Gadgetory

we're here to talk about Mirror's Edge catalyst a sequel prequel type effort reimagining long time in the making i mean Mirror's Edge feels like you know that's an early xbox 360 game that's a game that's been around for a long time I played a bit of it on pc earlier I saw that still looks all right it does but what we were playing over the weekend was the beta for catalyst which I was playing on xbox one where we pop kiss for your playing PS for Mike you didn't play did you I didn't get a chance but you have played mirrors edges in the past oh yeah you've been on a mirror's edge or two yes ok ok so that's kind of chew into it I feel like I have like I'm a big fan of the first message well himself actually our plane okay that's actually perfect right sort of way of coming into this so I came in looks sort of like rather lofty expectations of what I would like from this game and I feel like I've kind of gone a bit all over the place with it um and I'm still not really sure exactly Ryland you coming in fresh into it playing on PlayStation 4 what did you think Kallis i really enjoyed it um if I can make any comparison I'd say you're like off the bat as far as parkour games I played like dying light that's a little reminiscent as far as like the feel and you know doing cool moves yeah i thought the parkour and this game was spectacular i didn't have any issues maybe gripes not all like it was a really fun experience I enjoyed it I you know it's a cool city at first I was a little I went two ways first I was like oh this is a really bland world looks like an apple store right and then no I was like oh this is actually more of a cool environment I like the setup a steno this utopian city yeah game a lot of like um equilibrium vibes you know right what yeah these guys are trying to do basically put down people like no emotions from you you know like 90-84 or something then he just sure gon cut gun Katya whatever the hell it's kolkata gun connor grab with nine clerics and then i had a third wind of this is getting a little boring right um looking at like a room and it's just these glasses that I'm like the glasses on a table and it it looks like just app yeah none of this book this doesn't look that great and it gets boring and I'm you know you walk into a room and I just it's like box uh and that got old for me it's a weird sort of dystopian utopia I guess for the for people who haven't played the original or people have the original don't know what this event basically what they've done with mirrors edges it's now in a sort of open world and I mean open world is maybe a bit of a stretch it's just a large area like a large level which I'm sure opens up lard you can bake her when you get into beta and then the biggest problem that was with mirrors edge the first one of the biggest criticism which most players and reviewers had was that the gun combat in that game was like a big issue like it you had the option to shoot people or he could keep running in the first game and and then later on in the first game you there were like two or three levels that were at the end of the game which was essentially were forced to use a gun and it didn't work well and even though this was the same studio who's made battlefield of course and dice and so what they've done in this is that they've basically made it so most of the lower level enemies that you encounter only use truncheon so they only used batons basically to beat you down and the main mechanic that they've added like most of the running is almost identical to Mirror's Edge they've added a bunch of like extra types of movements in wash most of it seems to be around the combats like jumping off walls to take people down and or jumping off walls and pushing people out of the way they've sort of split the combat in two ways one is like I'm hitting them to get past them it's like a traversal attack and then the other one is like a heavy attack which is all I'm actually trying to kill this person right but they sort of push you in the direction of not trying to get everyone because there's this flow meter which you kind of you build up as you the more you run so there are people who shoot you yet Iran and and that they call it shoot dodge shield yeah so later on guy you will you you will get guy shooting at you and the ideas you have you right have that meter filled in order to have that like secondary shield against bullets and then use your parkour to like take them out or or whatever which is cool right it's like yeah if you build up enough flowed and basically you can dodge bullets and that's kind of like a cool you know conceit yeah it's fine like this um I got different takes on they they they would implement it like different ways right like you hear yo here's point A to point B don't buy anyone yeah like these are mission elements and the other one be like now you got no you actually gotta fight these guys so is a mixture of both I guess and you can knock if you want you can like engage in the fight and knock down somebody or knock them into someone else another person or get them close to the edge of a you know corner and then knock them off and what a kind of reminded me of is that I really like using like melee weapons in games like Skyrim or Oblivion but there are some people who will not touch that who like will never play a med a build in one of those games and first-person melee combat is like such an incredibly difficult thing to do right and I think they've kind of done a pretty good job of it but at the end of the day it's just never that compelling like I was sort of using and I'm putting most of my tech stuff into my movement and not necessarily my combat stuff to basically get rid of them and then there's this and this is the sort of stuff that's like weird for a beta right because you don't really know how this is pretty close to release they pushed it back i think too like a week before you three or something like I've gotten there and but it's coming there pretty soon so some of the stuff I'm not sure if it's fair to lay on it because it is a beta 1 this game does not look great no I know and the first game when it came out on xbox 360 it was very striking it was very it