Filling that meter puts Faith in a "flow state", activating an ability called Focus Shield. Faith's momentum is, in essence, her damage output.Ī small meter builds up in the bottom left corner of the screen as she runs, jumps, slides and rolls without interruption.
You can dodge around and punch through a handful quite easily, but the game rewards you for executing attacks off the back of a wall run, a long jump, or after whizzing down a zipline, with extra damage or instantaneous knock-outs. This is possible because most of the enemies you encounter only have melee weapons, like riot clubs and stun batons. You know how, in The Avengers, you always see Scarlett Johansson doing some ridiculous flips before kicking someone in the face, and you think, 'Boy, that's a bit elaborate isn't it?' That's the way Mirror's Edge Catalyst wants you to fight - and it's been systemised in a way that not only makes sense, but complements Faith's parkour abilities in a way the first game never managed to. After completing the closed beta, which ends after a quarter of the story is completed, I can tell you many good things about the former, and many mixed things about the latter. So Mirror's Edge Catalyst has two primary concerns to address: combat, and content. "By the end of the game I may be so intimately familiar with this entire city, that it becomes one giant, interconnected race course."īut that wasn't enough of a game for a lot of people, and I can understand why. That's why the time trials, 30- to 90-second chunks of a level devoid of enemies, were where Mirror's Edge worked best. So many machine guns! If you got the timing right, you could disarm those men and use their weapons, but the best course of action was to keep running. Mirror's Edge filled its levels with men with machine guns, and its skies with helicopters with machine guns. It's hard to race when taking a corner wrong means getting shot to death, though. To me, Mirror's Edge was a racing game, but in place of tire treads were Faith's cool red shoes with the split toe - and I became intimately familiar with every floor and wall she left her footprint on. Where others came away thinking 'Why is everyone shooting at me when I'm trying to figure out where to go?' or 'Is this all there is to it?', I spent close to 100 hours scrambling around each room and rooftop, trying to find the best way to shave half a second off my record. Point being, my experience of Mirror's Edge was different to most. I'm definitely not still salty about that. I say 'used to', because eventually the leaderboards were overtaken by hackers - they'd open the level in the Unreal Editor, rearrange it in a straight line, and the leaderboard would accept their times without question. When Mirror's Edge Catalyst is stripped back it becomes a great racing gameįirst, a little background info: I used to hold the number two record in the world for one of the time trials in the original Mirror's Edge. There's a neat time-trial racing game underneath all that glare.