Take to the rooftops of the city of Glass with Mirror's Edge Catalyst

I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow (June 7) ever since I played the first Mirror’s Edge back in 2008. Although the new game, Catalyst, isn't a sequel, I can hardly wait to get back into the mechanics of it all.

Presented in the first person, it’s a parkour game in the purest sense, involving you running, jumping, and climbing an urban landscape.

With the first game, it took a while to get used to things. In other first-person games, you usually just see the environment, but in Mirror’s Edge you’d see your hands and feet come into the frame as you ran, the way you see your hands and feet in real life.

When you got into the flow of the movement, it was an absolutely exhilarating experience.

Catalyst is more of a reboot of the franchise, but it features the same protagonist, a young woman named Faith who has crazy movement skills. And the plot theme is similar: a futuristic city called Glass that may be more fascist than utopian.

When I spoke with Catalyst's producer, Sara Jansson, last year, she explained that one big difference between the two games is that Faith does not wield weapons in Catalyst.

The first game could be played and completed without Faith ever picking up a gun, but it was difficult to do. When players decided to have Faith arm herself, though, the flow of her movement was stopped.

In an interview, Jansson said: "That sort of killed what was good about the game: the fluidity of movement."

In Catalyst, as long as Faith keeps moving and "stitching" her movements together, she is invulnerable to bullets.

"It's always a good thing to just keep moving," Jansson explained.

Both the original game and Catalyst were developed by DICE in Sweden, and are published by Electronic Arts.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is available on PS4, Windows, and Xbox One.