Any little tiny mistake, anything at all-getting caught up on an obstacle, getting punched by a cop, or more likely just not being sure, for a split second, what direction the game wanted me to go next-and that was it might as well restart the level. My moment of clarity was the first "distract the cops" mission, in which I was tasked with-well, it was just running from point A to point B, as usual, but instead of a single timer, the course had several checkpoints where more time would be added on to my remaining seconds. I didn't expect EA would actually do it, but I thought it would do something. I imagined a Mirror's Edge in which you could rewind time, a la Prince of Persia. There were sections that were so difficult or required such precise movement that I literally spent longer on the loading screens in between attempts than I did actually playing the game.
But what is that path? It's not obvious the first time.ĭeath in Catalyst, just as in the original, means a long, long wait on a loading screen while the game spools up the exact area you were just in, polygon by polygon, again. In my experience, for most of the time-trial missions, even though there might be multiple ways to get somewhere, you pretty much had to find the perfect golden path if you wanted any chance of success. And indeed this was the case, but only if you'd already played the level 9 or 10 times and had thus committed to memory each jump, each somersault, each maximally efficient way to deal with the pattern of obstacles.Ĭatalyst may be "open world," but it's really a hub-and-spoke system that gives you one way to get wherever you're going, with maybe a little bit of freedom here and there to run over a building instead of through it, or springboard off an HVAC unit so you can clear a railing without having to shimmy up a drainpipe. Here was my fundamental issue with the original game: It was supposed to be about flow, about speed, about making lightning-quick decisions about where to jump, what to slide underneath, and what walls to clamber up to get you from point A to point B with maximum efficiency. It recreates the original game's strengths-and, more importantly, its fundamental errors-as if no time had passed. It feels like I stepped through a time warp and am reviewing the original Mirror's Edge again. And it had me wondering why nobody else seemed bothered by its design issues.īut* Mirror's Edge Catalyst* (out this week on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC) doesn't really feel like a sequel, or even a remake. It had then-editor Chris Baker absolutely enraptured with its dizzying momentum. It made columnist Clive Thompson want to vomit. The concept alone grabbed many-first-person parkour game built around running at nearly-superhuman speeds across the rooftops of buildings and over vertigo-inducing chasms-and led to no small amount of digital ink spilled at WIRED. Released in 2008, Electronic Arts' Mirror's Edge became a cult classic, unappreciated by some but beloved by others.
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