Gadgetory

Mirror's Edge catalyst to the reboot and sequel to the cult hit Mirror's Edge is finally here and sadly it is one of those games that just does not live up to the original and here are five things that kept it from being great first off was the decision to make the game an open-world setting which is something that does have its upsides but also its drawbacks on the one hand it makes it a lot easier to implement things like side quests collectables challenges which is something this game is stuffed with not to mention it gives players a much greater sense of control because they're able to go where they want when they want rather than being forced to follow along with the game's main story on top of that one of the best ideas going into this game for using an open-world is the fact that you as a player can create your own time trials to challenge other people with despite this though it just feels like Mirror's Edge is the kind of game that doesn't really benefit from an open-world setting or at least the way it was implemented in this game one of the things that made the first game so great was its sense of fast pacing there was a very little story very little forcing you to wade through one thing or another it was a very fast paced gameplay that got you from one place to the next and with this you find yourself spending a lot of time having to run back and forth back and forth over the same areas in order to go to where different missions start applying different collectables and it doesn't help that the world you're doing this in is honestly very boring the style and design for it makes sense for the setting and it fits well but it just doesn't make for that interesting of a thing for you as a player to explore it's a lot of whitespace a lot of the same collectables and things that you can find everywhere and it just gets very boring after the first couple hours now whether or not you like the idea of it using an open world one of the things that keeps this game interesting and keeps you rooted in is of course the core par core mechanics which is by far this game's biggest strength it is tremendously satisfying to play through the game's different challenges missions and side quests over and over again trying to shave time off your best score to compete with other players and it really harkens back to this feeling of old-school games where yes you're doing something that is kind of repetitive but at the same time it's really satisfying because you're just seeing how you're doing a little better each and every time what really messes this up though is the fact that this game is ridiculously buggy over the short time it took me to complete this game I encountered all kinds of bugs including clipping into a wall and getting stuck between the wall and a ladder walking on thin air and also falling down but surviving causing the game to checkpoint in an area where I couldn't actually proceed so I had to restart the entire mission all over again it didn't happen enough to make me completely a rage quit the game but it was definitely dense enough to really kind of sour a lot of the experience and make me have to take breaks every now and then because I was just so frustrated with the issues and while the core par core mechanics are really cool there is one aspect of them that was very weird to me and that's point number three the progression system over the course of playing catalyst main story there are two forms of progression that really get unlocked some things that are automatically given to you for getting so far on the story and other things that you have to unlock yourself by spending experience points that you get for playing the game now the gear based rewards for getting further in the story I'm completely okay with I actually thought that was a good idea because it gives you a reason why you can't explore certain areas of the open world just yet and it gives you new ways to complete old trials faster and better but the XP based progression just doesn't really make sense in this game to me it's become this thing now where a lot of games that weren't RPGs to begin with now implement pseudo RPG systems and they just don't need them and this is one of those situations where it just wasn't necessary at all in fact several of the abilities that you unlocked with XP are things that you really should just have right away as soon as possible because they're necessary for getting through some of the games later levels like being able to immediately turn around being able to do a roll when you land or even double wall running the game does make sure the main story bits do give you enough experience in order to afford these abilities but it just seems like it just didn't need to be there in the first place now point number four is probably my biggest problem with this game and that's the combat system there are some cool aspects to it in particular the parkour style attacks where the game rewards you for knowing how to use terrain against your enemies and basically just for doing cool shit in general but if you're just standing on the ground trying to fight enemies toe-to-toe it is extremely boring and it doesn't help the fact that a lot of the enemies come across as complete idiots a lot of their AI is extremely simple they lose tracking you very easily all they ever really do is walk up to you and try to swing with the same attack over and over again and enemies that have guns just stand at a distance and randomly fire here and there rather than just freely unloading on you when it be so easy to also it comes across like all of them are a little drunk all the time because the animations they have for when they run into each other or when you push them into boxes is extremely silly looking and it's kind of dumb how easy they pass out from some attacks and to make all of this worse unlike the first game there are parts in this one where you have to fight enemies in order to proceed there is no option for running away or getting by them you have to beat up a bunch of guys to get farther forcing you to deal with this game's weaker mechanics last but not least the final point to talk about is the game's storyline now I actually didn't mind the basic idea behind this game's plot I think a lot of the ideas for the reboot for faiths new origin for the main plot arcs of the game were actually pretty cool the problem is it feels as though there was a much larger plan initially put in place that didn't end up happening so we ended up with a very large cast of characters that never really got any time to shine and never got fleshed out there are so many characters in this game that have interesting little quirks or try to get characterized but then have no screen time and no time to build up and it just feels like there's a whole lot of secondary characters that don't do anything aside from one or two of them it feels as though the game would have been a lot better had they cut out half the cast or at least collapsed some of them together into one character because as it stands a lot of them just aren't very interesting in this along with all my other points really just sums up how I feel about this game it's a lot of squandered potential I know a lot of the points I've been making sound extremely negative and might make it seem like this is one of the worst games of the year it's not it's a perfectly mediocre game that after some bug fixes and some price drops can definitely be worth picking up but that's the problem it's just mediocre and you can see how much potential this game had while you're playing through it especially compared to the first and it just seems like at some point the dev team ran out of time money resources or just didn't have the heart put into it to make it what it could have been and ultimately after having finished it I'm not really angry about it I'm not salty about it I'm just sad