This game is painfully, unfortunately mid. Not because it lacks merit as a game, or has no interesting ideas, but because it sabotages itself on a fundamental level. Pretty much every single cool or interesting idea or mechanical choice it contains is buried completely under an all encompassing, overbearing, irrevocably clunky fixation on filling the game with every single AAA, Games as a Service design cliche the developers could muster. There's almost a desperation to it; you can practically hear the developer begging you not to stop playing it, as they show you all their little compulsion loops and arrays of skill trees crying to be filled out, their awkward crafting and inventory management, their constantly spawning timed live events, their sidequests that put huge yellow objective text and waypoints on the screen at all times, and their whole department store full of ugly-looking unlockable skins. It all ends up being kind of sad, really, because this could have been a pretty dope zombie-dodging parkour game if the developers merely had confidence in the ability of their own game's core ideas to stand on their own.

The level/world design is the best part, followed by movement. The middle eastern city setting is pretty novel for a zombie story, the game looks pretty decent visually, and the parkour mechanics can feel cool when they actually work right (though playing it right after Mirror's Edge Catalyst did not do Dying Light any favors... but it's still solid). The day-night cycle and the tension that the looming threat of nocturnal monsters and the dark creates is genuinely cool, even if running from the monsters can be a bit janky and annoying in practice.

The combat would feel cool if it weren't for how obnoxiously damage spongy the enemies are, especially the humans. The kick is great, though. Love a good kick. If the weapons didn't have arbitrary feeling RPG stats, and instead were something more like Dead Rising and were all useful in their own ways, it would MASSIVELY improve the game. As it stands they tend to all feel like skins of the same 2 or 3 weapons, and that's boring as hell. The crafting is also boring. In a zombie game I'm not opposed to crafting by any means, because it can be a great mechanical tool to make the player feel like they are scavenging for survival and making do with what little resources they have available to them. But that requires restraint on the amount of crafting, actual limited resources, and meaningful choices to make about what you do with them. This game has none of that. So it just feels like busywork instead. They do not have the confidence to ever deny the player their trickle of little gamer treats.

I understand why people like this game. It gestures at some interesting immersive sim mechanics and is big and full of stuff, and some of that stuff is actually pretty cool. The parkour is neat and not too many games try that and get it right. I haven't tried the multiplayer but I could definitely see how playing with a friend could make certain parts of the game a lot more fun. But every time I started having fun the game would throw some kind of obnoxious obligatory feeling dog biscuit of game design at me and after I while it just became too annoying, tiring, and vaguely depressing to want to continue.

Maybe someday if want the game design equivalent of a big bowl of candy corn (too much sugar, kinda disconcertingly waxy, bad for you but weirdly addictive, a perverse simulacra created from the processed remains of the very thing it strives to recreate...), then I will return to this, perhaps with friends if I can rope them into it. But for now Dying Light is just not it.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst feels like it never gets talked about except for through lamentations of it being open world instead of level based like the original Mirror's Edge was, or people complaining about how it has a couple movement abilities locked behind a skill tree, or people talking about how EA doesnt make original games anymore. And I get that position on paper, since Mirror's Edge: Catalyst came out right in the middle of the ps4 generation when open worlds were everywhere in AAA and every game seemed to have an obligatory skill tree regardless of whether it added anything of value. I can't blame people seeing a sequel to a really tight, linear, level based game going open world and throwing up their hands about Trends and Bandwagons.

But here's the thing. This game is barely an open world in the Ubisoft sense or the GTA sense. Rather, I think it has a lot more in common with the Metroidvania genre.

Mirror's Edge is about parkour, or free running, in a dystopian future. Everything about the gameplay and theming is centered on these two ideas. What this means for its "open world" design is that you have several decently sized but not huge sections of city, largely rooftops, interiors of buildings, some infrastructural installations, and a construction site, that is all there to facilitate free, expressive movement, often while escaping from The Cops. No matter what route you take, you are always pushed to engage with the detailed and active parkour mechanics. This isn't like the other big Parkour game, Assassin's Creed, where you just hold a button and occasionally another button while moving and your guy does it all automatically (not a knock tho, I love AC). Its stick-shift platforming and it's a ton of fun. The mechanics have been slightly refined from the original game and provide more ways to enter a state of rapid, flowing movement, or recover it if you fuck up. Every route you take becomes a chain of vaults, slides, jumps, wall-runs, impact rolls, and swings off pipes and flagpoles. New to this game is a shift move that works both as a dodge and a way to build, rebuild, or maintain momentum, that I found myself using in a way that almost simulated the rhythmic, controlled breathing of distance running. Tying it all together is the absolutely unparalleled design of full-body presence in its first person viewpoint, where it not only shows your body when you look down but actually makes it feel like you're inhabiting and moving in it, with the weight and momentum and grace of an athlete in motion, instead of just a floating camera with arms like so many other first person games. There are honestly very few AAA games that care about detailed, flavorful movement mechanics to this degree.

