I quite liked the first Mirrors Edge game when it released in 2008. Years later I knew they made a sequel but never got around to playing it or just waited until it was cheap. I finally got it on sale for like $10.
At first things are how I remember them from the first game, you do a short tutorial teaching you the basic controls, and it feels pretty fun at first the way your characters momentum and speed builds up as you hold the forward button. I played with a controller and the controls are a little odd, for example you press LB to jump. But the controls feel decent at first. After the tutorial is when I started to have some apprehensions about the whole thing. For starters, it plops you into yet another one of these open world type experiences. You have this overview map of the city, and all sorts of icons to look at and sort though. Thankfully you can press a button to bring up the Legend and see what all the icons mean. So the game has tons of optional side content and side missions, and frankly I never cared to do any of it and literally ignored every single piece of side content in the whole game because it just didn't seem to be a good use of time. I mean, I did one or two side missions but I could already tell it was the standard fare filler padding out copy pasted content. It's like they just made the game open world because "thats what mainstream games are supposed to have" - even if it doesn't service the gameplay experience. Ultimately, all the open world does here is add boring filler in between each main mission. I don't think the first game had any sort of Open world like this, it was just constant fast pace one mission to the next. So yeah, I never particularly enjoyed the whole open world vibe in this game and it only serves to ruin the pacing.
The controls are mostly fluid and fun, you get a good sense of momentum and always being so high up and vertical makes things feel intense. However a few things about the whole experience makes it feel kinda shit. For instance, the animation that plays whenever you fall from a slightly too high place (even when using Soft landing button) is just annoying and obnoxious. It swings your whole camera around wildly and it can just be nauseating. Like imagine someone grabbing your head and jerking it around as you're playing. Not good. Everytime you die, you get a big white screen, but for whatever reason it takes like 30 seconds to reload the last checkpoint, even on an NVME. Though, atleast the game is really generous with checkpoints and saves frequently so when you die you pretty much never lose more than 30 seconds of progress.
So then what the whole open world experience offers is opening your map, setting a waypoint to the next Main mission, seeing if you can fast travel closer to it, then running to the main mission. Fine, standard enough. Usually what will happen in these main mission icons though is you wont be able to fast travel there and will have to run around mindlessly to it anyways. Then, once you get there, its just a cutscene and then it makes you run across the map to trigger another cutscene. Frequently. So youre just running from one place to the next, only triggering cutscenes and not much else.
Finally when you get into the actual core of the mission content, what does it offer? Well really the whole structure and content of pretty much all the main missions is simply run across this rooftop place, interact with this machine/press a button, escape from the guards, go to next mission. Thats kinda all you ever do. Sometimes you go inside these big office type complex buildings and have to figure out how to leap off all the walls , crawl through vents, and find a way to the objective, but its usually nothing more than just arriving somewhere and pressing a button or causing some kind of chaos. Now the worst part of this whole thing, is unlike the first game (from my memory) this game has mandatory combat segments. It will throw you into an arena and make you do this most god-awful melee combat to progress to the next bit. The combat here is just shit feeling.
It feels like a really weird beat 'em up game where theres different enemy types and you have to constantly vary up your attacks or they block you, but the animations and annoyingness of it all just makes it really frustrating and stupid. You have these tazer guys that constantly taze you, you have a dozen guys shooting machine guns at you across the map, and youre just some unarmed girl suppose to meanderingly take them out one by one. It just sucks. To make matters worse, all I really ended up doing is spamming the Dodge button, and then the Heavy kick, over and over and over. For every single enemy. For the whole game, because it actually seemed to work and sort of confuse/glitch out the shit AI and made it a viable tactic to get past the shitty combat. These combat sections are no slouch either, frequently I would die 10 times in a row before I could fucking beat it, and it wasnt the kind of satisfying rewarding challenge it was more like "that was really stupid and annoying". You cant even pickup guns, which is something I remember being able to do in the first game.
