We have now passed the same amount of time between the original Mirror's Edge and Catalyst's release

Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a flawed but still fantastic experience.

DICE did such an incredible job on the visuals and the gameplay, the sprawling corporatised city of Glass is still absolutely stunning 8 years later and the parkour gameplay remains undefeated in its sound design, fluidity and move variety even to this day. Every time I return to MEC, I discover some obscure move that I didn't know about at all (this time I found out you can backflip off of swing bars).

Sadly, all this comes at the cost of a main story with flat, annoying characters that you never come to care for and a plot so confusing that a loading screen tip tells you to go read a damn comic to get the full picture. To its credit, the main story has good set pieces and unique action sequences that make them one of the most fun and replayable aspects of the game, and thankfully you can replay any mission at any time (a feature some open world games tend to leave out nowadays).

The other middling drawback is the open world. On the good side it's very well built, taking advantage of pretty much all of the games mechanics anywhere it can and the map itself is absolutely huge in size and environmental variety. On the bad side, you cannot return to any of the unique story mission environments (thankfully this is possible with mods) and the open world activities are bloated. There are 3 types of samey delivery missions, 2 types of time limited running missions and then the time trials. The actually good side content (side missions and gridnodes) unfortunately lack in quantity but whats there is great.

The online components were also pretty cool before they were shuttered, specifically the Beat L.E geo-tags that you could place down at any point for other players to find! I spent so much time on the Xbox version getting into ridiculous out of bounds spots to place one down, I even recall a time I got a party chat invite from someone asking exactly how I had gotten somewhere.

As much as I long for the day that EA will take this series off ice and give it another go, the lukewarm reception of MEC and the sales disappointment from Dead Space causing EA to scale back single player games means we probably won't see another Mirror's Edge anytime soon :/

Super fun gameplay, but the story is wack. Also, it reeks of EA's greasy-fingered grip. For a game so focused on "freedom" they sure had an unfortunate choice of publisher. It's ironic, really. If you can look past all that, you've got some stellar parkour on your hands.

This had a lot of wasted potential but was still playable for Mirrors Edge fans but removing all online features like leader boards etc makes it even harder to recommend