PREVIEW – The first quarter of next year will be the release of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, the wildly dividing game franchise’s sequel… Sort of as this will be a prequel and will deal with Faith’s past a bit more. A lot of changes are in storm for the prequel, and the biggest one is that it will be open world game, will this be an advantage Catalyst in the end?

The first adventure of Faith Connors was released in 2008, but the welcome party was less than heartfelt. While the first person parkour was a good idea, the story, and the short gameplay was not well received by the audience. Now it is time for DICE to fix this with the brand new se.. I mean prequel.

Through the looking glass

Instead of the first game’s metropolis, the prequel will be set in Glass. Catalyst will break away from the linear level design, and will show u show our heroine became a part of the runners, and how he got where he was in the first game. Nobody knows how big of a level we will have, but we can safely say that Glass is big as the previous game’s city was. However in Catalyst everything can be reached that we see.

She has no weapon and she is dangerous.

Another change for the sequel is that there will be no weapon usage in this game, so basically the enemy can fire a tus, but we only have close quarters combat, or running away. This does raise a few questions, as some of the old game’s levels were nearly unmanageable without using the fire arms. Faith was such a badass that she was able to disarm anyone in a second? Will there be more focus on stealth? Will the AI be a worse shot? No specific reason has been given from the developers, but we can be sure that no firearm will be used by our heroine.

How will we handle the lady?

No worries we will not change the topic, we’re just going to talk about the controls. Compared to the older game this has also changed. Besides the basic up and down controls, everything else is dependent on the situation. So basically if run towards a wall, and we move our character up that will result in running up or climbing up the wall. If we press the same button but we approach the wall at a lower angle then it results in wall running. Basically there is no jump or crouch button, but this was also the case with the previous game. What is new however is the Shift function, that help’s Faith when it comes to momentum and jumps. We will probably need to use this more frequently to use some of Faith’s more advanced and heavier attacks.

Mixed feelings

In my opinion I really liked the first game, and replayed it five or six times, yet I kept feeling it was missing something. It was great, the clean city gave a weird feeling of dread, while the story was okay. Yet the weak controls, the bad checkpoint system, and the extreme overkill the enemy could attack us will probably not be missed. Making the game open-world is a good choice, lets just hope the game will not be open world just because we will get to jump to any of the roof tops of buildings. Hopefully Catalyst will show some ground ’’world’’ and not just the skyscraper ones, and will be success in the open world games. We shall see in 2016 February 23.

-Dazo911-

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: EA DICE

Genres: Action, platformer

Date: 2016. február 23.