Kat herself is likable enough, harbouring a snarky internal monologue behind a clumsy exterior, but the way that all the other characters are only carted in long enough to set up their necessary story points and then pushed back out of the way without any personality or motivational setup makes the cast entirely forgettable. The dialogue is passable, but not particularly memorable, and the writing is unnecessarily coy, as if it's trying to hide twists and mysteries from you without ever really making good on them. Plot lines are introduced regularly and then are forgotten about, often never to reappear again, leaving little investment in the overall story. The missions themselves are often rather shallow, involving either inane fetch quests or an ever-present over-reliance on combat.
Of course, a game can still be great despite its story based on the strength of its gameplay. The primary mechanic in Gravity Rush is adjusting the direction of gravity so that you fly (or more accurately fall) toward your intended destination. The process is a little stunted, as changing direction requires a dead stop in mid-air rather than just an immediate shift, but traveling is enjoyable enough. As you might expect, however, it can prove a bit disorienting, and unfortunately the camera is simply not up to the task to mitigating the problem, readily catching on objects, jerking awkwardly in seemingly random directions, and positioning itself so that your character completely obscures the screen or to give you no depth perception whatsoever.
Kat's other navigational ability is the gravity slide, triggered by touching both lower corners of the front touch screen. Sliding is faster than running and automatically adjusts your gravity to stick to inclines, making it theoretically useful in certain situations, but in practice it's a pain to use as you're required to steer with the motion sensor, forcing you to deal with the oversteer/understeer problems that result from a complete lack of tactile feedback. It's often a better idea just to stop sliding, reorient on foot and then start again. Compounding the issue is the fact that so much as grazing an obstacle while sliding will cause Kat to get stuck on it, which is incredibly frustrating during the optional time-trial missions.
It's also important to discuss the combat, because there sure is a lot of it. The enemies you fight are black nebulous creatures known as Nevi, whose bodies are adorned with glowing red weak spots that you need to attack. Smaller Nevi can be fought from the ground, where kick combos can be employed against your foes, but the lack of a lock-on ability makes it easy to lose track of your targets. For taller or airborne Nevi, you need to take to the air with your gravity abilities and then charge toward them with the gravity-powered equivalent of a dropkick. While airborne you can only either fall or hover defenselessly, so when trying to catch your bearings or find a new target expect to be unfairly hit, often by projectiles fired from off-screen. Later Nevi can have a multitude of flailing limbs or can move rather quickly, making it an entirely luck-based effort to hit enemies with the gravity kick by no fault of the player.
By swiping the screen Kat can evade when both grounded and airborne, but doing so forces you to remove your hand from the controls, leading you to wonder why this ability wasn't instead applied to the rear touch panel, where it would be much less disruptive to the gameplay. Through the course of the game you can also unlock additional special combat abilities. One of these is a homing attack that will often go for enemies other than the ones you want or simply target nothing and send you spiraling off to nowhere. Another is an area of effect attack that, initially at least, has such short range as to be useless. The most useful is perhaps the ability to fire a large number of projectiles at enemies, which unfortunately can still be disrupted by the ever-present off-screen ranged enemies.
So what does Gravity Rush do right? While not immense, the city is large and stunningly rendered for a portable device, and flying around it - particularly between regions in the later part of the game - is joyous. The framerate is mostly consistent, except when needing to render a large number of particle effects, but as with Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush fails to natively render to the same resolution as the Vita's screen. This isn't too noticeable in the city, but impacts more distant character models quite a lot, and some of the more abstract parts of the games whose aesthetic is reliant on clean lines suffer immensely by it.
Gravity Rush was a game I went into wanting to love. The concept was great and the art was brilliant, but ultimately there were too many mechanical failings and too little emotional investment in what was happening that the game just never grabbed me. Hopefully if Japan Studio revisit this universe - and they've certainly set themselves up to do so - they'll apply the polish to deliver what might have been, rather than what we received.