Some of us thought the day would never come, but here we are! After earning a cult following, the original Mirrors Edge was praised heavily for its innovative use of parkour to become a new type of first person platformer. Unfortunately, the praise didn’t equate to huge sales numbers, putting potential sequels on hold. After years of fan requests and a good ear from the folks at DICE and EA, the unexpected follow up, Mirrors Edge Catalyst, is finally hitting store shelves. We got the chance to play through the first six hours of the game to see how well Faith transitions into an open world environment, and while there’s plenty of promise, it’s easy to see how she’s stumbled out of the gate.
The first Mirrors Edge was a linear first person platformer/shooter hybrid, where the focus was on finding the fastest, most efficient way to run between your objectives while keeping up your momentum. This involved moves that were unheard of using this perspective, such as vaulting over obstacles, sliding under them, wall running and rolling. Catalyst picks up on this concept and expands on it by taking the game from a linear set of levels to the open rooftops of the City of Glass. As you travel between point to point, you’ll quickly realize that there’s an insane amount of content to sift through. Between hundreds of collectables spread out across over a half a dozen types, a seemingly endless amount of side missions, and story missions that take you into different interior environments, early impressions feel like this game will be much meatier than the first, even if the content is a bit shallow.
Most of the moves from the first game return, with the notable exception of the removal of shooting. Rather than bring back the tacked on low ammo firefights, Catalyst integrates movement into the combat in even bigger ways. Giving you a weak and strong attack button, the two can be used in conjunction to take out weaker enemies. As you begin to encounter better armed guards as you progress, you’ll have to rely on your momentum to take them out. Vaulting off of vents or jumping off a wall into a light kick for example, will usually one hit KO an enemy with a side kick that doesn’t slow you down from your continued running. Hard kicks are where the game gets especially fun combat wise however, since satisfyingly powerful takedowns sacrifice some speed for the assurance of taking out your pursuers. When you’re stopped, attacking with a hard kick and a certain direction held will allow Faith to kick enemies into whatever direction she wants, leading the enemies to stumble around with some laughably slow animations. Forcing them to bump into each other will do extra damage while stunning more than just the guy you’re beating up, but you haven’t seen anything until you see a guard do his best WWE Royal Rumble impression and visibly launch himself over a railing if you kick them into one. However, these iffy animations are more than enough of a trade off for how fun the combat can be.
What’s less forgivable is the horrendously bad texture pop in I kept experiencing. For minutes at a time, characters would have flat, blurry faces that looked like they were ripped straight out of a Nintendo 64 game. Even with the red objects and trails leading me to my next objective thanks to the game’s new Runner Vision mechanic, it was hard to tell what I was looking at until the game fully loaded, (which says a lot considering most of the city is just made up of white walls.) Matching the strange visual glitches was the awful voice acting, especially on the NPC’s who give out missions. It doesn’t help that their awkward delivery is highlighted especially well by the way they tell you their life story as you complete their missions, taking you out of the experience fairly often when you can’t help but chuckle at the way their delivering these lines.
It doesn’t help that the core story itself doesn’t do the cast any favors. Faith was essentially a mute avatar in the first game, so focusing on her past, including her motivations for becoming a runner and the mistakes that put her in prison right before the start of the game, is a step in the right direction. But everyone around her has felt hollow so far, failing to establish a reason for us to care about her teammates or her father figure. To make matters worse, Faith doesn’t come off as too great of a person either, closing out the final mission in the early access version by committing a horribly out of character act of vandalism. I won’t spoil it here, but I’m sure you’ll be scratching your head as to why she would be so willing to complete this task so readily, especially for the person she was doing it for.
Story notwithstanding, the biggest issue I had with Catalyst so far was the sheer repetition of the tasks you’re given. As a runner, Faith is responsible for delivering information under the noses of the evil corporations that have a grip on the city. So be ready to take on hours of exciting side content like… Delivering a capsule! And delivering another capsule! And delivering one that will break if you take hard landings! What makes it worse, is that most of these missions take place in the same small districts, amplifying the repetition to the point where you’ll memorize many of the routes just from the insane amount of times you’re asked to run across the same paths. Even with hidden passageways, you’ll keep finding yourself running across areas that stop being exciting fairly quickly. Maybe if there were other runners moving around the city, or police actually looking for you outside of missions, it would make things feel more alive. But throughout most of Catalyst, the environment is a barren series of blocks that exist solely to jump on, making you wonder where all the people are in this sprawling metropolis full of roof running freedom fighters. It will make you eventually bolt towards the fast travel button, effectively making you want to avoid the game’s biggest feature until you move to a new section of the city. Except, even though you have a large amount of safe houses early on that allow fast travel, you don’t actually get to use it until you encounter a certain type of side mission about three hours in.
These side missions in particular however, are one of the highlights of the demo. Aside from the combat focused missions where you have to avoid enemies while staying out of sight after sabotaging their security systems, the hacking rooms that unlock fast travel will really put your platforming to the test. These puzzle sections force you to examine the environment closely, looking for a way to reach the top of the server room without setting off security. Movement is still the highlight of the experience, but it really shines when it makes you focus on the best way to use it.
After the six hours was up, I was happy that I got to spend some more time with this universe and style of game play, but I’m left running away feeling like the game would have been better off staying out of the sandbox format. Serving as a sigh that the game is severely padded with meaningless side content to hide that the story isn’t all that robust, the crazy amount of repetition manages to suck the joy out of the amazing free running while highlighting how dead the world feels this time around. With that said, the improvements to the combat and the movement itself are still strong points, making Mirrors Edge Catalyst worth a run through based on what we’ve played so far. Yet, it’s far from the next evolution in the series that we were hoping for.
Unless the rest of the game is significantly better, Catalyst is looking like a 3/5.