I recently played through two games that are strikingly similar, those being Katana Zero and Ghostrunner. With Ghostrunner releasing about a year after Katana Zero it’s hard to feel a sense of “hey, can I copy your homework” with the game since it feels like the developers made Katana Zero in 3D. Both games center around cyberpunk narrative where the main character cannot remember their past, both use a katana as the main weapon, and both focus on high speed, precision play. But by far the most important similarity is that both games focus on combat where everybody, both your characters and enemies, die in just one hit. I wanted to see how both games designed themselves around this brutal combat style and see if one outshined the other.
In my mind, there are three major things you need in a game for this type of franic-paced, one-hit kill combat to work. They are predictable enemy AI, situational awareness in the level design, and extremely tight controls. These help alleviate some of the frustration that can be caused by the high difficulty of games with one-hit deaths. When looking at both games, it becomes clear that Katana Zero is much more successful than Ghostrunner at incorporating these design elements into the game.
Let’s start with enemy AI. Fast-paced, insta-death games, much like stealth games, require enemies to be predictable. This helps the player read them the instant they appear and react occordly. When your character moves fast and death comes even faster, it feels unfair if enemies don’t act in a way you are used to and makes the game feel too reliant on trial and error more so than the player’s skill and reflexes. Both Katana Zero and Ghostrunner have enemies with very predictable AI—if they see you, they try to kill you instantly. While the enemies in Ghostrunner appear to only be alerted by sight, the baddies in Katana Zero will react to shots fired and the crashing of bottles within a certain radius and then immediately go to investigate. This makes them more exploitable, easier to lead into traps or an unexpected fight, but also means you have to take more consideration with your movements. With the level design being all platforms separated by bottomless pits in Ghostrunner, the enemies seem practically welded in place, unable to move enough to lead into ideal positions for the player. There were times in both games too that enemies seemed to respawn in slightly different positions upon retrying a level, completely throwing off the muscle memory rhythm I had built up, but there were times in Ghostrunner where some enemies seemed to fail to spawn at all. This could be a recurring bug, some sort of adaptive difficulty mode, or the dummies just walking off into pits, but it was also baffling and frustrating.
Situational awareness comes from two major things in games like these: the level design and the boldness of the characters. I never felt lost in Katana Zero because the 2D sprites of all characters made them instantly recognizable. Players see what weapons they are holding and will learn quickly how they attack and what will alert the mooks to their presence. At that point, it’s up to the player to react quickly enough and exploit the enemies’ awareness to their advantage. Ghostrunner is more muddy visually with it being a full 3D, cyberpunk dystopia city, where all enemies are guards or robots wearing metallic armor that blend in with the gray steel environments around them. The different types of enemies can be easily discerned after a second, but in a game as fast as Ghostrunner an extra second is death.
While Katana Zero allows players to use the right analog stick to view the layout of the entire level anytime while playing, Ghostrunner does not let the players preview a level at all. This is a problem because being able to plan out a route is important when only one hit sends you back to the beginning of a level. There’s no way to no what’s coming up in a Ghostrunner beside throwing yourself at it, leading to clearing a section only to be killed by an enemy you did not know about, trying again and again, getting a little further at a time until you’ve seen every challenge in the level, and then you still have to run through it, dodging and slashing enemies apart perfectly, to win. There is so much trial and error in the levels of Ghostrunner, which can work in high difficulty games like Dark Souls or puzzle platformers like Limbo, but in a game that is so focused on speed, it just works as a huge pace killer.
Of course, the most important thing to have in games like these are tight, responsive controls. They are another way to tamper the frustration of instant death since the player will have no one to blame but themselves. Katana Zero controls are as sharp as the blade of the titular katana and feel absolutely great. The character movement speed feels just right, the jump has just the right amount of weight yet floatiness to it, and the sword slash, while having a few frames where you are vulnerable, feels great to master. The only minor issue I have with the controls are the wall jumps. The character has the Super Meat Boy effect where you slide a little up the wall when you jump into one and this leads to leaping on and off walls to feel slightly sticky. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it meant I avoided this technique whenever possible. This slight stickiness, though, is nothing compared to downright frustrating platforming controls of Ghostrunner.
There are very few FPS games that have done platforming well (Dying Light is probably the best use of it that I’ve seen) and Ghostrunner sadly is with the majority. The inherent problem with platforming in 1st person is the narrow view. When you can only look in one direction at a time, it’s hard to know where a platform is under your feet. You also have no peripheral vision, meaning when you are trying to run up along a wall to run across it, you have no real idea how far you are when you jump. I died countless times in Ghostrunner due to this view. The horse blinders that come with a 1st person view is not so much of an issue in games with more open levels like DOOM or Dying Light since you can quickly choose a different path if you mess up (and more importantly can absorb a few hits before you die), but Ghostrunner’s level feel rather limited. This is partly due to 70% of the areas being bottomless pits like some empty oceans, but the linear feeling is mostly because enemy placements and the stage layouts are placed in very certain locations to encourage an optimal path through them. Even in the more open levels, paths you have to take to keep moving forward and killing enemies feel like set routes. The game has the 3D Sonic problem where the world feels like it was built specifically for the character of the game and not a real, breathing world. The moments where combat is left behind for straight platforming challenges throw the clumsiness of the platforming into sharp relief and it is not flattering; it’s frustrating at best and infuriating at its worst.
Both games also have one other major similarity and that is a time dilation mechanic—an invaluable power to have when one hit kills you— but again, Katana Zero feels great to use while Ghostrunner stumbles. In Katana Zero, the player can slow down time for a few seconds with the simple press of a button. This works great as a way to more precisely position yourself, deflect a bullet back at an enemy, or just give you an extra second to assess the wave of mooks coming towards you. Ghostrunner, however, uses the ability to slow down time with a few different abilities, most notably the mid-air strafe. This move can only be performed in air. You press a button to slow down time and then you can move your character left or right, but momentum makes any slight tap of a joystick slide you gliding to the side like you were covered in grease. It is so loose and slippery that I found myself being unable to rely on it since my character would slide off further then I expected constantly.
While both the games are very similar, the gulf of success between how Katana Zero and Ghostrunner pull off designing around instant death is vast and deep and dangerous. Katana Zero feels as disciplined as the samurai that the main character emulates. It truly feels like the designers thought long and hard and reworked and tweaked every aspect of the game to ensure it worked well with the speed, difficulty, and brutal nature of the gameplay. Ghostrunner feels like an honorable attempt at best and hypocritical at best. The game demands precision from the player but shows little in the design of enemy AI or controls. If I were to recommend one of these games, it would obviously be Katana Zero. While the story feels like a pace breaker at the beginning, I slowly got absorbed into it and found myself really engaging with the narrative and characters. They were the perfect break to let my brain cool off between intense combat sections. All Ghostrunner can offer beside it’s combat is a stock standard cyberpunk narrative and some of the most frustrating platforming sections I’ve ever played.
Atomic Bob-Omb 