Review: Gripper – Anything But A Gripping Experience

I’m guessing someone at developer Heart Core watched Akira (1988) right after playing Furi (2016) and decided to combine the two. Which, fair enough, sounds like a cool idea. But ideas can only get you so far. What matters is how well you execute them. And in the case of the self-published story-driven action game Gripper, the final product does not live up to the concept.

I want to start by talking about the writing, because the marketing for Gripper keeps emphasizing that this is a story-driven game. Heart Core even advertises their own studio by saying that cinema experts nominated for Oscars and Palme d’Ors are among the founders. And yet, I would’ve never described Gripper as a game that emphasizes its story.

Just look at how sad he is when he remembers his home.

The thing is, I don’t think every video game needs to have an incredible story. In particular, action games can get away with a serviceable story whose sole purpose is to get you from one awesome set-piece to the next. But if you market yourself as a game with a focus on story, then the narrative that Gripper delivers, which isn’t awful but certainly not great either, is disappointing.

And just because I don’t think the narrative by itself is awful, doesn’t mean I don’t think the writing at large is pretty damn bad. I’m going to go off a little tangent here, but I think that’s the best way to explain how I feel about the dialogue. Last year everyone loved to point out how bad the dialogue in Neon White (2022) apparently was, but I tried to defend it. Neon White (2022) committed to a very specific type of humor, one that for many people didn’t land. Fair enough, but I still believe that Neon White (2022) had some good jokes within that niche humor. Gripper goes for the same kind of humor, except there are no good jokes here. This is what the bad version of Neon White’s (2022) dialogue looks like, so if you already didn’t like that, imagine what it’s like here. Painfully unfunny and not even a little bit clever.

Get it? Because we defeated anger.

The underwhelming writing doesn’t stop there though. Because I guess Gripper also attempts to explore grief. At least the bosses are clearly designed after the stages of grief and they’ve done that in the most obvious way imaginable; anger is an angry fire dude, depression is a sad ice girl – you get the idea. Their dialogue is similarly on the nose with lines like “now you’ll meet with my anger” coming from Anger, and “you just have to accept it” from Acceptance. At least the bosses look cool, I will give them that.

As I mentioned before, I believe that mediocre or even bad writing in an action game can be excused as long as the gameplay is fun. Too bad Gripper doesn’t deliver on that front either. There are two halves that make up Gripper’s gameplay. One half is boss fights, and the other half is endless runner sections. Both are plagued by design decisions that range from annoying to frustrating.

Who doesn’t love a good endless runner?

Let’s start with the boss fights (although you might as well call them bullet hell levels). What they boil down to is you having to dodge a plethora of projectiles that the bosses throw at you, while you have to wait for the boss to do the one action that allows you to damage them. And then you get to repeat that a number of times. Most bosses have one of two problems: either the amount of times that you have to get through this cycle is too high, or the time that it takes for each individual cycle to complete is too high. Either way, the bosses are endlessly dragged out, resulting in them slowly whittling down your health, even if you dodge the vast majority of attacks. And as such, I quickly came to realize that the only resource that really matters in Gripper is your health.

There’s another big problem with the boss fights though. A lot of the attacks from the bosses require tight controls to dodge them, but the controls in Gripper are anything but tight. It feels like the boss encounters and the movement of the bike were designed by two completely separate teams with no communication between them, because they don’t complement each other whatsoever.

This is one of the calmer moments.

You also get a new ability after every boss fight, but those barely matter to be honest. The only ability that’s really important is the grappling hook, which is what the entire combat is based around. The others are occasionally nice to have, but that’s it. While they add very little to the boss fights, they add nothing to the endless runners. You might think that unlocking a jump ability, for example, would mean that you can now also jump during the endless runner sections, adding some complexity. You’d be wrong. All it does is that a couple times per level there will now be a quick time event where you get to press X. Every single new ability you collect adds nothing but another button that you might have to press during a quick time event.

Besides that, the endless runner sections are exactly what they sound like. Similar to the boss fights, they also have the problem of being overly long, and they don’t have any checkpoints either. On top of that, the obstacles often just kind of pop up out of nowhere, or start to move right before you pass them, often making it close to impossible to dodge them. I wouldn’t even say this makes these levels hard, it makes them unfair. You cannot rely on your reactions to get through them; you need to repeat them over and over again until you know where every obstacle is. And this is where the length of the levels becomes a serious problem.

Exhilarating gameplay… not.

The art direction has something going for it at least. I’m always a fan of cyberpunk worlds, and this is no exception. Especially during the parts where Gripper utilizes comic frames to tell the story, it looks striking, with a very unique art style that oozes coolness. The 3D style the rest of the game is presented in isn’t quite as gorgeous, but it still looks alright. If there wasn’t this weird thing where a lot of the time the cutscenes are just out of focus. I understand that, given the fact that there are people from the film industry working on this, they might have intended to create some kind of stylization with shifts of focus. But a lot of the time the cutscenes are just out of focus, and I have a really hard time imagining that was on purpose. And if it was, then I don’t understand the reason.

There’s another weird thing Gripper does to stylize its presentation. Often, during cutscenes, there’s a split screen. One half is in the 2D comic look and the other half is 3D animated. This seems like something that could be cool, but a lot of the time both sides of the splitscreen show the same thing, just in a different style. Which makes you wonder what the point of it all is. Especially because one of the styles looks much better. Should’ve just gone with that one.

Like… why is he out of focus here?

But to mention at least one thing I can be positive about. The music is quite good. It’s what you’d expect from a game like this: hard-hitting techno beats for the most part, but it works, and it gets the adrenaline pumping during the fights.

Gripper is a game that could be so much more with a concept that sounds exciting. But in the translation to an actual product, a series of misguided design decisions have been made that leave you with a game that’s frustrating and annoying more than it is anything else.

Nairon played Gripper on PC with a review copy. Gripper is also available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.

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