Currently Playing: Mirror's Edge: Catalyst Almost Lost It's Way.
Warning: This is going to be one of those really annoying reviews where the writer invests hundreds of words into telling you everything that is wrong with a game, and then turns around and tells you to buy it anyway. (Sorry.)
Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a deeply mixed up game. There is so much here which feels, not bad as such, but deeply lacklustre. It's reminiscent of writing a story for a Creative Writing assignment at school. You have the story you really want to tell, and a list of grammar and punctuation articles you are required to include to get the high technical marks. So you spend 90% of your piece telling your amazing story, and then half-heartedly crush all your required content into the last two paragraphs to make the grade. Mirror's Edge Catalyst wants to be a game about Parkour, gliding and soaring over roof-tops, but it's also been forced to be a game about mission completion, evil corporate overlords, family, racing, community engagement features, upgrades, and a whole load of other guff. The purity of the Mirrors Edge experience is still there, but it's partially buried under a load of necessary, and often rather poorly executed features.
Take, for example, NPCs. The game's core NPCs, Icarus, Noah, Dogen and Plastic, are, whilst not winning NPC of The Year, competently fleshed out as real people, with their own (narrative) motivations and distinctive silhouettes in terms of character design. They are nicely animated during the game's cinematic cut scenes, and well voiced acted. Plastic stands out as being particularly hard to pull off, yet her voice actor does an excellent job of communicating with tone of voice aspects of her personality which are never explicitly told. Her lines are heavy-handed in a tap-dancing elephant sort of way - (look, she doesn't understand emotions. Hey listen, she keeps using the word "logical." Ooh, she doesn't understand art!! Maybe she's autistic, eh? Eh?! Nudge nudge, wink wink) - but they are acted well enough to make her believable.
Yet the side-quest NPCs, are, in a word, dogshite. They are ugly and flat, facially speaking virtually expressionless and their costume design is instantly forgettable. They are static in every sense of the word, standing near motionless on rooftops, not flinching or reacting in the slightest as Faith barrels past them. They don't even cycle through a range of barks; they are either creepily silent, or annoyingly repetitive:
Hey, over here.
Hey, over here.
Hey, over here.
The quests they offer offer a delicately, handled, coy glimpse behind the scenes of the city, but with all the subtly and grace of the aforementioned tap-dancing elephant - PLEASE TAKE THIS STATUE TO A PERSON OVER THERE SO I CAN TELL YOU I AM SAD. YES, THIS STATUE IS IN EXACTLY THE SAME CONTAINER THE PREVIOUS PERSON USED TO GET YOU TO TAKE 3 QUAIL EGGS ACROSS THE CITY. DON'T ASK QUESTIONS.
There are other problems too. The city you traverse as Faith is wonderful, a thrilling maze of pathways to explore and uncover. And most incredibly of all, it's seamless. There are no loading screens. This, surely, deserves praise as a technical feat. Look down however, and you'll see cars running like Scaletrix models around the distant roads, stopping and starting and moving in abrupt jagged lines, as they have not been programmed to navigate round curves - an issue in a city with so many roundabouts. Look up whilst going up in a construction elevator, and the central section of the city, a giant skyscraper called The Shard serenely floats up with you, having not been properly anchored into the map. There is something pretty impressive about a QA team that failed to notice a skyscraper soaring through the air.
The story was largely nonsensical to me, partly because I hadn't read the Mirror's Edge: Exordium comic that I was upsold constantly during the cut-scenes, and partly because I has assumed that this game would be a sequel to Mirror's Edge, when in fact it is a reboot. This is annoying to me. It keeps happening. Rhiannon Pratchett writes an excellent and moving game about a female character, and some Twerp In A Suit retcons it into something blander and more palatable for commercial tastes. (Sigh) Either way, I was underwhelmed by the story and narrative design; so many things were left unexplained, or came across as utterly contrived. Shoe-horning computer hacking in as "Collect The Glowy Things" and it's sequel "Collect The Glowy Things, But Now Faster" doesn't mean those gameplay sections were not fun, but it doesn't make them make actual logical sense either.
And there is more complaining to come. The upgrades system undermines the gameplay, making it in some cases impossible to complete side-quests without upgrading the tree. Yet, the cutscene hints encourage you to plug away at it - Find A Better Route! - when what you actually need is a pipe traversal move which will cut about 3 seconds off your movement time. The upgrades thus are not actually UPgrades, they are simply what you should have had to have any chance of getting the job done in the first place.
The combat is execrable, with those pesky cut-scene hints writing cheques the game cannot cash:
Enemies will react to your moves!
They will try to flank you!
They will recognise your combat patterns and outsmart you!
Like bollocks they will. Attacking NPCs line up to get kicked in the head, damage one another with friendly fire when in enclosed spaces, and hurl themselves off buildings when bored. But, it's extremely fun to drop down from high buildings and cave their skulls in with your squeaky rubber Runner feet, so full marks to whoever did those sound effects.
The Social gaming features are crow-barred in, the shielding mechanism is borderline insane - running fast makes you bullet proof!? - and the most powerful upgrades are pretty much entirely optional. I never once "disrupted" a drone as part of gameplay. I'm not even sure I've been given the chance?! And the less said about the finale mission, the better.
And yet (here it comes) despite all of this griping, paragraph after paragraph of complaints, I love this game with my whole damn heart. And I want you to buy it. I want you to buy it for your Mum. And your sister. Buy it as a gift for the bloke who works in IT next time he has to get you back into your email account because you forgot your password, again. Get a copy for everyone in your Church group. Hand them out to people getting on the Tube. Because I want people, particularly fat useless people like me, to experience the joy of digital free-running. Playing Mirror's Edge Catalyst was like putting on an old glove. I knew where to go. I knew how to get there. And when I didn't I could figure it out by studying the environment around me, and testing Faith's limits. It's almost meditative. That freedom, and joy, that comes from hurling your avatar around a room, gliding from obstacle to obstacle in a state of pure Flow - that is hard to beat. And it's hard to find. Tomb Raider games, mainly the older ones, give it to you sometimes, as did the (criminally under-appreciated) Remember Me. But it finds it's purest form of expression in Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, taking the on-the-fly path-finding puzzle-solving of Mirror's Edge [Original] and increasing the scale to an open world.
Take away the fluff, the crap, the butt-ugly NPCs, the pointless side-quests about eggs and vaccines, and focus. Ignore the moronic enemies, the endless trial-and-error of some challenges, the silly missions, and the avatar upgrades you don't care about. Focus on the city. Focus on the flow from obstacle to obstacle. Focus on the purity of the path. Breathe in, breathe out. Listen to the squeak of Glass beneath your feet, the hiss of the ziplines as you glide down them, the rhythm of Faith's breathing. Run, jump, grab, swing, turn, release, fly... and run.
Just run.
