Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst has a great concept, but misses the mark

A GAME based around the art of parkour might sound like a great concept, but is it too ambitious for its own good?

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst game

PARKOUR, the French art of getting from place to place on foot as quickly and innovatively as possible regardless of the obstacles in one’s way, is exactly the sort of thing that lends itself well to computer games but is rarely implemented with anything approaching its full potential.

Games developer Dice is better known for its Battlefield series of games, but has also turned its talents to this reboot/prequel to the 2008 parkour-based title, Mirror’s Edge, notable for its impressive environment, strong lead character and innovative use of parkour as a key gameplay element. The game struck a chord with its fans, who have been calling for a new game in the series ever since.

Eight years later, Dice revisited the franchise with Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, published by Electronic Arts on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The game is set in the futuristic city named Glass, which is ruled by a group known as The Conglomerate (and obviously with a name like that they aren’t the heroes of the piece), with security provided by a private contractor named KrugerSec (again, not the good guys here).

You take to the rooftops of Glass as a young woman named Faith Connors, a parkour practitioner and courier. Faith is certainly very good at what she does, leaping from ledge to ledge, sliding under ducts, ziplining between buildings and hurdling balustrades without a second thought — indeed, doing all these things are the highlight of the game.

Faith is controlled from a first-person perspective, with the immersion helped by the fact her arms and legs are visible on-screen as well during many of these activities.

She has her own motivations for running the rooftops — a combination of revenge and financial necessity. There’s a story here about corporate corruption, the abuse of power and so on, but I really couldn’t get into it because ultimately I just wasn’t engaged by it. The characters in Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are nearly all unpleasant or unlikeable people, with their interactions featuring a lot of teenage-like angst, melodrama and generally mediocre acting.

The game’s parkour mechanic was intuitive and worked well, and there was certainly a great sense of fluid motion as Faith navigates the city; an optional display feature also highlights a suitable route and identifies objects Faith can use to leap over, slide under, climb, or interact with.

As she gains skills, Faith also acquires useful equipment such as a grappling hook — but much to my disappointment, it could only apparently be deployed on certain fixtures and not for any enemy grief-causing.

Despite the innovative gameplay ideas, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst suffers from a surprising lack of polish.

For a start, the in-play graphics on the PC version I reviewed weren’t nearly as good as I was expecting — even at “high” or “ultra” settings, the city itself didn’t look nearly as spectacular as I thought it would; especially when I stopped running to take stock of my surroundings. Some of the character models also looked pretty unremarkable and the city itself also felt very sterile and empty with not that many NPCs in it; the ones who were present didn’t move much either. To be fair, the cutscenes looked pretty good, though.

I also encountered multiple dialogue synchronisation issues in the PC version, where the sound did not match up with what was happening on screen — leaving character’s mouths and expressions out of synch with the spoken words in a way that would be an entertaining part of the experience in a classic Hong Kong Action film but is nowhere near good enough in a modern computer game.

The game promises a sense of freedom to explore the city, however, but I never got a sense of said freedom — it still felt pretty linear, and I never felt any sense of having pulled off an epic, on-the-fly stunt to escape from a predicament or reach somewhere particular.

Faith has no weapons in the game — apparently they’re bio-locked to their security force users — but she also seems to show no remorse at shoving people off skyscraper rooftops to their inevitable deaths.

Combat also feels stiff and clunky, in stark contrast to the fluid nature of the parkour Faith engages in. Enemies often stumble around like second-rate stuntmen when knocked into each other and the fights lacked any real weight; it never felt like I was really laying into someone with effective and damaging martial arts moves.

There also appeared to be no significant ragdoll physics and even when shoving enemies off high buildings, their demeanours didn’t change; the figures often simply stumbled over the edge and fell away without flailing or yelling or any of the other things you’d expect from someone in that extremely unpleasant situation.

Much has been made of the gleaming city itself, and while it’s certainly a welcome change from the drab earth colours so prevalent in many modern games, it ends up feeling sterile and unexciting; one glass-covered building looks much like another and the rooftops and airconditioning ducts also soon blur into similarity.

The missions got repetitive pretty quickly and although there are side quests (timed races and courses, or package deliveries) scattered around the city, the few I tried didn’t excite me greatly either.

Ultimately, a combination of unlikeable characters, an unengaging plot and uninspiring missions all added up to a game I simply didn’t have much fun playing.

It’s hugely disappointing; the game was clearly an ambitious project for the team at Dice and while I respect what it was trying to do, from my perspective, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst falls short of being an enjoyable game and is definitely one to miss.

Originally published as Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst has a great concept, but misses the mark