Quick Look: Mirror's Edge Catalyst

Yay Mirror's Edge!

Thanks for the content! Hope you guys take a look at some recent PSN games too! Excited to watch this but the beta didnt warm my heart.

I'm on the edge.

Here's some chat for ya.

Dat face texture

6th

I think "A retelling" is better way to describe a mix between a reboot and a prequel.

color me interested but I just have too much else on the plate right now - between Overwatch and Doom + Uncharted and Blood & Wine - sweet overload. But also color me a fan of the splashes of color in this, and it's still cool that EA and DICE placed a bet on a somewhat niche game.

Faith with that sweet La Mistica

Mischief Maker? Is this a hint toward a remake of that? I'd be down for that, I think? Maybe? Nah, probably not.

Meh. Not overwhelmed by enthusiasm for this one.

Also, I think that word you all were looking for is dystopian. Dystopic is not a thing, at least according to OED.

You can play a six hour trial on Xbox one just now with EA Access. As seems to be frequently the case with frostbite engine games, it looks really remarkably bad on Xbox One.

Not a fan of the combat changes -- taking on a guard in the original Mirror's Edge was dicey one on one sometimes and almost impossible in larger groups, and that makes a lot of sense, seeing as you're a person running around with a messenger bag. Having the guards stand around waiting for you to kill them hand-to-hand just seems... anticlimactic. And it dissolves all the tension.

There's some neat changes in here and stuff I really like, but overall I'm kind of lukewarm on it. Maybe when it goes on sale.

The XB1 version is 720P, Vinny.

This has always been a weird one. Film critics have been using the word dystopic for decades, so I'd say it's a "thing," in the sense that they didn't just make it up and people have been using it for a long time, but it's slang. It's also a weird one because OED recognizes the opposite, utopic, as a word, which just seems totally unfair to me. If you have one you should have the other. Dictionaries are dumb.

I feel like... falling... in this game... shouldn't cause a 15+ second blank loading screen to come up. Way to completely kill flow.

I guess there are no more white guys in games...

Truly a crying shame.

i want this game so bad. it looks awesome.

i'm gonna turn off that stupid stanley parable adventure line though. because you can.

are there other planets in the Mirrors Edge universe? Said "Something" Prime like its a planet in another star system.

Oh man, that resolution.

Dosent look very good. Looks like it controls terrible with a controller. Seems like 100% a mouse and keyboard game. Might give it a try if it comes up during the Steam Summer sale.

Fucking finally!

looks extremely meh, just like the first game.

Wow this game looks super clunky especially when fighting guys. Also I wonder if the blur is from the poor image quality on consoles

Guns would have been nice to have. Who the fuck hates parkour + guns?

Either Alex is uniquely terrible at this game or it's real clunky. It'd be nice to know which one Alex thinks it is.

Has anyone played further into the game on EA access? If so, do the enemies get smarter/more dangerous at any point later on in the game?

From this QL it looks like they removed Faith's ability to use guns (huzzah!) but compensated by making the enemies very little threat at all :( Which would be a huge bummer to me, as much as I didn't like the combat in the first, I do have some great memories of running from guards in a tough spot and feeling like I just barely escaped because they could shoot you or beat you down pretty easily.

Disrupt.... the VR economy! Make people think there should be, and then make it not so.

Dang did they turn mirror's edge into a ubisoft game

I would like to know if Alex had as much trouble with the first Mirror's Edge as he seemed to be having here.

Maybe the controls just clicked with me but I don't remember having that much trouble with them in the first game.

Thanks for the Android Netrunner mention, Austin! :)

The first game was also clunky when dealing with combat, but it was (largely) avoidable. Combat in this one is avoidable too, but it looks like Alex engaged enemies just to show off how much the combat has improved.

As far as general gameplay goes, it's basically first-person Skate with story progression. It's going to feel real junky until you get better at it, then it kind of feels amazing. Also wouldn't recommend it unless you're heavy into speedrunning and time trials.

You guys have the best entering-the-game banter

I think this looks fine and essentially what I wanted out of a new Mirror's Edge. It's still Mirror's Edge, but because there's more to do I think it'll be less frustrating than the original, plus the hand to hand combat looks pretty easy and avoidable here.

@banicabolnica said:

Oh no! Now it's next to impossible to find white people in games!!

Oh no, the guy that Nomad aka Mischief Maker was modeled after is gonna watch this and now have a complex about his arm length...thanks a lot Austin!

I'm pretty sure I played Mirror's Edge with both a controller and a keyboard and it felt smoother on a keyboard but nowhere near this clunky on a controller. There's a flow and a rhythm to playing Mirror's Edge which I imagine could get jacked up pretty easily by having two people talking next to you but something as simple as pressing left trigger whenever you fall more than two or three feet isn't a particularly complicated procedure, and if you can't get that part down you probably won't enjoy the game very much. Maybe it was just the chatting going on around Alex's head but I'd hate for people to think that mission was "difficult" because of the controls. I'd recommend people use a keyboard if they're doing the PC thing.

Not feeling the combat. It's been a long time since the first game, and there were things I liked, but I just want to run around jumping to/from stuff. Other than the guns, was there this much hand to hand stuff previously?

Sick Levaithan Wakes reference brah.

As a couple of folks mentioned in the comments here, trying to talk and play at the same time was definitely throwing me off a bit. That said, there are a few moments here and there where the timing/precision seems a little off on jumps and landings.

It doesn't really seem like they made a better game than Mirrors Edge 1. They just gave it the AAA-treatment by making it open world and include collectibles and upgrade trees. Do we really need a combat tree in a game like this? Especially when the enemies act like the Assassins Creed enemies,waiting for their 1v1 duel oppertunity.

The ropeswinging seems kind of neat, but when you can only use it at pre-determined points, it's dissapointing.

Watching Alex play this game is what it must feel like for an RTS fan to watch me play RTS. Good on him for trying to keep a good attitude, but this clearly isn't for him at all. I would despise these games if this is what my experience was like (as a lot of people seem to, which makes me very sad). He missed more rolls in one hour than I missed playing through the first game ten times.

I don't see any hitching, so I guess it was a problem with the stream. Still, this doesn't look great on Xbox One. In any case, I think I'll be picking this up for PC. I really enjoyed the original game and I enjoyed what I played of the Catalyst beta.

Thanks for this. I definitely felt the vertigo .

I was looking forward to this but man, I don't know.

@alex: Do you think the strange timing of certain inputs is caused by the game (like the Witcher) or a performance issue (like input lag from the xbox to the controller or input lag from the streaming setup)?

The game seems to run terribly on xbox at least so I thought I would ask.