So out of sheer curiosity and a sale price that was like practically giving it away, I played through Mirror’s Edge Catalyst; the sequel/prequel to 2008 original that I’m honestly not sure who asked for it. That isn’t meaning to sound as harsh as it does, but the original game was met with mixed reviews, many of which slammed the game for being repetitive and bland with terrible combat. Having played the original myself many years ago, I thought I’d give the new game (new to me at least) a go since practically every sale on the PS Store has the game at a remarkably low price. I finished it in… I don’t know how many hours to be honest because the moment the credits had finished rolling, I quit out of the game onto my home screen and deleted it. Through nought but sheer force of will did I commit to finishing the game and I will likely never go back to it again.
I feel the need to keep emphasising the whole prequel thing because to be honest, I couldn’t tell throughout the majority of my play through. If I had recently played the first game, this may have been more obvious but the game doesn’t exactly have a big piece of text anywhere to say “This is set before the first game”. While I’m on the topic of story, this is by far the weakest point of the game because frankly I couldn’t care less about Faith or the people around her. Faith herself got on my nerves frequently with how whiny and downright abrasive she is towards everyone around her, she shows little interest in doing things properly or listening to other when they tell her what she’s about to do is a bad idea, then gets upset when everything goes wrong. There’s this whole subplot where she’s in debt to some kind of gangster who at one point threatens to break her legs and my first thought was “Do it, might teach her to be less of a dick”. And another thing, I may be misremembering slightly but wasn’t Faith’s sister a police officer in the first game? In this game, Faith thinks she’s dead until they capture the “daughter” of the bad guy and the player immediately goes “There she is” even though Faith still doesn’t get it. By games end, she runs the bad company so how does she go from CEO to police officer exactly.
I need to talk about something else so let’s look at gameplay. The free running is the main drive behind this series as that’s what garnered the most attention for the original title. This side of things I can’t really fault because despite the hard sell of a first-person free running game, the flow of movement is really smooth and the navigation is clear enough that I only got stuck a few times when the navigation is turned off for story missions. I found myself using the fast travel options very sparingly because I did enjoy the running between missions. If you’re confused by what I’m saying, this game is an open world game now which was probably the next logical step for the series. As far as open worlds go, it feels rather large with a variety of collectibles to be found and some side activities, but they all revolve around getting from one location to another as quickly as possible. Most that I played were currier missions where you couldn’t take too much damage or you’d break the package. I only played a couple however because the time constraints on some because nigh on impossible and I could only stand the smug, condescending voices of the clients when I failed so many times.
Right let’s go back to what doesn’t work; combat. It was a mess and hard to work with in the first game that much I do remember. To give them their dues mind, it is vastly improved for the sequel with some good dodge mechanics and needing to put some thought into how you approach the enemy variety. It is though, for lack of a better term, like trying to polish a turd because it’s still poorly executed combat in a free-running game. At least in Dying Light, you had weapons and a variety of skills to unlock that would make combat easier as you go along, but Faith isn’t exactly going to be wandering around the city with a spiked baseball bat on her back. I’m ashamed to admit but I rage quitted at one point in the first half of the game when I kept getting stuck in a story mission REQUIREING me to win in a combat encounter. The game introduces the ‘heavy’ character who kept kicking my ass to no end until I quit out and deleted the game out of frustration. After a few days, I looked at myself and said “This shit will not beat me” and carried on. Cheesed (took an easy exploitable way through) the hell out of the fight but got through regardless. The jist of what I’m saying here is that combat is bad, but not as bad as its predecessor.
