As a huge, huge fan of the original Mirror's Edge, I noticed a lot of things that went completely against the original's design that I felt were worth pointing out.

The overall design of the city looks just too messy for me, there's a lot going on and not enough space to breathe in the scenery, they went for the same bright color pallete which is nice, but everything just looks cluttered in Catalyst.

In the original Mirror's Edge it had a much more minimalistic design and everything just felt less busy and nicer to look at.

Not to mention for some reason they decided to give Catalyst this gritty look to it in a lot of areas, I guess they tried to give the city more personality but it doesn't feel right for a Mirror's Edge successor, part of what made the first one so unique was seeing such a clean aesthetic that was well complemented with the bright use of colors.

Now with the busy design and the somewhat gritty/dirty look to a lot of the environments I feel that Catalyst doesn't really look all that unique anymore.

I'd go as far as saying that it's starting to look generic.

Not to mention that I think it was a bad idea to make this a sandbox game, the linear levels in the first one were great, trial & error gameplay is what truly made it shine after numerous playthroughs, the way they could've improved it was by adding much more levels, pacing it better, instead of adding a bunch of Ubisoft generic padding to make it feel like you're getting your moneys worth.

Anyway, I made a video comparison so you get a good idea of what I'm talking about.

How do you guys feel about Catalyst so far?