Gravity Rush 2 Review: One of the PS4's Most Unique Adventures

Every console generation has a few games that feel like they wandered in from a parallel universe, and Gravity Rush 2 is one of the clearest examples I can point to on the PS4.

It arrived in 2017 from Sony’s Japan Studio, the same experimental corner of PlayStation that gave us Silent Hill and a lot of the platform’s stranger ideas. If you spent that generation hoping for something that wasn’t another brown-and-grey shooter, this was the answer.

So let me get my verdict out of the way early. This is an incredible AA game that got buried under 2017’s heavy hitters, and it deserves a spot in your backlog.

A world that’s a joy to just exist in

Most of the game takes place in Jirga Para Lhao, a floating city stacked into layers like a wedding cake that forgot about gravity.

Up top you have a bright, bustling marketplace full of NPCs going about their day. Hang underneath the city and you find a poverty-stricken houseboat slum, which is where a lot of the story’s tension lives.

The layers have names and personalities, from the market district of Lei Colmosna to the wealthy floating estates that sit above the working poor. That vertical class divide feeds directly into how you move through the place and into the story itself.

The art team based the city on their travels through Southeast Asia and Latin America, and you can feel it in the architecture and color. It reads as lived-in and specific in a way most game cities never manage.

What makes it special, though, is how much fun it is to simply move through. Fly higher than you think you should and there’s more city waiting up there, then let yourself fall past the bottom and you’ll find whole areas hidden in the clouds below.

You eventually return to Hekseville, the setting from the first game, now rebuilt at roughly two and a half times the size. Exploring these places is the kind of thing I’d do for an hour without touching a single mission, which is about the highest compliment I can give an open world.

Gravity shifting is unlike anything else

Here’s the mechanic the whole game is built around. Kat can change the direction of gravity itself, so instead of jumping she “falls” toward whatever surface she’s aiming at.

That means walking up the side of a building one second and standing on its ceiling the next, then hurling yourself off across open sky. Her powers come from a cat named Dusty, because of course they do, and honestly that’s the least strange thing about this game.

The sequel adds two new gravity styles you swap between with a swipe of the touchpad. Lunar style makes Kat light and floaty, with towering jumps and a Wormhole Kick that warps her straight into enemies.

Jupiter style is the opposite, slow and heavy, turning her attacks into ground-shaking hits that can flatten a whole group at once. Switching between the three styles on the fly is where combat finally clicks, and I found myself doing it because I wanted to, not because the game asked me to.

Your enemies are the Nevi, blobby creatures with glowing orange weak points that you smack around with gravity kicks. Combat is solid once the styles open up, though it always plays second fiddle to the pure fun of getting around.

There’s also a genuinely huge amount to do. The main campaign runs around 20 hours, with dozens of side quests piled on top, from ore-mining dives to time trials to little one-off tasks like chasing a bird that stole someone’s lunch.

The real magic is how the traversal and the exploration feed each other. Bending gravity to zip around Jirga Para Lhao is so satisfying that getting from A to B becomes the reward, and that’s rare.

Kat’s story and a cast worth caring about

The story kicks off with Kat and her cop friend Syd stranded far from home, scraping by as ore miners in a ramshackle village.

Before long they reach Jirga Para Lhao and get pulled into a class struggle between the city’s wealthy rulers and the people they’re grinding down. It’s heavier subject matter than the cheerful art style suggests, and the game mostly earns it.

Kat herself is the reason it all works. She’s endlessly upbeat and kind, the sort of hero who helps people because it doesn’t occur to her not to, and the whole cast (including returning rival-turned-ally Raven) is easy to get attached to.

A lot of players reached for the same comparison here, and I’ll happily join them: this has the warm, hand-drawn charm of a Studio Ghibli film. The story beats play out in gorgeous comic-book panels that give the whole thing a storybook feel.

The plot does get tangled in its final act, especially once it starts explaining the mysteries behind Kat’s origins. I won’t spoil anything, but temper your expectations for a tidy ending.

A soundtrack I keep coming back to

This is the part I get genuinely evangelical about. The score comes from Kohei Tanaka, a veteran composer whose credits stretch back through games like Alundra and the Sakura Wars series.

Most game soundtracks reach for orchestral bombast or moody ambient loops. Tanaka instead leans on a jazzy, brass-heavy energy that suits a world where the floor is more of a suggestion.

The characters even speak an invented language, a made-up fusion of French, Japanese, and English, and the music runs with that same playful, slightly foreign feeling. The standout for me is “Night Gale,” the theme tied to Raven, and it’s the kind of track that lodges in your head for days.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I still put this soundtrack on outside the game, while I’m working or driving. Very few game scores earn that spot in my regular rotation, and this one did it without breaking a sweat.

How it looks and runs on PS4 Pro

Gravity Rush 2 was built for PS4 from the ground up, and that pays off in the art direction more than in raw fidelity.

The comic-book styling, borrowed from European bande dessinee, gives everything clean lines and bold color. Cutscenes slide into hand-drawn panels that look like pages pulled from a graphic novel.

On PS4 Pro the game ran great for me, holding steady while I was diving through the sky and swapping gravity mid-combat. That smoothness matters a lot in a game where you’re constantly reorienting which way is down.

It isn’t flawless on a technical level. You’ll spot some texture pop-in as you fly, and the pre-rendered cutscenes run at a softer resolution than the game itself, which stings a little given how sharp everything else looks.

A few things that hold it back

I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended this was a perfect game, because it has some clear rough edges.

The mission structure gets repetitive, leaning on a lot of go-here-fetch-this busywork that doesn’t live up to the traversal wrapped around it. The stealth and tailing missions in particular tend to drag.

Kat’s plain ground combat is still the weakest tool in her kit, floaty and imprecise next to the joy of her gravity attacks. And as I mentioned, the story loses its footing in the closing hours.

None of this sank the experience for me, but you should walk in knowing the padding is there. You play this game for the feeling of movement, and the missions are mostly an excuse to keep moving.

The verdict

Gravity Rush 2 is one of the most unique games on the PS4, and I mean that in the fullest sense. The world, the art, the music, and the gravity-bending movement all feel like they came from a team with a very particular vision and the freedom to chase it.

It won’t be for everyone. If you need tight combat and a laser-focused plot, the loose missions and messy finale might wear on you.

If you want an adventure that plays like nothing else, backed by a soundtrack you’ll keep long after the credits roll, this is an easy recommendation. It’s the rare AA game that swings for something genuinely its own and mostly connects.

My one real regret is that we haven’t seen more of Kat since. I really hope Sony hasn’t forgotten this series, because a Gravity Rush 3 built for current hardware could be something special.

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Screenshots are from the Gravity Rush 2 page on the PlayStation store and used under Fair Use.