Mirror's Edge™ Catalyst

My first hour in Mirror's Edge Catalyst convinced me the movement system alone is worth the admission. Wall-runs, vaults, slides, coil jumps, and the MAG Rope grapple chain together into something that genuinely feels like thinking with your feet, and the bleached-white skyline of the City of Glass gives all that momentum a spectacular stage to play across. DICE took the linear corridor design of the 2008 original and replaced it with an open world, which is both the best and worst decision they made. The traversal is the whole game, and on that front Catalyst delivers consistently. Getting from the Anchor District to Ocean Glass View without touching the ground, linking wall-runs into a sliding kick into a springboard off a KrugerSec enforcer, feels genuinely exhilarating when the rhythm clicks. Runner Vision can be toggled between a full red-mist GPS trail or a subtler mode that only highlights climbable surfaces; turning it off and solving your own routes is where the game earns its keep. The GridNode climbing puzzles, where you scale towering structures while dodging laser sensors, are the single best thing in the package, and they're free to tackle whenever you like. Time trials and Dash races round out the side content and give speedrunners plenty to obsess over. Here is where the praise has to pump the brakes. The story is a reboot nobody asked for, filled with jargon-heavy world-building and characters who disappear before you care about them. The campaign missions lean heavily on running the same rooftop corridors you have already crossed a dozen times, and the open world, while large, skews toward empty and sterile in its early sections. The upgrade system gates moves like the quickturn and tactical roll behind progression, which is a strange way to hobble a game whose entire identity is fluid movement. Combat is the weakest pillar: Faith relies on light attacks, heavy kicks, and dodges, but forced group fights devolve into spamming the same move until enemies stumble over railings in a way that looks clumsy rather than cinematic. It is also worth flagging that EA shut down the game's servers in December 2023, making the social features and a handful of achievements permanently unavailable. Who is this for, then? Players who want a movement sandbox with a story wrapped loosely around it. If chasing a faster route across a rooftop for ten minutes sounds like fun rather than busywork, Catalyst will hold you for a long time. If you need characters you care about and moment-to-moment variety, the 74 Metacritic score telegraphs your frustration pretty accurately. The original Mirror's Edge fans are the trickiest case: the parkour is smoother and faster here, but the tighter level design of the first game arguably gave each run more tension. Catalyst trades that tension for scale, and whether that trade works depends entirely on your tolerance for open-world filler between the genuinely great moments.

Alex · Scout Team

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