Subway Surfing in the City of Glass.

The OG Mirror’s Edge is a bit of a darling to me - this laser-focused parkour action thrilla that limits it’s scope to densely choreographed sequences through rich, hyper-real urb environments. There’s a weightines to Faith’s movement, allowing the player to feel a sense of inertia to the stunts you string together, putting stones in your gut whenever your unbroken momentum ends in freefall. It’s so lean it’s so Mean.

Ultimately I put off playing Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst for yearz because I knew what they did to it. I knew it was an open world game, a sprawling map peppered with waypoints and collectables and challenges and skill trees and XP and shit. This Human Revolutionification of a game I originally adored because it sidestepped that stuff. With a few concessions (I skipped every cutscene and ignored everything that wasn’t a story mission), I was finally able to get over myself and just give the game a shot, and I’m happy 2 share that I think ME:C is Alright!!! It’s OK!

The shift in focus is almost immediately striking as the art direction of Catalyst shifts from heavily stylised minimal realism, to this catastrophic directionless mush of overexposed modernism. It's like every expensive yacht in the world crashed into one another to form a continent. It’s kind of pretty but it really doesn’t inspire awe in me in the same way as the OG… A lens flare fried calamity of white pointy buildings with an accent colour thrown in for good measure. Whenever I replay Mirror’s Edge, I gawk at the level of attention poured into the texture, staging and lighting work - and I just couldn’t find anything to care about here.

The reason for this visual mulch is, of course, gameplay clutter as a result of moving towards an open world. The environment design is stretched thin by taking a very blunt modular approach as a result of attempting to pad out the vast expanses of rooftop between quest markers. The City of Glass is slavishly built for Faith and her moveset, every canopy littered with pipes and platforms and grappling points with the intent to allow the player to maintain an unbroken sprint across vast expanses. I can’t help but prefer the simplicity and muted realism of the prior game’s world, one that felt almost hostile to the existence of the Runners, which necessitated a more thoughtful approach to the moment-to-moment - scanning the environment for ways to use your moveset to reach places you shouldn’t. Catalyst’s city is Faith’s playground - but who can deny the simple joys of swingin on da jungle gym.

I’m not going to shit on the game a whole lot - the core intent is very different, focused on player retention through endless sidemissions and jiggies, but it’s pretty great when you meet it halfway. Brushing aside the fluff content and focusing on the story missions allows something of a rush through what the game has to offer. It’s bigger, it’s crazier, it’s bombastic, Faith goes crazy scaling wacky luminescent architecture that doesn’t even pretend to feel like places built for civvies. Assault course game design. It even follows many of the same beats as the original game, you just can’t help but compare how differently things come across here. The combat buckles very quickly with miserable enemy variants, but I enjoyed the focus on using the environment against baddies by paddling them around/into each other, it's pretty slapstick but a damng lot more dynamic than what was in the original game.

I dunno, I’m middle of the road on this. Catalyst feels like the flipside of the same coin, Mirror’s Edge but hopped up on Ubisoft Juice. You couldn't convince me that Mirror's Edge needed bandit camps if your life depended on it, but the speed and flow and scale is intoxicating but it all rings kind of hollow when it feels like you’re just playing Aesthetique Temple Run. Maybe all I need to be happy in this life is seeing bullets go through Nvidia PhysX cloth & dats why this game isn’t doin it.

A rough gem that could have truly shined if it wasn’t stymied by its grindy filler sandbox design, Mafia 3 is still the best game in the series in my opinion and a game that is woefully underappreciated.

The narrative is genuinely one of the finest I’ve seen in an open world crime game; Lincoln is a great protagonist and the supporting cast are all strong, most notably Father James, who adds so much to the documentary style framing device which made it feel genuinely inspired. The atmosphere is also wonderful too with a great sense of place with its setting in 60’s Not-New Orleans. The soundtrack is fantastic with so many great licensed 60’s songs picks and how well utilized they are when they pop up from time to time in the main story missions, Sympathy for the Devil especially. Thematically it’s also a neat exploration of how broken the American system is through the lens of the 1960’s. America was founded on white supremacy, genocide, and slavery and that won’t go away no matter how much American exceptionalism you try to paper over with it. The rot is in the foundations.

The combat itself is solid, the gunplay is fun and so is the stealth even though its super easy because enemies are easily lured away one by one by just whistling so you can easily stealth kill them. The turf system is a neat idea too and how you have to balance the favor of Lincoln’s lieutenants, it just really needed to cut out the grind because you need to dive into it to progress through the story so it does get rather tedious having to dredge your way through them to get to the great story missions. The game should have been like half its length.

The DLC campaigns were also a neat explorations of different genres for Lincoln and his supporting cast to find themselves in, ranging from Lincoln teaming up with the not-Black Panthers to go all Dukes of Hazzard on a white supremacist rural sheriff and his Klan buddies, a Vietnam War era spy story, and a cult horror story. It all really left me wishing we had some more adventures with Lincoln in a similar vein.

Mafia 3 has some deep flaws, but if you can stomach the grind you’re in for a genuinely great game otherwise.

