Mirror's Edge Catalyst is on steam now and it's $10 so I guess I'm gonna play that

Game had a tone of hype bc "finally, a mirror's edge sequel" and then the entire internet fell *utterly silent* the instant it actually released

also I tried to purchase it years ago but Origin is so monumentally broken that I literally could not

so that all bodes well

Mirror's Edge is one of my all-time favorite games but the idea of a sequel has always been kinda fraught bc like...... mirror's edge is pretty clearly not actually the game its designers intended to make

oh ffs "EA games are on Steam now" apparently doesn't actually mean EA games are on Steam now, it means you can buy licenses on Steam which then install and launch Origin

-__-

yeah there's a pandemic too dude

it is with a heavy heart that I must pronounce this a Triple A Game

I hope you like Videogame Dialogue

maaaaaan they have the time trials, which were fantastic in the original game, but now all your traversal options are locked behind a shitty upgrade tree so there's no point even trying them until you've unlocked everything ughh

you have to buy the 180 wall kick, you have to buy the midiar crouch thing, you have to buy ROLLING LANDINGS

>:(

Sometimes it does a good job of looking like Mirror's Edge and sometimes it does an absolutely atrocious job of looking like Mirror's Edge

For comparison this is what they're up against

It's kinda unfair because the original game's Whole Thing was insanely high-quality baked lighting in constrained, tightly authored spaces... and now the devs are tasked with an open-world sequel with dynamic lighting

Frostbite GI is pretty good but it's not *archviz good*

lmaooooo they put a grappling hook in mirror's edge

why is every AAA videogame the same videogame

collecting collectible audio logs because there is only one videogame

so combat is mostly designed around kicking dudes into things and other dudes, which is both rad and extremely silly

I am begging AAA publishers to design more than one videogame

lmao there's an entire terrorist group living in the sewers

"Ah yes! The sewers! That gigantic system of caverns the size of an entire city, that can be accessed by just going through a grate, that no police force would EVER think to investigate"

okay this is some proper mirror's edge at least

man there sure are about four billion different ways for this game to misinterpret your input and kill you

gently bumping against walls! my only weakness!

There's a lot of extremely pretty environment art but it's all totally deranged

absolutely no internal logic; spaces are weirdly huge or twisted in on themselves; indoor and outdoor areas bleed together at random

the world is an utterly structureless, incoherent nightmare

this game is bad, and I don't mean that as, like, a dunk. I'm incredibly sad about it

here's a couple minutes of me just running around at random picking up Collectibles. It's gorgeous, but like... where am I?? What is this place? WHY is this place??? What is indoors, what is outdoors, are these even buildings? am I in hell??

It's hard to articulate how genuinely nightmarish this game starts to feel after a while, except to explain like.... I do I actually have dreams about being stuck wandering bizarre structureless spaces like this

it'd be incredibly cool if it was, like, on purpose

Side note: Please play ECHO, an absolutely brilliant game that happens to use this concept for actual psychological horror purposes

An impossibly opulent palace the size of a literal planet, like an abandoned procgen algorithm left running for centuries

I remember when the first game came out a ton of Gamers made Posts about how it should've been open world, and I was always like my dudes mirror's edge is a *platformer*

"Open world mirror's edge" is like asking for "open world mario" i.e. completely at odds with its own concept

The windows on these buildings are also giant LED screens displaying chill abstract art and I hope this becomes a real thing for real buildings

Server rack skyscraper is a pretty rad concept

gotta admit I have a ton of respect for this game's commitment to the idea that damage is primarily dealt by making dudes touch objects and/or other dudes

The character delivering this monologue is presented as generally sympathetic but Too Extreme to really be one of the good guys

literally half of the city can only be accessed via this ladder in a closet

I love how the rectilinear videogame camera always destroys any sense of scale, and then artists have to just screw with everything to make it look natural

Seems like a normal height for some lightswitches, right? BUT THEN...!

also shoutouts to whatever artist decided to render out parallax occlusion maps for lightswitches

I would like to retract this statement

the first... 30%? 50%? was deeply unpleasant and made me despair for videogames

once I unlocked all the skills (ugh) and figured out which parts of the game actually matter vs which are meaningless filler content, I'm actually enjoying it

really?

so I still haven't solidified a lot of my thoughts about this game but I think the core problem that made me hate like half of it is that literally everything is DESIGNED to be played with all the upgrades unlocked, but there's zero indication that that's the case

so like the maps is covered in all these side missions that are essentially all slight variations on time trials, and most of them are LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE until you've done 10+ hours of open-world collectible-gathering to unlock everything

They're actually GOOD time trials too! They're very short, very intense routing challenges, where a successful run usually has like 0.5s left on the timer

they're exactly what was fun about ME1 time trials; i.e. super intense micro-optimization of short routes

and like.... if you're gonna have an upgrade system AND time trials, having the upgrades trivialize the challenges would be pointless, so they kinda HAVE to be balanced for full upgrades

but then why have the upgrades at aaaaaallllllll

(also the "dash" races are completely pointless bc there's no local target times, and the scoreboard is all players who've either hacked or found cool exploits so the top times are like 4.2 seconds lol)

My review of Mirror's Edge Catalyst is that you should listen to Solar Fields

Kick Dudes Into Other Dudes