This thread came at the right time for me. Big ME1 fan. Been at Catalyst for about 6 hours...
What was great about Mirror's Edge? I played it once, and it still sticks with me: satisfying, well controlled parkour gameplay in scenarios that are usually either urgent or puzzle-esque, sometimes with sometimes without enemies. But these linear crafted levels usually had some purpose and the way to go was usually fairly clear, it just came down to you using your parkour skills to get there. Hence the satisfaction. They kept it changed up enough to remain interesting.
Could faith use guns? Yes, but she wasn't a marksman, gunplay was rightfully sloppy-- but most encounters you could, by and large, avoid-- as you should. It made sense; Faith is not The Terminator, she should be running past enemies, maybe shoving them aside or at most tripping them off buildings. That the game allowed gunplay at all seems to have been a concession to certain gamers who either couldn't effectively 'run past' everything and got 'stuck' fighting, or, a concession to gamers who assume that any first person game with guns requires shooting and killing all the things. The point is, the combat was largely avoidable and, at no point did it feel like it overshadowed the good parts of the game (the satisfying platforming/parkour)
Mirror's Edge Catalyst:
The combat is BETTER in this game! Yes, it is! Now to explain:
The combat is simple, but it *makes sense* for Faith: She hits fast and light, she has a few moves involving shoving or avoiding enemies while maintaining momentum, and in some cases she can subdue an enemy by parkouring off a wall or ledge and crushing them from above. That's awesome! It's easy enough to control/execute and it makes sense that a light footed, thin athlete can only give light shoves, basic CQC, and kick around fully armed, equipped, and armored heavy infantry type opponents as she tries to run blazing past them.....
....and THAT is where the game design goes wrong!
It's not *the combat* that is bad, it's the fact that they felt the *need* to set up several scenarios where you are basically locked up in a big box with 5 some odd of these heavily armed and armored guys and are required to slowly grind them down until they're all defeated. And in some cases, they send them in several waves of ~5 of these things. WHYYY. If it were like ME1 you could use the new combat moves to shove guys aside as you blazed past, maybe occasionally wall run and crush a dude from above, or periodically knock one off a ledge.
But no... "Faith, where are you going?" >> "Back to the Lair. To take out 10 or 20 or 30 of these highly trained weapon-toting KrugerSec who literally just demolished our base of operations.. by myself... with nothing but my ninja shoes... because I can't wait until later after the KrugerSec presence has died down to disable the tower they put up there. Cus I'm angry and suicidal!"
The combat is well suited to avoidance, but they force you into these long, aggravating encounters to beat up these types until they're all gone and just GUGHGHHG I want to smash my keyboard.
The open world? Pretty bad. With ME1, you were constantly being given interesting new 'courses' of sorts, with new dangers or objectives or light puzzles to parkour your way through under different circumstances. The new Open World design here is an exercise in tedium. Because the open world mostly exists to connect story mission points or other nonsense, the platforming you conduct between them is far less interesting and thus less satisfying than the series of 'levels' or 'missions' you go through in Mirror's Edge one. It feels like by-the-numbers platforming in the game. Especially if you have to backtrack over the same areas.
The overworld is also cluttered with crap. I find the ... grid leaks(?) to be pointless diversions to try and give the mostly boring (skill-wise) overworld something to try and 'get' to keep it interesting; but the carrot for that stick seems super arbitrary. And those computer chips you find in those terminals? I feel like there's hundreds of them and since they ask you to collect them so early on, I have forgotten what they're for. At this point I couldn't care less how many of those little chips I find, it feels like a waste of time.
At least the controls and general parkour moves and mechanics are still great. They're just underutilized and made to feel repetitive due to the game design. And the forced "defeat all the thugs" missions just totally ruin the flow of everything and are aggravating and make no sense story-wise or gameplay-wise.
Super disappointed by all this.