Then theres these escape segments where youre kind of meant to just run as much as possible and absorb enemy bullets. There will be enemies everywhere shooting at you, and youre kinda just intended to soak up all their bullets in your 'runners shield' which is this shield that generates the more moves you do like walljumping and stuff? I'm not sure the whole idea and mechanic behind it just felt awkward and stupid. Like you're suppose to just get shot dozens of times while running, like what? Then it has this like GTA 4 kind of mechanic where it shows a GPS on the screen and the enemy bubble and you need to stand outside the bubble and hide somewhere to lose the enemies.
But...none of the missions really stand out at all, or even the locations make any sort of distinct visual impression.
So that's another thing:
The first game had a really sort of iconic distinct artstyle, and things did stand out in that game. You had all sorts of different coloured environments and areas, however in Mirror's Edge Catalyst everything looks the fucking same, and it almost (from memory) looks like a downgrade in aesthetics from the first game. Like the enemies look more like power rangers or something, everything has this overly saturated childish brightness to it. Its all super futuristic in a way that looks cheap and tacky. None of the locations of environments stand out, everything is just the same blur of corporate rooftops and office complexes. Its hard to describe exactly what I mean but it just comes across as bland and actually boring. Frequently I'd just find myself kind of an overall feeling of "meh" and boredom while playing this, so much so that I could barely finish more than 2 missions per sitting (1 hour tops). I had to really play the game in 1 hour maximum sessions or else I just feel like going to sleep. I think a lot of has to do with the game just not having any standout landmarks. You know like statues, memorable buildings, giant podiums - anything. Theres seemingly none of it. Its like the whole game is just copy pasted assets with no manual handcrafted care or charm, theres nothing that makes you go "Oh yeah, its this place" its a total samey blur.
In standard open world slop, it also has multiple skill trees, which just made me kind of eyeroll when I was introduced to it. Theres 3 different trees, Movement, Gear, and Combat. These are pretty much trivial. The movement one is already half filled out at start of the game, the Gear one gets filled up as you progress and it forces you to get certain unlocks, the Combat one is the one youll mostly be using as you save your points until the game forces you into these mandatory combat segments, then you dump points into whatever sounds like it would help you in combat like "more damage to enemies" and stuff. You get skill points after each mission or something, I don't know I barely gave a shit about it, towards the end of the game I had almost every single skill anyway, even without doing any side content.
And the story... well it's really uninteresting and dull. It's a lot of mumbo jumbo technology jargon talk about big corporations being evil authoritarians taking over the world, you and your gang of parkour athletes are apparently the only ones who can stop it, or some shit. I kept getting a lot of vibes of The Matrix, take the blue pill or red pill kinda shit. The antagonist wants to create a blue pill world where all the residents are in virtual reality bliss or something and Faith the main character wants to stop it and "give people the choice". I don't know, it all seemed really derivative and uninspired, but worst of all the characters are just not likeable. Almost every character has that modern gaming "strong independent empowered woman" trope with short flippy haircuts, and the men are just generic edgy guys or 'boss dudes' I dunno, the story really didnt do anything for me, more often than not I was just cringing at the dialogue and characters.
Thankfully, the game has a sort of objective marker button, when you press a button its called 'Runners Vision' which lets a red beam show up and guide you around the world. This allows you to just turn off your brain and mindlessly keep following this beam to constant progression. I liked that, because even if the game is mediocre, I can just use this feature to mindlessly rip through it to end credits. So I did. So it wasnt all that painful to make constant progress thanks to this. It can be really hit and miss, though. Usually it will highlight objects in Red showing you this is where you should go, other times it kinda just glitches out and shows you paths that are impossible to reach which makes you just scratch your head and think what youre missing.
Overall its not an awful game, its just really mediocre and could have been better. It's short, under 8 hours, and it does have an open world if for whatever reason someone is into that kind of thing after the credits roll. For me though, I just followed that red objective line mindlessly to end credits and towards the end of the game the last two missions were so annoying and frustrating I kept reassuring myself "its ok, only 1 mission left" cause I've had enough.
5/10
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