Zoroark Cutie
The Illusion Fox Skyfarer
- 2,511
- Posts
- 9
- Years
- Age 29
- Auguste Isles
- Seen Dec 13, 2017
So my most anticipated game of this year has finally released, and I love it, but it isn't without it's faults.
The first thing are the graphics, they can be absolutely gorgeous and some of the most gorgeous graphics I've seen, but one problem that plagues it are the constant texture pop-ins. This will happen a lot and you'll see textures from all across the board pop in. It also doesn't help that the character models look like plastic and have not improved from the beta at all. Thankfully the cutscenes have been fixed from the beta and no longer stutter. There are some questionable moments with it like at one point in the game a mall explodes and it looks really bad with how it is animated.
The story is a bit of a mix bag. I will say that it is a lot more better than the original's story which was basically sister gets framed for a murder she didn't commit and you have to clear her name. This time it is about stopping a Security group who runs the city from releasing an injection called Reflection which I don't want to spoil, but it does give a good reason to be stopped. Character development still feels lacking as characters either don't get developed enough or they are just one note like one chick who leads a group that is underground which you might think may have her sound interesting, but she's got nothing going for her other than this tough woman who is just narrow minded. Even worse is a character like Birdman who is set up to be an interesting character, but they just remove him from the story after just a short while which is really sad because it looked like he was going to play a bigger role from the looks of it in the E3 trailer. The story is also played pretty straight forward with only one big twist in it and it also disappoints me that the final "fight" in the game is between two enemies that you find normally in the game so there is no big fight at the end of the game. Not to mention that the ending is not very satisfying and is sort of setting up a sequel.
One big issue I have is that the game is easy. Besides a few platforming mistakes, I rarely ever died to enemies. There are 5 variations to enemies. You got your normal dudes, you got your dudes in armor, you got your shock dudes, you got your Shooty McShooterson dudes, and you got your Pro Dudes. To be fair, they're not all dudes, some of them are female, but it's very rarely you'll ever come across one of them who is and even then I think it is only the enemies with guns who can be female since I never came across one as any of the other enemy types. Now combat has been improved to feel much more fluid, however it is still easy, and I might even say that it might be a bit easier. You have a light attack and a heavy attack, if you go up against the normal or Shooty McShooterson dudes, you won't need to put much effort into beating them. The rest of them are a bit tougher, requiring to use Heavy attacks to defeat them, usually one heavy attack and followed by a light one then a dodge and repeat because if try to use the same one, they will attempt to block or counter, or you can just absolutely destroy them by sliding and doing a heavy attack and if you have the ability to where you can do 3 light attacks, and you know how combat works, you'll rarely ever have trouble with enemies. They also added some cool third person moments that show you doing an awesome attack to finish off an enemy, but it doesn't happen too often.
The game is open world which is a good thing as the first game was linear, and it was sort of disappointing seeing how a lot of potential was lost because of it. You'll have the entire rooftops of The City of Glass to explore and you'll start off in one area, and you'll unlock more areas to explore as you progress through the story. With the exception of the one area that is basically a construction area, all the areas are just wonderful to look at. Even the levels of the main story itself can be really fun and great with the different locations and large buildings you'll get to go through and they look amazing on the inside or you'll get gorgeous views. By far my favorite is the final level where you get to scale the tallest building in the game and it's only available for that mission and it has a lot of really great looks to it. Now the level designs and set pieces are great, but the main issue with Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is your objectives. You're going to be doing a lot of the same objectives, find something, take this item to some place, go here, go there, plant this thing here, it's not a lot of variety that you'll be doing and pretty much you're just a delivery girl. To make it even worse, there are side missions in the game which play out the exact same, except it's a bit worse as the majority of side stuff are Delivery missions and the Delivery missions are literally to the point of unfair and player hostile. The game does encourage you to find alternative and faster routes, but even if you find a faster route and even complete the faster or normal route flawlessly, you're either not going to have enough time or you're just barely going to make it. This is made so much harder than it needs to be and I'm not the only one as a majority of people I've seen thought that these missions were nearly impossible with only the masochistic bunch saying that they are fine and claiming "It's good that they are not easy.". Some other side missions are GridNode missions and these are absolutely vital as you need to complete them in order to unlock fast travel between all the various hide outs. These kinds of missions have you platforming in like a giant server core and you need to reach the computer at the end to unlock the GridNode. There are also Intervention missions which pop randomly where you see another Runner get attacked by K-Sec officers and you can choose to do these or not. Billboards are also spread across the map as well as various other screens that you can hack into and if you hack into them to show to friends and other players that you've been there by displaying your Runner Emblem and Background and you can also take part in some dashes which require you to make it as fast possible to a location and compete for time against other players. Some of the sidemissions are Metagrid missions which are not that brilliant to be honest since they revolve around you collecting red grid things in a certain time limit. There are also Diversion missions, which I have yet to play because from what I heard, they act nearly identical to the the Delivery missions and I am not willing to torture myself.