Honestly I’d difficult to sum up my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst in brief. If you loved the original game then you can’t go wrong with playing this game. If you only marginally liked the first game, maybe replay it to make sure you do as well as refresh yourself then give the sequel a go. If you didn’t like it, this instalment isn’t going to sway you. But, as mentioned earlier, this game is on sale all the time. Even base price (I think) is around the £20 mark and I bought it for less than £5 so I can’t really moan about wasting money on it.
 |
| Protagonist Faith on the run from Krugersec [Image source: IGN] |
So out of sheer curiosity and a sale price that was like practically giving it away, I played through Mirror’s Edge Catalyst; the sequel/prequel to 2008 original that I’m honestly not sure who asked for it. That isn’t meaning to sound as harsh as it does, but the original game was met with mixed reviews, many of which slammed the game for being repetitive and bland with terrible combat. Having played the original myself many years ago, I thought I’d give the new game (new to me at least) a go since practically every sale on the PS Store has the game at a remarkably low price. I finished it in… I don’t know how many hours to be honest because the moment the credits had finished rolling, I quit out of the game onto my home screen and deleted it. Through nought but sheer force of will did I commit to finishing the game and I will likely never go back to it again.
I feel the need to keep emphasising the whole prequel thing because to be honest, I couldn’t tell throughout the majority of my play through. If I had recently played the first game, this may have been more obvious but the game doesn’t exactly have a big piece of text anywhere to say “This is set before the first game”. While I’m on the topic of story, this is by far the weakest point of the game because frankly I couldn’t care less about Faith or the people around her. Faith herself got on my nerves frequently with how whiny and downright abrasive she is towards everyone around her, she shows little interest in doing things properly or listening to other when they tell her what she’s about to do is a bad idea, then gets upset when everything goes wrong. There’s this whole subplot where she’s in debt to some kind of gangster who at one point threatens to break her legs and my first thought was “Do it, might teach her to be less of a dick”. And another thing, I may be misremembering slightly but wasn’t Faith’s sister a police officer in the first game? In this game, Faith thinks she’s dead until they capture the “daughter” of the bad guy and the player immediately goes “There she is” even though Faith still doesn’t get it. By games end, she runs the bad company so how does she go from CEO to police officer exactly.
I need to talk about something else so let’s look at gameplay. The free running is the main drive behind this series as that’s what garnered the most attention for the original title. This side of things I can’t really fault because despite the hard sell of a first-person free running game, the flow of movement is really smooth and the navigation is clear enough that I only got stuck a few times when the navigation is turned off for story missions. I found myself using the fast travel options very sparingly because I did enjoy the running between missions. If you’re confused by what I’m saying, this game is an open world game now which was probably the next logical step for the series. As far as open worlds go, it feels rather large with a variety of collectibles to be found and some side activities, but they all revolve around getting from one location to another as quickly as possible. Most that I played were currier missions where you couldn’t take too much damage or you’d break the package. I only played a couple however because the time constraints on some because nigh on impossible and I could only stand the smug, condescending voices of the clients when I failed so many times.
Right let’s go back to what doesn’t work; combat. It was a mess and hard to work with in the first game that much I do remember. To give them their dues mind, it is vastly improved for the sequel with some good dodge mechanics and needing to put some thought into how you approach the enemy variety. It is though, for lack of a better term, like trying to polish a turd because it’s still poorly executed combat in a free-running game. At least in Dying Light, you had weapons and a variety of skills to unlock that would make combat easier as you go along, but Faith isn’t exactly going to be wandering around the city with a spiked baseball bat on her back. I’m ashamed to admit but I rage quitted at one point in the first half of the game when I kept getting stuck in a story mission REQUIREING me to win in a combat encounter. The game introduces the ‘heavy’ character who kept kicking my ass to no end until I quit out and deleted the game out of frustration. After a few days, I looked at myself and said “This shit will not beat me” and carried on. Cheesed (took an easy exploitable way through) the hell out of the fight but got through regardless. The jist of what I’m saying here is that combat is bad, but not as bad as its predecessor.
Honestly I’d difficult to sum up my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge Catalyst in brief. If you loved the original game then you can’t go wrong with playing this game. If you only marginally liked the first game, maybe replay it to make sure you do as well as refresh yourself then give the sequel a go. If you didn’t like it, this instalment isn’t going to sway you. But, as mentioned earlier, this game is on sale all the time. Even base price (I think) is around the £20 mark and I bought it for less than £5 so I can’t really moan about wasting money on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment