When the original Mirror’s Edge came out in 2008, it was a cult hit. The gameplay was unique for one taking place in a first-person perspective, and it looked good graphically too. While it’s story wasn’t the best, it wasn’t a bad one either. After years of waiting for some sort of new entry in the series, fans finally got their wish in the form of 2016’s Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
Catalyst is a reboot of the Mirror’s Edge series that also serves as a prequel to the original game. Some elements of the first game’s story and world are present here, but others have been altered, so if you never played the first one you have nothing to worry about. The game still takes place in a utopian city, this time called Glass, and there’s a conflict between Runners, a group of secret underground couriers, and the corporations and government officials that control the city. You play as Faith, a Runner that’s being released from jail as the game begins. Soon after being freed, she stumbles across a conspiracy involving Gabriel Kruger, CEO of KrugerSec, and is thrust on an adventure to try and put an end to his plans.
The story is easily the weakest part of Catalyst. The characters that you come across in the game are interesting, with the majority of them being likable, and they have the potential to be fully formed characters, but that potential is completely wasted. One of the characters in the game, Dogen, is a crime lord that Faith has a history with. He has influence all across the city, and he is played up to be a character that we should be afraid of. The issue is that there is nothing shown of him in the game that really makes us see what’s so scary about him. Sure he may scream at Faith sometimes, but that doesn’t equate to him being a man that should be feared.
Another example is with Birdman, one of the first characters you’re introduced to in the game. He’s said to be a legendary Runner that used to run years before, but he no longer does. He has all the potential to have his character explored more in depth and thereby allow us to care about him more. It’s a shame though that upon meeting him, he sends you off to do a time trial, and then is never heard from or seen again for the rest of the game.
Aside from the characters, the actual story itself is disappointing. Each mission gets you excited about some of the developments regarding the conspiracy Faith has gotten herself wrapped up in, but the game never completely follows through on the excitement and curiosity that it builds in you. You are constantly told that whatever Kruger is planning is terrible so he has to be stopped, but the game never makes you feel or even understand why Kruger’s plans are so bad that you should be afraid of him succeeding. Everything culminates in an ending that is disappointing after the journey that you’ve been on the entire time, leaving you with many questions and hanging story threads, and not many answers for any of them.
Thankfully, the gameplay of Catalyst is very good. Gameplay revolves entirely around parkour movement, so it’s a good thing that the parkour feels incredible. Anyone coming into this game from the original or the recent zombie parkour game Dying Light will quickly understand the controls and how to move. For any newcomers though, there may be a bit of a learning curve to understand how to move throughout the world. Once you get it though, it all just clicks together and you’ll be running along walls, vaulting over railings, and sliding under signs with ease. It’s a blast to be running from one point on the map to another uninterrupted and chaining all your moves together.
Traversing is made easier with the assistance of Runner Vision, which shows you the direction you should be heading in, as well as highlighting objects you need to traverse in red. For those who want the challenge of finding their own way through the world, fear not, as you can turn off Runner Vision in the options menu.
You don’t start off the game with all of your abilities available though. There are three upgrade trees for you to go through (Movement, Combat, Gear) and you use skill points to unlock and upgrade your different abilities. You can earn these skill points by collecting items throughout the world, playing through the story, and doing side missions. It’s a bit odd that you don’t have some basic abilities at the start of the game that you would expect to have, but you earn skill points at a pretty fast pace, so you don’t have to go for too long without them.
Combat is back in Catalyst and it’s better than it was in the first game. You can tackle your enemies in a head-to-head fight that drags on for a bit, or you can include parkour into your combat and lead a wall run into a jump kick off the wall to take them down in one hit and keep on moving.
Thanks to the different enemy archetypes, you’re forced to mix up your tactics based on who you’re fighting. Even though combat is improved, it’s still something you don’t want to do. You’ll often be pitted against a group of enemies, some of them with guns, so your best option will always be to just run right past them.
The map is a nice, fairly sized one with a large amount of things to do. Time trials are your standard race against the clock. Time trials are fun and will have you trying over and over again to make it to the end before the clock hits zero if you fail to make it in time. You can even make your own time trial missions or run a course that someone else made, so the competition never ends.
The best side activities though are the Grid Node missions. These missions involve you making your way up a tower in order to unlock a fast travel location. It sounds simple, but they’re actually fairly tricky as you have to avoid raising security alarms, and find your way up to the top without the assistance of Runner Vision. Making it to the top always offers a sense of great satisfaction and I wish there were only a few more of these in the game.
While most of the side activities in the game are fun, not all of them are. As is typical open world fare in the current gaming landscape, there are a number of different collectable items for you to get in the game. Getting these items is more tedious than fun, as the majority of them don’t involve much thinking or require a lot of work on your part. They don’t offer you that much experience either, so there really isn’t a point in collecting them unless you want to collect everything in the game.
There are also delivery and distraction missions for you to do. These are also races against the clock that involve you either delivering a package to someone, or distracting KrugerSec guards with a foot chase across the city while an illegal operation happens elsewhere. These are fun at first, but get old quickly as all of these missions end up feeling the same after a while. There isn’t much variety in how these missions play out and nothing new gets thrown into the mix to spice them up.
Graphically the game looks gorgeous. DICE’s Frostbite engine is just as beautiful as ever, and that is very evident in the appearance of the city. It’s very clean and bright, and uses a large variety of colors. There were some moments where I had to just stop and take in the scenery because it looked so great.
The game sounds great as well. Hearing the sound of Faith’s feet as she runs along the ground, or the sound of her sliding down the side of a building helps immerse you into the world and make you feel like you are Faith. And although the characters may not be the best, the voice acting is pretty good across the board as well. Unfortunately, the game’s soundtrack isn’t that noteworthy. While that may not be a big deal for most people, it is a shame since the original game’s soundtrack added to the game world.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst isn’t a bad game, moreso it’s a disappointment. There are a number of things that the game does well, but the things that it fails at are too significant to overlook. The game is fun to play and there is a lot to do once the story is over, but not much of it will be all that enticing or interesting unless you’re trying to 100% the game. Running throughout the city of Glass is a thrill, and it certainly helps that the city is something that’s nice to look at. It’s just a shame that the story and characters fail to live up to the potential that they have. Maybe we’ll see another entry in the franchise at some point in the future that’ll right all these wrongs and be the sequel that fans originally wanted.
TheComfySpot 