Mirror’s Edge Catalyst review: Follow the red line, or else

The first Mirror's Edge solved a seemingly unsolvable problem in gaming: effortless first-person running and jumping. Usually, in 2D or 3D, a good third-person camera is needed to let the player see around corners, above and below ledges, past gaps, and even behind and to the side of the character in a way that allows for smooth planning of jumps and moves two or three steps ahead of time. In first person, by contrast, you often can’t see where you need to be until you’re already up in the air, getting ready to hopefully land somewhere safe.

Mirror’s Edge figured out this problem with a clever system of environmental cues that gave back some of the preternatural knowledge taken away by the perspective. Objects highlighted in bright red against the game’s stark white backgrounds showed you precisely where you should plan to jump, grab, or slide safely without having to worry about what you can’t see beyond the horizon. Combined with a set of fast, smooth parkour moves, protagonist Faith felt like an unstoppable super-powered force, cutting swiftly and precisely through dangerous environments mere mortals couldn’t tread.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst doubles down on this “Runner’s Vision” conceit, adding a paint-like red line that darts in front of your vision to show you exactly where to wall run, ledge grab, or spring jump. Sometimes, the game goes so far as to show an outline of a person doing the precise parkour move you need to move on. It’s subtle enough to not be annoying but clear enough to stand out among the game’s gleaming, techno-utopian environments.

At its best, Catalyst’s version of Runner’s Vision gives you that same feeling of being a superpowered badass that can’t be stopped by walls, fences, or even towering changes of elevation. Following that red line quickly becomes second nature, giving a sense of effortless flow and seeming mastery that’s rare when traversing first-person environments.

It’s when you’re not simply following that red line that the game begins to fray a bit at the edges.

Open conflict

Unlike the original Mirror’s Edge, which was more or less a straight conveyor belt pushing you along a tight and fast-paced story, Catalyst expands things to a much more open world. That comes complete with hundreds of collectible doodads to stumble across and jerkily animated quest givers who stand awkwardly on rooftops all day waiting for you to give their lives meaning. There’s definitely plenty of stuff to do, even if most of the missions boil down to either “get to this point on the map as quickly as possible” or simply “get to this point on the map somehow.”

The open world design is in something of an open conflict with that thrilling Runner’s Vision ideal, though. By showing you the precise path to take through the overcrowded, heavily detailed environments, Runner’s Vision dampens the desire to explore the open world. Instead, you end up often following the bright red path marking a safe and rote path to your next objective.

To be fair, there is some incentive to just wander around looking for all those doodads in between missions, which can be fun in its own right. And the game does go out of its way to tell you that the Runner’s Vision path is just one possible way to get to your next point of interest—it's not necessarily the best one. In a lot of the game’s timed tests, in fact, following the set red path will be much too slow to earn the best results.The problem is that it’s usually much too difficult to figure out those alternate paths, or even to figure out where it’s safe to explore. Absent those bright red markers, the first-person perspective and the confusingly cluttered surroundings combine to make free exploration a cumbersome process. Scouting out better paths usually involves painstaking, slow, detail-oriented trial-and-error that seems antithetical to the game’s whole keep-running-at-all-cost ethos.

Sometimes you can find small, almost trivial shortcuts while maintaining your speed, cutting out a corner from the ever-present red path. More often, though, improvised freestyling leads to a frustrating string of pointless falls and deaths as you test jumps of blind ledges, misjudge safe falling heights, or slip off an edge (or when the game just fails to let you grab that zip line that is literally inches to the right of your outstretched hand).

With enough time and practice, I suppose you might memorize chunks of the city to the extent that you simply know all of the shortcuts and can pick them out at speed. But after suffering through enough five- to 15-second reload times (on the Xbox One version) and losing another minute of progress during a race to another pointless death, the urge to learn the city at that level wanes a bit. This is in contrast to a game like Dying Light, where clambering around the ramshackle environments was more freeform joy.

There are a few points where Runner’s Vision goes “offline,” and you’re forced to slow down and discover your own way through the game’s maze-like 3D structures. Often, though, after a minute or two of poking and prodding for the right path, Runner’s Vision will come back online and offer to show it to you. You can ignore this, but when the game is pushing it on you and you can’t figure out where to go, there’s a strong urge to take advantage of it.

Punching and plotting

To break up all the running, the game occasionally throws waves of repetitive security goons at Faith. There’s none of the awkward gunplay that slowed down the original Mirror’s Edge; thanks to the plot device of bio-encoded weaponry, Faith has to rely exclusively on melee attacks. Standing still and mashing the punch button is nearly useless, though. The fight system encourages keeping up your momentum by giving more damage to attacks performed at speed or while jumping from above, for instance. Keeping up continuous motion also gives a temporary “focus shield” that ends up being your best defense against ranged weaponry.

The battle environments often don’t seem especially well designed for these kinds of motion-focused fights. You’ll often end up running around in a circle desperately trying to keep your shield as you look for a convenient place to perform a good jumping attack.

The enemies, meanwhile, show minimal signs of intelligence or even life. They usually just stand in the open and fire directly at Faith or awkwardly circle and wait for a moment to give a telegraphed, easily dodged strike. The game encourages you to knock these dumb goons into nearby obstructions or each other, at which point they stumble and crumble with some hilariously bad animation that can instantly remove all the tension.

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I’ve gotten this far without mentioning the plot because it descends from a promising start into a pastiche of near-future, corporatist, techno-dystopian cliches incredibly quickly. It’s an unsurprising and bog-standard tale of a scrappy band of rebels fighting against the all-powerful, authoritarian conglomerates seeking to control every waking action of the sheep-like employees in their gleaming, efficient “city of glass.” The major plot beats are so heavily telegraphed that I found myself tuning out when the utterly expected “twists” inevitably happened a few missions later.

Faith’s own complicated, flashback-heavy entanglement with those rebels soon gets overshadowed by a rotating cast of new characters, introduced at a rapid clip that doesn’t give any of them a chance to breathe or really develop as anything outside of hackneyed plot devices. There are a handful of relatably human character moments buried in there (reclusive, socially repressed computer hacking genius Plastic gets some of the best lines), but a lot of the potential is deadened by some perfunctory vocal performances and often awkward animation.

There is definitely fun to be had simply running through Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’s beautiful cityscape like some sort of all-knowing speedster god. It’s all the stuff that surrounds that simple, joyful running that ranges anywhere from annoying to downright frustrating. In the end, combining a game about running as fast as possible with one about exploring a vast open world ends up being a pretty awkward pairing.

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