Very spellbound by Yakuza 7's early game. Broad shifts for the series that nicely complement the themes of the story - about the difficulty of starting over in a new place, and it never being too late to look to the future. Further complemented by the fact that you are ripped out of not only the familiar Kamurocho, but also the genre. The fact that it unflinchingly (albeit clumsily) touches on topics like homelessness in Japan, the sex work industry, and immigration mindfully... It's really fucking incredible. I won't gush, but I love the cast and their themes. I cried a lot.

The shift to turn-based was the stim injection I needed after growing weary of the mashy brawler combat of 0, K1+2. It's incredible that a combat system that has been iterated on for over a decade has been immediately blown out of the water by something that almost feels like a science experiment. A genuinely informed genre shift that means items and equipment finally matter, as well as meaning you can now operate an entire party of characters while completely maintaining the old original pacing. My vote for personal GOTY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV1lOo-T15I

A complicated mess that requires a more complicated assessment than my tiny brain can offer. It is VERY clearly unfinished, you can practically feel the lingering absence of certain mechanics - almost as if the game is riddled with holes from when they were ripped out during the crunch phase. What awful turbulent development did this game go through for it to take 7~8 years to make what is essentially just Rage 2. It's neither a pointed immersive sim or a sprawling interactive open world.

There's stuff to like here, I'm immensely endeared to the sheer level of detail in Night City's design. It's not often an open world lends itself to a sense of verticality with wonderfully designed multi-level roads and walkways that bob and weave haphazardly through the skyline, entirely different styles of colour scheme and architecture when you across districts. Walk from one end of a street to another and be greeted with a new vista. It's genuinely gorgeo. Keanu gives his best performance since Bill & Ted and I'm not even kidding.

I just hate Borderlands DPS-FPS design so much. A litter tray of skill tree perks that make invisible percentile changes and shooting guys just to watch numbers pop out of their heads until they die. It’s never been satisfying, I never win an encounter with a sense of accomplishment, just that I had a gun powerful enough for the task at hand. Why have we done nothing but regress from what FEAR 1 accomplished?

The narrative design is weak overall, each character archetype being funnelled into the same canned timeskip sequence and starting point is about all you need to know you're not freely role playing at all. I love going to undiscovered side gigs with the flavour text "Who knows what you might find?" only for a phone call to completely spell out the entire mission when I enter its proximity. Really keeps any sense of adventure and wonder intact. The only sidequest I didn't complete was the one that I couldn't get working, which it turns out was about a character voiced by Grimes lol. Fuck outta here. What really takes the cake is that every significant-feeling moral choice I've made has absolutely no payoff ingame, and essentially feel like DLC bait. The game aint fucking done.

Is it the best often-delayed and buggily released open world game where you play as a person with a bunch of tricked-out gadgets who is fighting against time to remove a parasitic person in their head who appears as a snarky vision that leans on walls and makes fun of you, but is actually going to end up replacing you and has a bunch of unnecessary driving segments that nobody really likes I've ever played? No, that's Arkham Knight.

Considering the game is riddled with as many craters as the moon, I'm trying to cut some slack and credit the creators for what they ACTUALLY accomplished in spite of soulcrushing crunch. This is the forty-hour sunk cost fallacy sinking in;-

Being worse off financially for taking moral high roads in missions, cops being so ineffective that they pay you to do their work for them (of course the wanted system is shit, they can't chase you if they wanted to). Living ethically is a luxury you don't always have a choice to make. You have to shred your humanity to pieces with body augmentations just to stand a chance. When the game isn't trying to be a visual wonder or a David Jaffe-esque piece of tryhard shit, its systems compound into something a little more meaningful than I think I gave it credit for in the beginning. There's stuff here, it's hard to stomach, but I like that they did it.
Cyberpunk speaks clearly against the way society dehumanises us, it points a condemnatory finger to the corrupt systems that nourish it, and does everything in its power to make you feel chained to your complacency. It tells you again and again that the system doesn't work, it shows the people who idolise it dying senselessly and unceremoniously, it's telling you that we should do better - that the monolith of human achievement in the form of 2077's Night City is a smoke and mirrors act that disguises the same problems plaguing our world today. I'm no genre genius, but if this is "Cyberpunk", then go the fuck off. Some of these questlines struck a nerve, genuinely good pieces of writing, they just didn't need to be in a game that is this fucking bloated.

Wars of the future won't be fought on land or at sea. They'll be fought in space, or possibly on top of a large mountain. In any case, much of the actual fighting will be done by robots.

Kind of the platonic ideal Call of Duty has been striving for after all these years: endless, apolitical, pure nationalist warfare. Stripped of real world ideology. It's just endless war as far as the eye can see. It's what the US Navy dreams of when they hear the words Star Wars. Men and women alike, from all over the Earth, fighting robots in order to stop some space Jon Snow guy.

And it works. It's utterly shameless about much it just loves war. And Michael Bay esque explosions, which in this game are happening constantly all around you. The whole game is a 5 hour walking tour of explosion city. It's great. It dazzles.

The most human character in this is a robot (styled personality wise after the one from Interstellar).