was linear so then they could there's that whole thing if you have a game that is relatively you know buxton then you can add more visually striking elements to it because you're not worried about people going outside and and having to load more stuff or whatever I don't know again drew that that obviously doesn't exist in this one the other thing is that like the original game fell very cinematic like this sort of like weird future luc besson type world that's kind of crazy and like you said like looks like an apple store but you kind of like ads like a linear weird story I'm on it when you spread that out into an open world it just doesn't make any sense it's like why is everything so clean why is everyone so idealistic why are none of these characters in any way believable but like the mission people were just standing around on rooftops and if if you're not willing to give you the mission they literally just stand there yeah I saw somebody who's standing there what a rooftop not a rooftop like by the way it's like 15 stories up or something on a rooftop and I'm like why you standing here and they don't do anything and later on their a mission giver but they were there at a whole time or how about there was one guy who I did a runner mission for her and I gave it I gave him the that work and in he's still standing there yeah after I did his mission he's just hanging out name isn't he didn't talk to you know yeah also that mission was the weirdest voiceover I like person gives you something to give to somebody instead of using a courier system they're using you because of this sort of political reason and then when you run away from her she's talking to you in your ear I like how were you talk like I'm sure to some future oh it's a good thing we invented the squabbit Blair so everyone can like talk to each other like there's just so much of that there's no consistency the world it didn't feel real at all faiths feel was really not great at all so I can't I thought the voice acting in the cinematics was actually top-notch I was really into that that was that's just right but yeah you can get into her character but I have to say one thing there was an area when I was doing I was you know you can do side missions like go hack this billboard and I'm climbing on this area and like oh there's people in this room oh I'm looking in weed Jake deccan hide to the live stream of the 12 people in this room yeah four of them are right exactly the same on the phone in like in a line Larry people in a line all the same that's a bummer and yeah hopefully that's not present there's another scene where I was looking down a bit between two buildings and a drone did you look at the drones falling by rhyme of them literally their their fans are just triangles right yeah it's that's frightening to me like I I bet this game would look a lot better on pc and the weird thing about it is this game when you stream it on the Internet looks really good it like has the opposite effect of Far Cry fashion I just write the guy yeah yeah the compression helps us yeah whereas with the added detail you have on your own home television there's just something about it looks so edgy in like a not very sort of a pleasing type way and like that's just not you and me like I've heard that across the board from a lot of people who played is that it doesn't look super I don't know to me this feels so much like Mirror's Edge one in like all the right ways in all the wrong ways and like the traversal zone is very very identical the unlock system is like they're like peering at bits and bobs to you because I feel like they're trying to teach you how to do this no this whole combat thing but it feels like an open-world game that also was made in 2007 but it doesn't feel like a real flesh that world to me at all did you look at the skill tree like like the one thing they blocked off about half of what the skill tree yeah I think maybe there's like three does like move in combat in something else gear here okay um if you look down on some of like the combat ones some of like the the trees are just damaged more like more damaged more damage early I don't know where these I was looking through them like we're the moves you know I expect something along the lines of that not just like damage against these guys damage against these guys and the thing that was like pushing you forward in the first message and again this is difficult to love it as criticism on a beta but yeah the thing that was like was the fact that this is a linear story based game you were going to new environments which was always sort of the the fun element was like oh this next level is going to look beautiful in the new way or like there was the level you had to like go down in the circle around you all that yeah and they yeah and then it was like loads of like sort of sewer retype levels and stuff like that and I don't know I've been treading a lot of common Greta no pun intended I common ground in this game like over and over again and I I don't like even if they do mix it up I don't know that the next area is going to be a shell so the thing that's like that they're trying to like push you forward with the unlocks and and all that that's not compelling enough for me to keep playing I felt like I once they just spent you know what I like exploring open-world games I'm just going to go on and explore and I went lalalalalala and I'm like one of the things that I want our biggest criticisms of watch dogs is that you could be anywhere and wash dogs and if somebody asks you to go back to your house you would have a clue like it's just nothing about the world like a game like GTA kind of have an idea right there's like low i noticed street yeah right exactly you treat look different yeah your sense of the place you're actually taking in the face Mirror's Edge catalyst to me was just like I'm running Patrick could be i don't know where i am and i ran to like the and i played for like three hours something i wrote and it relatively small areas not that big and I ran to the farthest reach of us to be like oh where does the map stop and it was this concourse that was about like six lanes wide was the way they split you off in the