Review Mirrors Edge Catalysts Fiction Fails but Its Gameplay Is Stellar
Towards the end of the original Mirror's Edge, there's an area that exemplifies most of what studio EA DICE's 2008 first-person parkour game got right. You're in an empty atrium and asked to find your way up along a succession of platforms obscured by a lattice of scaffolding. Dazzling sunlight makes the room's lemon and white checkerboard walls glow. Ambient electronica pings and blips soothingly. Looking at a five-story high maze of concrete, rebar and piping, you wonder "How in the world am I going to scale this?", That's for you to puzzle out, and the moment for me the game finally came together. You had to probe for connection points, then tilt the view just so to attempt gasping wall-runs, scrambling climbs and heart-stopping leaps. Watching vets play this sequence now, amounts to a few minutes of surefooted clambering. But my first try took over an hour sorting runnable routes from red herrings. It's one of my favorite sequences in a video game, a kind of "Zen of investigatory acrobatics" set against an exquisite Mondrian canvas. Similar gameplay is the sublime center of 2016's Mirror's Edge Catalyst, EA's overdue series rethink for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One released June 7. Unfortunately, to get to it you have to ford through a lot of filler. Instead of advancing protagonist Faith's rooftop struggle with a cabal of autocrats, Catalyst reinvents then situates it in an open-world rendition of the original's stunning, bleached-white metropolis. That utopia now has a name, Glass, a gleaming city in which despotic plutocrats for some reason tolerate factions of superhumanly spry "Runners." These unabashed thrill-junkies perform a kind of Olympic snail-mail service by bounding between skyscrapers to deliver black market items or messages covertly. As the game opens, Faitha legendary Runner herselfis fresh out of juvie, in debt to a leg-breaker and on the verge of unraveling a sweeping conspiracy. So yes, there's a plot here you can chase that reduces the game's open-world to 15 linear sprints from this point to that one. Corporate underlings pop up along the waymore irritant than threat since you can generally run right past them. And in a few instances there's a ruthless timetable to beat. But mostly you're tailing "runner's vision," the game's candy-apple-red GPS that guides you through Glass's urban jungle to tag an endpoint, punch a button and watch a cutscene. The villains are boring, hand-to-hand combat feels clumsy and pointless at least the gunplay's gone, the story's typical pablum that telegraphs its twists too soon, and these things ultimately stand between you and Catalysts far better free-range gameplay. Veer off toward the broader city's jutting structures and labyrinthine byways, and Catalyst becomes something else entirelya glittering playground of kinetic possibility. Here you can explore and maneuver as you like, running routes to challenge a leaderboard of players' best times, or devising grueling runs of your own that show up on other players' maps. This is where slowing down becomes paramount, however counterintuitive. You'll finish a route with a one or two star of three rating and notice an outlier score that's somehow 10 or 20 seconds faster than yours, then realize there's a completely different way to come at the course.