Mirror's Edge Catalyst

The staples of Mirror's Edge remain refreshing and unique in the first-person genre in 2016, but Catalyst's attempts to keep up with the open-world Joneses don't always jive with its design strengths of movement and momentum. On top of that, muddy-looking console versions and a lame story filled with unlikable characters doom Mirror's Edge's return to fall short. I was so happy this game was being made, but in the end I'm just as disappointed in how it turned out.

Catalyst's combat stumbles, but the fluid freerunning and enticing open-world challenges overshadow most of its shortcomings.

DICE's reboot of a flawed modern classic fixes old problems while introducing new ones all of its own.

Catalyst is as close to a definitive version of a Mirror's Edge game as we're likely to get, despite retaining some of the first game's issues.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a flawed, but often great breath of something different and exciting in an open-world landscape full of the same old thing.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is an interesting game with some strong ideas but not enough variety.

This genre-blender experiments with the traditional sandbox formula, but fails to encapsulate the fun elements of an open world

Faith is restored to a visually striking world she deserves in the return of the first-person parkour title – but, as with the original, niggles stop it achieving greatness

A flawed but effective take on parkour

So I'll end in the spirit of the game, with a refined version of what I said last time: Mirror's Edge Catalyst is good and you should probably play it, but damn, it could have been superb.