The combat is vastly improved from the first game, where clunky fighting or shooting segments often brought the game's beautiful momentum to a screeching halt. In this one, you can no longer use guns, thank god, so its all punching(light attacks) and kicking(heavy attacks). The new shift-dodge means you can more easily avoid damage, and also get behind them to do extra damage or kick them off ledges. But the key to combat is traversal attacks, which is when you attack while doing parkour. Light ones do less damage but preserve your momentum, so they're good for getting enemies out of your way while escaping, or for setting them up for a knockout from a stronger heavy traversal attack. These attacks are snappy and well-animated, and the combat is actually quite satisfying once you get the hang of incorporating parkour into it. There are several enemy types that all require slightly different tactics, so it keeps things from getting stale. The combat is also very frequently optional; you can often simply bowl them over and get the heck out of there instead.

The game does contain a skill tree, but it is honestly quite unobtrusive. It has 3 parts: movement, combat, and gear, and 80% of the movement tree is unlocked already at the start of the game, with the majority of the rest of the actual parkour mechanics easily unlocked in an hour or two of play. The rest of it is all combat skills, damage or defense upgrades, and new gadgets. The gadgets you actually just get from story progression, and they give you new movement abilities that open up new paths and new areas as the story progresses. Its not quite as free-form in its exploration as traditional Metroidvanias, and there's no sequence breaking due to the mission-based story, but it still has that feeling of the world gradually unfolding as your abilities grow. The map contains some of the typical open-world collectables and busywork missions, which are usually time trials, timed deliveries, or small combat challenges followed by escapes. They're fun enough to do, but can be safely ignored without consequence if you aren't interested or just want a more tightly paced game. The story missions themselves, and the character-given major sidequests, are all very solid and bring you to a variety of more linear, contained levels scattered around the city. This stuff is classic Mirror's Edge, and where the game shines brightest. I especially liked the Art Museum level and the under-construction skyscraper you have to sabotage for the mafia.

Like the original game, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a real looker. It paints its world in splashes of vivid color against stark, sterile white and polished glass. The use of color is a bit more restrained here compared to the first game, but its still very effective. Sometimes you slam open a door from the blindingly white rooftops and are blasted with the most incredible shade of green you've ever seen in a game as you sprint through an office corridor to the closest exit. Huge video billboards or displays cover buildings, with constantly shifting advertisements or news reports lighting up the night. It feels lightly futuristic and dystopian in a way that balances mundane believablility with stylized hyper-reality really well. There are some really lovingly crafted service corridors, corporate office buildings, and infrastructural facilities; mundane places transformed and made stranger by the context of how you move through them and why, which is something I always love to see in games (see also: INFRA, for the ultimate perfection of this aesthetic in games). The sound design is quite immersive, and makes you feel the speed and physical exertion involved in everything you do. The music on the other hand is only OK, as it serves the atmosphere and action well, but isn't especially memorable. They commissioned a pretty solid CHVRCHES song but bafflingly, don't even use it at all other than in a jukebox in the hideout. It doesn't even play over the credits! Why even commission it then!!

The narrative is fine. It's not like poorly executed, but its nothing new either. Kinda feels like a middling TV show from that time period. It provides a solid enough framework for a bunch of cool levels, so I guess it did its job. It is at least, better than the absolutely atrocious storytelling from the original game with its e-surance cutscenes and barely sketched characters. The characters here feel like people with a history in this world, and the presentation is solid, it just lacks a certain extra spark. Even so, it's well-paced and doesn't overstay its welcome by any means.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is a seriously underrated game. It doesn't quite hit the transcendent highs the original does, but it also comes nowhere near that game's very low low points either. It is simply a good time, and it really deserved better than the low sales and critical dismissal it seems to have gotten when it came out. If you like deep first person movement I highly recommend it.