This is a city of paths and routes, but as the name suggests, it's also a city of surfaces. This is the City of Glass, all but devoid of life and with a skyline that looks like it' s made from guesswork renders of next-gen consoles. Drainpipes, server boxes, cooling fans that you learn to pause so you can move through them. Rooftops, alleyways and ladders! Ducts and open-air business suites, that indoor-outdoor lifestyle everyone's after in the Valley. But that's very different to places that actually do connect.Īnyway, the genius of Catalyst - and it is genius despite the understandably chilly reception the game got, I find it intermittently more than thrilling - is that its open spaces do connect, but also still give the impression that there are yet deeper connections that cannot be accessed. The first Mirror's Edge bristled with places that gave the careful impression that they connected to other places. And the idea of exploding these spaces outwards, retaining their intricacy while allowing them to become open-world areas fit for exploration and repeated journeys and multiple purposes - I can imagine the kind of headaches this design would cause. But it wasn't for everyone, which is a phrase that must not delight an outfit like EA. I even liked getting lost in office buildings with the hint button pointing me mindlessly at my own feet when I really needed an exit. Instead, each level was a sort of white-box Rubik's Snake of urban design, gloriously sunny and bleached outside, the surfaces somehow chalky, and chalk is just the remains of the dead isn't it? And then, muddly and fussy and a bit of a migraine indoors.
The first game was emphatically not open-world, and it's hard to see how it would have worked in that way. Remember when they announced a sequel to Mirror's Edge, the pristine parkour-heavy action game from Dice, all shot through with wiry energy and surprising heft, and they said it was going to be open-world this time? I remember thinking: that's going to have to be a very different kind of open world. If you only read one piece on Mirror's Edge today, re-read his! Meanwhile, I'm going to look purely at the game's landscape - how it affects the game's atmosphere and how it shapes the feeling of play. I'm in love.Įmad has already made the case that this game is politically and socially a lot more interesting and progressive than most video game sequels. Mirror's Edge Catalyst is finally on Steam and I have been running and jumping, diving and swooping across its squeaky world. A lot of people might argue that it leaks, too, or at least that it is not quite fit for purpose. And again, although Foster and Partners were not involved, it's also disquieting and abstractly villainous and filled with odd features. I've spent the last few days in another collision of EA and architecture, though. A mausoleum built to the specs of a condominium. The heights were not quite right for it to be truly deathly, but it did a good job of being Deathly Junior.
The Bond people never actually used it, I gather. Anything with a touch of horror or unease.
#MIRRORS EDGE GAMES TV#
You can see it for yourself in films like Inception and TV shows like Jekyll.
#MIRRORS EDGE GAMES WINDOWS#
(Westminster Tube is definitely Bond, but definitely also Brosnan Bond.) Anyway, EA's place: with oddly angled windows ensuring you never knew which direction the automatic blinds were going to descend from, skeletal staircases and lots of dark surfaces. Inside it was pure Bond lair, of course, this being the era which also gave us the doomy concrete spinal excavation of Westminster Tube Station, my favourite building in London because I am a massive child, loose in the world with nothing in my skull but feathers. From the air the whole thing looked a bit like the letter E. The front of the structure came off (on purpose) and leaked (not on purpose).
There were ducks involved, or maybe swans. And it had a handful of interesting features. Years ago, EA's building in the UK was a Foster and Partners number in Chertsey.