GORN 2 Review: A Chaotic Over-the-Top Sequel That Redefines Brutality!

After a long, busy day at work full of stressful projects, numerous unwanted meetings, and forced, awkward networking, there’s nothing quite like coming home and playing a game like Gorn, where you can spear a man’s heart right out of his chest and beat him with it before grabbing his shoulder with one hand, ripping his head off with the other, and holding it up as a victory trophy.  Ah… so calming.  So zen.

Gorn’s violence reaches a level of trashy catharsis that fits the game into a niche barely existing outside of itself – games that make being bad feel so very good.  It’s the virtual reality gladiatorial equivalent to aimlessly pissing off cops in Grand Theft Auto or ripping through a research facility like the monster in Carrion.  It’s also a stupid, immature, unnecessarily violent power trip, arguably the most Devolver-y game Devolver has ever published, if you’ll allow me to just make up an adjective, and I gobbled it up faster than my dog discovering peanut butter for the first time.  It was delicious.

If you’re new to the world of GORN, allow me to bless you with a brief recap of its stunningly elaborate lore.  You are a gladiator.  You enter arenas where you’ll use VR motion controls to pick up a variety of weapons that will literally rip the rokibe limb from limb.  In this case and probably every case, rokibe is a term referring to the ludicrously chiseled, aggressively stupid warriors that flail throughout the arena in a half-assed attempt to murder you.  See, the rokibe are far too muscly to have any real range of motion and they constantly skip leg day.  So, they’ll often jerk their entire body around in an attempt to fling their weapons vaguely in your direction, and archer rokibe, if you end up behind them, may even go so far as literally bending over backwards to shoot arrows at you rather than put in the effort to turn around. They have disproportionately tiny heads most of the time, probably because there isn’t much to fill them, and ripping their limbs off is a process of stretching them away from their bodies as if they’re action figures made out of rubber until they finally uncork with a satisfying pop.  These are the rokibe.  They’re very fun to kill.

Great!  Now you know the story, or total lack thereof, of the original GORN.  So let’s drive this point home – GORN 2 is a dumb, dumb game.  It’s really stupid.  It’s unapologetically janky, full of immature sexual humor and revels in presenting its cartoon ultraviolence as one of its main features.  I mean, the hub area even has a fart button.  All it does when you press it is fart.  And aside from getting an achievement for pressing it 10 times, I honestly don’t think it does anything else.  Add all of this up and you get one of the most hilarious experiences you will have in 2025, as long as you agree that it’s funny for every character to repeatedly call you a smelly coward for some reason, and that every two-handed weapon allows you to slide one hand up and down its shaft like you’re jerking it off.  Unless I’m the only one who did that.  I doubt it, though.

For how little GORN cared about its story, GORN 2 actually gets pretty into it.  The overarching narrative is still nothing worth paying much attention to – you’ll battle the five sons of the God of the Afterlife or something, and yada yada yada, fight in each one of five different arenas three times to beat the game.  It’s within these five arenas that you’ll get introduced to the game’s five different boss characters, each of which is almost certifiably insane and has their own… uh… unique personalities, including one whose calls for your death are not so subtly flirtatious, and another who’s basically a giant talking skull who’s really into teeth.

While the story doesn’t get much deeper than having these boss characters talk at you throughout your time in battle, their dialogue is genuinely hilarious in a way that I’ll call Rick and Morty meets the inside of a fourteen-year-old boy’s brain.

Those looking for a deep, meaningful evolution of GORN’s core gameplay aren’t going to find it here, and frankly, I’m not sure they were expecting it. GORN’s janky, weighty, blood-soaked combat is a huge part of its appeal, and in that sense, there isn’t a whole lot wrong with the original game, for what it is. GORN 2 is really just GORN 1 but MORE. More arenas, more weapons, more dialogue, more polish, and more ludicrous ideas than you can whip a flail at. You’ll fight with a teeny tiny sword that gets bigger for every rokibe you kill with it until it’s a massive monstrosity you can barely hold with two hands. You’ll shoot balloon-tipped arrows that will fling a rokibe up into the sky as if this is Metal Gear Solid V, only to watch him ripped to pieces in midair and have his guts rain back down upon you. You’ll avoid bulls running across the arena or giant crushers that activate when you lift your hands up in the air. And you’ll slice a rokibe’s leg off and watch him desperately hop toward you before you confidently toss him into a giant meat grinder. GORN 2 may play more or less the same as GORN 1, but the glee with which it indulges in its own creative ultraviolence elevates it far above its predecessor nevertheless.

I played the Steam VR version of GORN 2 on my Quest 3 and figure it’s worth going over the reasonably robust set of comfort options that developer Free Lives has included. You can freely choose between smooth turn or snap turn, selecting a speed for the former and an angle for the latter, as well as add a vignette for additional comfort. While there is no teleport option for locomotion, you can decide between smooth locomotion via the left stick or grab and pull locomotion like the default option of the original GORN, which has its own appeal in a way by making you move like an awkward, uber-swole rokibe yourself.

There’s also the option for Low Violence mode, which I would never select, but to each their own, and Hardcore Mode, which some of you may want to select if you want anything resembling a challenge. I personally feel that GORN 2’s mild level of default difficulty allows it to be the kind of power trip I wanted, and don’t think additional challenge would necessarily mean additional fun. But I only died a few times in my journey to beat the sons of the God of the Afterlife, and if having less health against faster rokibe sounds like a good time to you, Hardcore Mode is exactly what you want.

When you’re done with the campaign, which took me about three and a half hours, first of all, make sure you don’t miss the credits sequence because it is hysterical, and second of all, you’ll have access to Endless Mode as well as custom modes, where you can configure a wide variety of features like low gravity, number and types of enemies, weapons you use, and so on. This adds some nice replayability to the relatively short campaign, but for what GORN 2 is, the length of its story felt exactly right and did a great job remaining consistently entertaining without overstaying its welcome.

Graphically, I’d say GORN 2 isn’t making any extravagant leaps forward in fidelity from the original game, but the arenas are significantly more visually detailed and varied, and I love the intro sequences that will have you walk through an elaborately-themed foyer like a slow march to your own death. The game performs great, though again I’ll caveat that I played the Steam VR version on an RTX 4080, so performance was never likely to be much of an issue. I can’t comment on the Quest 3 standalone version that releases concurrently with the Steam one since I didn’t have access to it, so make sure you read any reports of the performance on that one before you commit.

Sound design in GORN 2 is consistently a treat, with high-quality voice acting all around, and the noise of a leviathan-sized double-sided axe cleaving a rookie in half sounding every bit as squishy as you might hope. The game’s music sounds way less like it fits in with bloody gladiator combat and more like the sort of soundtrack you’d hear in a series like Crash Bandicoot or Rayman, and I think that’s pretty hilarious and a great asset to the game’s vibe. No notes.

While you could argue that GORN 2’s commitment to immature absurdity and lack of wide scope will always make it a specific type of game for a specific type of person, I’d reckon to say that literally anybody who even slightly enjoyed GORN 1 should give this a shot. The jank is definitely a feature rather than a bug, and accordingly, there are elements I wish could be a little more polished, like the fiddly bow that never knows for sure if I’m trying to nock an arrow or not, and the fact that a handful of weapons feel basically useless and should be avoided at all costs. Seriously, how do nunchucks do basically no damage? Anyway, regardless – GORN 2 is fun. It’s very fun. It put a smile on my face the entire time I was playing it and knows how to lean into its absurdity with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

GREAT