Now there is a bit of multiplayer in this game, but it's all competition on the leaderboards and hacking into billboards and other locations, however players can create user generated dashes and everyone can play on these. You can set up Beat locations, which I never even bothered with because if I remember correctly, they didn't do anything.
There are some collectibles in this game and they range from electronic pieces, Grid Leaks, documents, voice logs, and runner bags. With the exception of Documents and Voice Logs which give you a bit more insight on stuff, all the other collectibles just gain you EXP and multiplayer customization options for later that you can collect.
The platforming on the other hand is great if you ask me. They added a few new things like the Springboard Jump which allows you to jump onto something and then you jump off of it to give yourself a bit of extra height to your next jump. There's also a grappling hook which can allow you to traverse a bit more through the world. There are also pipes that you can swing around on to another side of a corner to keep your speed and sometimes they are there so that you can get around a corner of a building. There are also some Movement upgrades you can get that allow you to do more stuff like a double Wallrun where you Wallrun and jump to another wall and continue. I feel like these upgrades are needed as it felt like that when I played the game. However the movement can be a bit off as well. I had times where I tried to do a Wallrun only for Faith to do a Wallclimb and there were times where I felt like I should have done something like a Wallrun and it didn't go through. I even had two weird times where for some reason a Springboard jump I did sent me backwards and when where I climbed up onto a pipe and stood on it and then immediately fell through.
I'm not going to lie, I do love this game. It's more of Mirror's Edge parkour platforming, but now it is open world. However it is a very repetitive game as it feels like you are given the same kind of objectives, side missions feeling too familiar to each other, and not a lot of interesting stuff in the game other than some events that happen in game. I honestly wish that this game had more variety in missions, better characters and stories, and stuff that was less mundane. I feel like this game was a big improvement i my honest opinion and I do hope that there will be another game that improves on some of Catalyst's faults.
The first thing are the graphics, they can be absolutely gorgeous and some of the most gorgeous graphics I've seen, but one problem that plagues it are the constant texture pop-ins. This will happen a lot and you'll see textures from all across the board pop in. It also doesn't help that the character models look like plastic and have not improved from the beta at all. Thankfully the cutscenes have been fixed from the beta and no longer stutter. There are some questionable moments with it like at one point in the game a mall explodes and it looks really bad with how it is animated.
The story is a bit of a mix bag. I will say that it is a lot more better than the original's story which was basically sister gets framed for a murder she didn't commit and you have to clear her name. This time it is about stopping a Security group who runs the city from releasing an injection called Reflection which I don't want to spoil, but it does give a good reason to be stopped. Character development still feels lacking as characters either don't get developed enough or they are just one note like one chick who leads a group that is underground which you might think may have her sound interesting, but she's got nothing going for her other than this tough woman who is just narrow minded. Even worse is a character like Birdman who is set up to be an interesting character, but they just remove him from the story after just a short while which is really sad because it looked like he was going to play a bigger role from the looks of it in the E3 trailer. The story is also played pretty straight forward with only one big twist in it and it also disappoints me that the final "fight" in the game is between two enemies that you find normally in the game so there is no big fight at the end of the game. Not to mention that the ending is not very satisfying and is sort of setting up a sequel.
One big issue I have is that the game is easy. Besides a few platforming mistakes, I rarely ever died to enemies. There are 5 variations to enemies. You got your normal dudes, you got your dudes in armor, you got your shock dudes, you got your Shooty McShooterson dudes, and you got your Pro Dudes. To be fair, they're not all dudes, some of them are female, but it's very rarely you'll ever come across one of them who is and even then I think it is only the enemies with guns who can be female since I never came across one as any of the other enemy types. Now combat has been improved to feel much more fluid, however it is still easy, and I might even say that it might be a bit easier. You have a light attack and a heavy attack, if you go up against the normal or Shooty McShooterson dudes, you won't need to put much effort into beating them. The rest of them are a bit tougher, requiring to use Heavy attacks to defeat them, usually one heavy attack and followed by a light one then a dodge and repeat because if try to use the same one, they will attempt to block or counter, or you can just absolutely destroy them by sliding and doing a heavy attack and if you have the ability to where you can do 3 light attacks, and you know how combat works, you'll rarely ever have trouble with enemies. They also added some cool third person moments that show you doing an awesome attack to finish off an enemy, but it doesn't happen too often.
