Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
Might as well jump!
A GAME EVERYBODY LOVED, but few played, Mirror’s Edge put you in the fashionable shoes of Faith, a runner who can carry messages without attracting government attention in her near-future dystopian home. This was in 2009, and the game was criticized for poor combat, contrived levels, and an inconsistent sense of speed, even as reviewers gushed over its bold, stylistic choices, and unconventional nature.
Seven years later, today’s Mirror’s Edge looks amazing. All Blade Runner screens and Neo-Tokyo lighting, this is a place of empty warehouses, planks across drops, railings right where they need to be, and pipes that end at just the right height. Contrived? Maybe, but only in the way that every game space is contrived in order to make it playable. Fall in a pit and there’s a way out, rather than leaving Faith to starve to death, or until a builder arrives to help her up. Despite its modernist good looks, however, the city is underpopulated and lacks character.
Fresh out of a two-year prison stretch, during which she’s managed to cultivate a sharp haircut, Faith immediately gets her old job back. Supervised by the deeply irritating Icarus, she soon begins delivering packages and breaking into company headquarters in a newly more-open-world city (it’s not a true open world, really), where people hang around on rooftops to offer you side missions, there’s always more than one route to a target, and the ground seems a very long way down.
An irritating early mission sees Faith tasked with retaining Focus—a bar that fills as you run—while she makes her way through security guards to a dead drop. There are several things wrong with this. Firstly, the number of guards suggests the bad guys know where the drop is, defeating its purpose. Then there’s the “not losing Focus” part, which fails the mission if you run past a guard instead of thumping him, in a game that’s told you it’s often better to avoid combat, and makes you invulnerable to damage as long as you keep running. Then it fails you for using the “wrong” attack to take them down—light attacks only in this situation. It’s a frustrating sequence that becomes a challenge of rote-learning, rather than skills.
There are other non-optional combat sections throughout, and the developers have made a valiant effort to make them bearable by building a melee fighting system around the traversal. Spring into the air or slide into a guard, and you do extra damage, often taking them out immediately. Much like certain aspects of the movement controls, especially wall-running, it’s often not clear whether you’ll land a blow. It’s not that the game is unresponsive, as it proves itself time and again to be a smooth and fastflowing affair, the Frostbite engine holding its framerate well on our test rig’s GTX 970 and mostly Ultra settings. The game also comes with a Hyper setting, aimed at those with GTX 1080 cards and 2.5K monitors— even on this, it’ll hold 60fps.
No, the problem seems to be one of direction. The radius within which Faith will change direction mid-air to land a blow is wide, and when charging at security guards, we’ve seen them suddenly change direction to move back into our path, the better to bop
them. But when attempting wall-runs, a wall can’t do this, and we found ourselves in a pit or flailing at the air many times because we weren’t perfectly lined up. AID RUNNER Faith is guided in her wanderings by her Runner Vision, an augmented contact lens that shows her a route—not always the fastest—to her waypoint with a red swirl, and highlights in red the objects she can use to ease her path there. It becomes very much a game of “run at the red things,” and this visual feedback enables you to chain moves together into a blur across the rooftops. Time trials enable you to show your mastery of the system, with the online leaderboards every game must have these days, and the ability to create your own to share with friends. You get to choose what information Runner Vision displays, or turn it off if you want more of a challenge. It’s switched off in certain areas to make you think more about your surroundings, too.
Something else that every game must have is an XP system, complete with unlockable abilities. Catalyst’s fits rather awkwardly with the game—many skills are already unlocked when you start playing, the useful quickturn becomes available very early on, and one particular mission acts as a barrier to unlocking a great many more. It’s an odd addition to the game, especially as DICE has chosen to leave XP-boosting pickups dotted around the city. Floating orbs can be run through, but documents and control chips make you pause to collect them. It’s another addition that might have benefited from a little more thought at the planning stage.
Enemies come in armored varieties, with some carrying guns that you can’t actually take from them, so it’s important that you can beef up your character for the escalation of the game. Improving your stamina is one thing, but protective vests and grappling hooks, made available by gaining experience for a character who was previously at the top of her skill set, undermine the internal logic somewhat.
Catalyst is certainly a beautiful game, and could have been a great one, too, if its systems were as well designed as its sumptuous visuals. As it stands, it can be frustrating to play, yet when it gets it right, it gels together into a celebration of fast, clever traversal, which is capable of firing up adrenaline and even vertigo. In a marketplace that’s recently seen Doom and any number of man-in-the-dark-witha-gun games, this stands out as a ray of sunshine, and after the reception of the first game, it’s a sequel that we are lucky to be able to play at all.