city and I just felt I want to go over there I'll I go down there I want to go I'm just stuck on the roofs and it feels really weird even your main I mean you can this is better right I don't know what's going to be in infra stores but your main hub it seemed like there were only two ways of exiting yeah in that you were going down lanes that that over time got repetitive yeah I'm hoping there are a mean you know yeah I only play for like four or five hours but like I hope there are lanes that you can start you know making up your own more of that like because when you initially leave it's just it's like the same route I've done this route before and yeah at first the same 30 seconds both ways is exactly and I I feel like if you haven't played a game like dying light maybe you come off this completely different if you haven't played a lot of like first-person open-world games which have like half decent traversal like I even think like far cry primal to me is a game that's like that's a fun game about exploring the world and trying to like you know i don't know like i enjoy the movement in that game and like the combat in that game far more than i enjoy the movement in combat in this and it's it's this is fine but like and then I just feel like we're dying light especially you've got a game that does parkour pretty well does come shooting really good and even those driving in a new one really good so to me this game just feels like oh you've made a sequel to a game which at the time was doing a lot of new things but in 2016 isn't doing anything new so I don't know where they had room to grow and even even dying light started in room at nighttime you got you have crazy threat in this environment there's yeah there's practically no npcs yeah there's no real threat you get this decay sec guys but in in that playthrough of the beta there were only these like out boats outpost security points yeah where you would go into one of those and then you would engage them and then the UDA you know you'd have this chase it be cool if there was more of a chase you be cool if it was so unexpected they just they're on to you now now you know two stars GTA okay cool now I have to change up my my way of what does if you're just wandering around mid mission at like I wanted REM admission for probably about an hour last night maybe 45 minutes and didn't run into any other they're not there are only emissions yeah yeah so it seems very strange yeah it's tough it feels like a tough game the first mirrors I just to make a sequel to write because it's just the thing I loved about it was linear but they're still but alternate routes you could take through that world that your reversal felt good and I like that they didn't force weapons on you for the majority of the game at the same time I think we're past the point where we need to stop just throwing open world onto a game just for the sake of saying that's a feature because you know like far cry primal is a good example I think that game made awesome use of its open world that's what I'm worried about catalyst it doesn't look like it's going to yet I have not touched the beta so I don't know but that's what I'm that's why I'm tempering my expectations yeah it does release and I think that's probably what we're doing is like trying to temper I'm not saying this is bad it was fine i enjoyed it but it's not it's it's not the feeling you got when you played Mirror's Edge get one it feels and that this is a beta I like people in the chat are making good points like you know cbw 86 saying the map debate is one district of around three or four and there's an underground area to sure sure it does expand sure but like you can gain a certain amount of knowledge from the loop that they give you in these things and that's the sort of come up that I'm getting from this is that like okay I know what game you are and it's like that's fine I'm where I'm just worried like will the open-world aspect kill what I liked about the first game because I know you need to do something different the sequel enough to set it apart but will the open-world sacrifice what makes that parkour so intriguing to me yeah like the time try these stuff that was in me resides one like I didn't touch it all I just like the single player but like that's a lot of what the side missions and this seems to be very like point-to-point races and their knowing that different no there's a dash and then there's a shoot there's another one is the ones where you're getting the security chips as well which essentially is just an elongated version of a point-to-point it's a point-to-point but there's four points and I mean so they feel very similar it's like right Oh instead of going to the checkered flag I'm just hitting exit a box you know some of them are I mean both are essentially do this as fast as you can it's the same you're getting the same drive one of them is just like if you can't do it in two minutes you gotta do it again yeah or are you doing a race it's like all the way you get one star mmm come back again if you want to you know get two stars and there's probably some cool stuff were like you unlock new abilities and then you figure out faster roots of doing these days but you're just still doing point-to-point races like that's like the one side mission that open world games have tried to get rid of for the past five years so yeah it seems a little bit weird I don't know huh Mirror's Edge comas it's I did like it like I enjoyed it I was really down on it for the first like couple hours and then I think when I saw going out I think then when I had the expectation of what it was and I'm Esther I'm a little bit more I was calling yeah yes I guess smears edge so yeah I guess I'll find out more soon that was the the sort of smaller beta they've done and not sure after opening it up to any more it's been pushed back though a little while so you're going to have to wait and see to get your own catalyst on let us know what you think are you excited for it are you tempering expectations they do not play the first one you're looking to get into it let us know if you play dying light as well think it's a good game to compare it with gentlemen thank you so much