The game is open world which is a good thing as the first game was linear, and it was sort of disappointing seeing how a lot of potential was lost because of it. You'll have the entire rooftops of The City of Glass to explore and you'll start off in one area, and you'll unlock more areas to explore as you progress through the story. With the exception of the one area that is basically a construction area, all the areas are just wonderful to look at. Even the levels of the main story itself can be really fun and great with the different locations and large buildings you'll get to go through and they look amazing on the inside or you'll get gorgeous views. By far my favorite is the final level where you get to scale the tallest building in the game and it's only available for that mission and it has a lot of really great looks to it. Now the level designs and set pieces are great, but the main issue with Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is your objectives. You're going to be doing a lot of the same objectives, find something, take this item to some place, go here, go there, plant this thing here, it's not a lot of variety that you'll be doing and pretty much you're just a delivery girl. To make it even worse, there are side missions in the game which play out the exact same, except it's a bit worse as the majority of side stuff are Delivery missions and the Delivery missions are literally to the point of unfair and player hostile. The game does encourage you to find alternative and faster routes, but even if you find a faster route and even complete the faster or normal route flawlessly, you're either not going to have enough time or you're just barely going to make it. This is made so much harder than it needs to be and I'm not the only one as a majority of people I've seen thought that these missions were nearly impossible with only the masochistic bunch saying that they are fine and claiming "It's good that they are not easy.". Some other side missions are GridNode missions and these are absolutely vital as you need to complete them in order to unlock fast travel between all the various hide outs. These kinds of missions have you platforming in like a giant server core and you need to reach the computer at the end to unlock the GridNode. There are also Intervention missions which pop randomly where you see another Runner get attacked by K-Sec officers and you can choose to do these or not. Billboards are also spread across the map as well as various other screens that you can hack into and if you hack into them to show to friends and other players that you've been there by displaying your Runner Emblem and Background and you can also take part in some dashes which require you to make it as fast possible to a location and compete for time against other players. Some of the sidemissions are Metagrid missions which are not that brilliant to be honest since they revolve around you collecting red grid things in a certain time limit. There are also Diversion missions, which I have yet to play because from what I heard, they act nearly identical to the the Delivery missions and I am not willing to torture myself.
Now there is a bit of multiplayer in this game, but it's all competition on the leaderboards and hacking into billboards and other locations, however players can create user generated dashes and everyone can play on these. You can set up Beat locations, which I never even bothered with because if I remember correctly, they didn't do anything.
There are some collectibles in this game and they range from electronic pieces, Grid Leaks, documents, voice logs, and runner bags. With the exception of Documents and Voice Logs which give you a bit more insight on stuff, all the other collectibles just gain you EXP and multiplayer customization options for later that you can collect.
The platforming on the other hand is great if you ask me. They added a few new things like the Springboard Jump which allows you to jump onto something and then you jump off of it to give yourself a bit of extra height to your next jump. There's also a grappling hook which can allow you to traverse a bit more through the world. There are also pipes that you can swing around on to another side of a corner to keep your speed and sometimes they are there so that you can get around a corner of a building. There are also some Movement upgrades you can get that allow you to do more stuff like a double Wallrun where you Wallrun and jump to another wall and continue. I feel like these upgrades are needed as it felt like that when I played the game. However the movement can be a bit off as well. I had times where I tried to do a Wallrun only for Faith to do a Wallclimb and there were times where I felt like I should have done something like a Wallrun and it didn't go through. I even had two weird times where for some reason a Springboard jump I did sent me backwards and when where I climbed up onto a pipe and stood on it and then immediately fell through.
I'm not going to lie, I do love this game. It's more of Mirror's Edge parkour platforming, but now it is open world. However it is a very repetitive game as it feels like you are given the same kind of objectives, side missions feeling too familiar to each other, and not a lot of interesting stuff in the game other than some events that happen in game. I honestly wish that this game had more variety in missions, better characters and stories, and stuff that was less mundane. I feel like this game was a big improvement i my honest opinion and I do hope that there will be another game that improves on some of Catalyst's faults.