YMMV / Ghostrunner

• Awesome Music: Daniel Deluxe's electro / techno / synthwave soundtrack (you can listen to here) enforces the nervous parkour gameplay and the urge to free the city from its tyrannical leader.
  • The Orb gives an adrenaline boost during the boss fights.
• Breather Boss: T-073-M is a Bullet Hell of a fight, with lasers rotating in every direction and forcing the player to juggle forward movement, timing, and situational awareness. Mara's fight isn't a slouch either, featuring long stretches of back-to-back attacks as the player waits for her to open up to Boss-Arena Idiocy — and is immediately followed by the brutal "fight" that is the Architect. On the other hand, HEL's boss fight, which is placed between the other bosses of the game, is far easier. Her first attack type is a flurry of strikes that the Ghostrunner must parry, but the indicator of her attacks (her blade glowing) is lenient and obvious enough once first spotted, and failing to parry isn't even a guarenteed death, as the player can move away. Her second attack, used between phases, is to retreat to a different platform and throw Sword Beams until the player closes the distance: this one is kind of pathetic for being about as complex as the basic Mook's pistol shots, but without the presence of other enemies that actually makes him dangerous. Overall, for a character that is built up as a powerful Mirror Boss, HEL ends up disappointing in execution, and feels more like a glorified combination of the ninja enemy and the later-introduced and curiously similar teleporting enemy than counterpart to the Ghostrunner.
• Cliché Storm: What many consider a flaw to this game is that its universe doesn't feel original enough. Dharma looks like the most basic depiction of a Cyberpunk dystopia with very caricatural characters.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Those Action Bomb crawling humanoids can prove to be a real pain in the backside. They can't be killed with melee as doing so detonates them and kills the player, so they can only be actually dispatched by burning a valuable skill to kill them, or finding shurikens somewhere in the arena, if they're present. They're also easily the most agile enemy, flanking the player from unexpected angles, in addition to being consistently placed in ways to take the player by surprise or block off what would otherwise be a good attack route.
  • The illusion-creating mooks that split into six can cause a ton of problems, as the illusory wall of bullets makes it insanely hard to exploit an opening in their attacks without putting yourself at risk of the real one, if you attacked a fake. You can't even employ Trial-and-Error Gameplay to get past them, as the position of all the doppelgangers is randomized every time you approach. Also, hard mode uses them way more liberally than the main game, and regularly places them near other enemies.
  • Right around when you start to think you're pretty hot stuff at cutting dudes in half, you round a corner and there's a gigantic 12-foot-tall robot that tracks your movement way better than any of the human mooks, firing off gigantic laser bursts that start off almost too wide to dodge laterally and rapidly expand horizontally the farther they travel, with a fraction of the reload time of the human enemies. If you're out of Blink super-dashes, you're going to have to figure out how to dodge their shots *vertically*, making much more careful use of wall-runs, grapples and blind corners to approach them than is required for human enemies.
• Evil Is Cool: Mara, Hel, and The Architect are all cool and badass villains. Mara's case is that her design is a very clear Shout-Out to Doctor Octopus and proves to be a formidable boss; Hel's case is that she's a competent Evil Knockoff to the titular Ghostrunner and is popular enough to become the playable character in the DLC; The Architect's case is that he's a suave Manipulative Bastard who gets the protagonist to do what he wants.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Hel. Despite only appearing as a boss, Hel proves to be popular enough to be Promoted to Playable in the DLC content.
• Goddamned Bats: The katana-wielding melee enemies, which can only be killed after parrying them first or wasting a skill to kill them. The game slows down when these guys are around as the player is forced to wait for them to attack before they can safely move onto a different enemy.
• Narm: The voice acting can feel like this, especially the Keymaster's during her battle:
  "What will you do if you kill me, puppet? Let him consoom yoo?
• Narm Charm: The bullet time after you slay the last enemy of a section can look ridiculous, but it also makes you feel like a badass for having triumphed over them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Unlike Jack, who either has a robot face or always hides it behind a mask, Hel looks like a robotic version of Painwheel, as her vaguely human face hidden behind a mask, her... pipelines on the back, and her open belly can testify.
  • The unwillingly roboticized... things the Keymaster created to "save" humanity. Not only they look and sound disgusting, but they walk on all four on walls extremely quickly and are determined to blow themselves out of their misery on you.
• Obvious Judas: Over the course of the final level it's revealed that the Architect wanted you to kill the Keymaster so he could establish his own utilitarian dictatorship. Who would have thought? It may be an Intended Audience Reaction, as the obviousness of it is lampshaded by the Ghostrunner himself, who is quite clearly wary of the Architect and actively disobeys him on several occasions to help out others; he's only surprised by the Grand Theft Me aspect.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the game is an efficient and challenging action platformer with Awesome Bosses, beautiful visuals and dynamic music, the story is a cliché "La Résistance fighting against a dystopian cyberpunk dictatorship" plot with Narmy voice acting.
• Polished Port: While it comes with some drawbacks (most notably, much brighter visuals in the initial release), the Nintendo Switch port is seen as a competent port of the game, running at a fairly stable 30fps in docked and handheld mode.
• Spiritual Successor: This game is about an Amnesiac Hero Cyber Ninja that slices enemies apart with a sword and parkours on walls, gaining empathy to his Tyke-Bomb original self by interacting with The Heart. She helped reactivate him after she discovered him, and is a major part of La Résistance fighting against an autocratic, discriminatory Dystopia. Said autocratic dystopia was once ruled by the cyber ninja's male ally, who has since been reduced to a wayward AI without a physical body after being "killed", and the attempted recreation of the original leader using advanced technology is the evil Final Boss. Ghostrunner is a reboot of Mega Man Zero from a different universe: Ghostrunner is Zero, Zoe stands in for Ciel, and the Architect combines original X and Copy X into one role.
• That One Boss: T-073-M is unanimously considered the hardest boss in the entire game, despite being the first one. It is entirely focused on platforming across a room full of moving lasers.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The visuals are often praised for how beautiful they look, especially if ray-tracing is enabled. As this is one of the first Unreal Engine 4-based games to support ray tracing, this game makes for a good showcase on how well it works.