Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is the latest instalment in the Mirror’s Edge series. Published by Electronic Arts (EA), it is a parkour game with acrobatic combat elements. The original Mirror’s Edge was received well, and according to many, was a return to form for EA, who according to critics, haven’t produced anything totally original in recent years.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is the latest instalment in the Mirror’s Edge series. Published by Electronic Arts (EA), it is a parkour game with acrobatic combat elements. The original Mirror’s Edge was received well, and according to many, was a return to form for EA, who according to critics, haven’t produced anything totally original in recent years.
Catalyst is just a continuation of Faith’s story; Faith being the protagonist of the game. She is a runner, which basically means she is super acrobatic, athletic and strong. She traverses buildings almost effortlessly and can wall run without any difficulty. So is Catalyst a game worth playing?
Opening
The game starts off with Faith being released from lock up followed by tutorial sections. The tutorial sections are boring, mainly because they are for people who haven’t played the previous Mirror’s Edge. During the first hour of the game, you are introduced to a new character who guides you through the tutorial sections.
Thanks to the runner vision, traversing buildings is no longer as tedious as it used to be and will get you to your objective within no time. This does break the open-world free roam aspect of the game, though. The game designers had clearly not noticed this mistake.
Story
The game suffers from very poor writing. The objectives, missions, and factions all make zero sense if you concentrate and try to find the inconsistencies in them.
The plot is quite simple: kill the evil organisation trying to control humans before they unleash their evil plans and do evil things. The game doesn’t do much in terms of storytelling either. It feels like the story is just there to justify why Faith needs to get from point A to point B, something which they could have done even without having a plausible story. It feels so bad after you realise how many mistakes the writers made while making this game.
Not only is the story bad, its characters are also not memorable. If I have to work for someone or try to save someone, at least give me something to like about him/her. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care whether the character lives or dies. It is a sad thing that such a big publisher didn’t notice the mistakes in the writing and still went ahead with the release.
Gameplay
You have the standard parkour mechanics, which are no longer exclusive to Mirror’s Edge - you can jump off walls, wall run, ledge grab, jump and ledge grab, shimmy, use zip lines and chain jump. In fact, people have done parkour games even before Mirror’s Edge, but just not as extreme.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’s combat is only slightly better. Other than the normal parkour elements, the game is made a bit interesting with very flamboyant kicks and other attacks. However, some skills that you had in the previous game are now upgrades. I feel it is not a wise game design decision.
Faith does not use guns this time, which is a neat addition since she is a runner and adding guns only breaks the concept of high octane hand to hand combat.
What bothers me a lot is the very stupid AI and lack of enemy variety. You don’t really find any good enemy types or variants. In fact, you don’t even fight against any runner. You do have helicopters that pop up from time to time and they have the worst aim ever.
The AI makes extremely stupid mistakes, like falling off ledges or simply losing sight of Faith when she climbs on a pipe in enemy’s plain sight.
All of this makes Mirror’s Edge Catalyst a very hard game to replay. It isn’t by any means a game that I will remember; it is quite obviously a game released to make quick bucks. There are plenty of design flaws that can easily be seen in the gameplay.
The level design isn’t realistic, and you can clearly see that not a lot of thought was put into making them. For example, you land into a room with a bunch of conveniently placed wall panels that are purposely there for the sake of parkour; otherwise, they don’t exist in the real world. It is like the developers weren’t paying attention and didn’t want to make the game believable in any way.
Even the fast travel system makes zero sense, as this game was supposed to be open world. It turns out to be more of an open district game as you cannot access most of the areas that you see on the map. Moreover, the runners’ vision really discourages any path finding. The game feels like a very generic parkour first person game.
Graphics and performance
The game does run well on all released platforms and looks great as well. The art style is good, but you won’t find a lot of colours in this game. The particle effects are average as other game developers have done much better work with particles. The camera motion effects are good and don’t cause your head to spin even after hours of playing.
The game shines when it comes to character models. The character models are incredibly detailed and the facial animation during dialogues is superb, almost as good as Lara Croft from Rise of the Tomb Raider. You can run this game very well on a mid-end computer.
Summary
There are better parkour games out there, so I will not recommend this game to anyone. If you want to try it out, make sure that you buy it when its price drops to under $10, during sales.
Review Score: 6/10
The writer is a professional video game critic, video game director and video game journalist.
