Mirror’s Edge Catalyst Review

In my humble opinion Mirror’s Edge is one of those games that you either love or hate.
Also, is one of those niche games that come to the surface only once in a while, often taking their chance to win in a matter of weeks. I always wanted to write an article about it, but never find the time to do it until now. I am still struggling with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice way too much to post something reliable, so I decided to give Faith (the protagonist) another chance.

The original game was published on PS3 over a decade ago (it was 2008) when this blog didn’t even exist yet. It was basically the only game (not really true, but so it seemed to the general public) dealing with the Parkour discipline, which was used by the main character to traverse the environment in order to fulfill her mission. The plot was set in an overly-controlled society were the only way to vehiculate information without incurring in censorship of any type was to engage people able to move, unseen, out of the streets. The devs so elected for a non-traditional stealth approach where runners found their ways on the roof of a super-technological city. Also, to make this kind of platformer even less traditional, a First-Person-View style was adopted.

The game was a success for its time, even though maybe not as successful as the publisher expected, so when a new chapter was announced during 2013 E3 people got all hyped up. The game was actually published in 2016, this time for the PS4.

Despite what everyone hoped though, Catalyst was not the sequel of the wonderful first installment, but a reboot that actually did not add anything new to the original story. What DICE tried to do here was probably good in their intentions: to draw attention back to a splendid “experiment”, adapting it to different players in a different generation of consoles. Too bad that the players who bought the game were probably mostly the old fans (I surely was) and to them Catalyst, after the first hours, was simply not enough.

Don’t get me wrong: Catalyst is overall a good game, where characters from the past were re-invented in a different role to make their story much more intriguing and relevant (Faith’s sister was the main one here) yet, compared to the first title, everything feels too simplistic. The story unfolds in a rather linear way; the environments (although splendid) don’t look like a real improvement (if you consider you are now on a superior hardware); the numerous quests scattered across the game world feel like a mere skill-check and not really story-related (even though they mostly are) and when the game gets to its epilogue you are actually left with a jar of flies.

Despite the bigger game world, the sidequests, an improved combat system (not always running away will be a viable option) and the options to customize your avatar, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst was actually a step back compared to the original title which, at present, is still unsurpassed.

In the end, Catalyst was, sadly, a missed opportunity, especially if you played the PS3 one. In case you haven’t tried those game, it would probably wise to get your copy now. It must be pretty cheap nowadays and, as I said, it was overall a good game. For sure, it is way different from most of the other, which keep being just clones of themselves. Give it a chance: it may be the right one for you.