YMMV / Mirror's Edge Catalyst

• Awesome Music:
  • The theme, "Warning Call", composed by CHVRCHES.
  • The beautifully chill theme that plays in The View. Coupled with the gulls, the water, the cherry blossoms, and peaceful colors and architecture, it's just about perfect.
  • The soft introduction of the soundtrack's Leitmotif that plays after you finally break out of juvie and get your first view of the glittering cyber-city vista.
  • Catalyst makes watching the credits worth it.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The appearance of the Omnistat agent during the early Elysium mission. He appears once near the end of the level, is killed, and is never mentioned or thought upon again, seeming to exist solely to have Faith get the Reflection blueprints that are vital to kickstarting the rest of the story.
• Base-Breaking Character: Faith's more selfish and stubborn characterization has made her somewhat contentious among fans. She's now either a flawed and thus more relatable figure or a unlikable Designated Hero. Sadly, a more realistic portrayal of extreme trauma and guilt over the death of her parents, accidental abandonment of her sister and shooting a friendly guard out of fear.
• Broken Base: The game being open world with side activities and skill progression. An opportunity to experiment with new tricks and explore a universe which had been way too linear? Or an attempt at attracting a greater audience that makes this game everything the original wasn't?
• Catharsis Factor: You can't use guns, but getting the upper hand against a squad of KrugerSec is pretty satisfying. Especially if you use some of the more elegant maneuvers like traversal attacks and aerial pounces. If anything, coming up on top against multiple armed baddies without any guns is even more satisfying.
• Complete Monster: Gabriel Kruger is the CEO of KrugerSec and the dictator of Glass. Lacking his father's basic love for humanity, Kruger came up with the idea of Reflection, a program that can manipulate people's emotions to give him total control over everyone in the city. Escalating protests into the November Riots, Kruger personally killed Erika and Martin Connors for defying his will, then teargassed and kidnapped their daughter Caitlyn before grooming her into Isabel Kruger. Intending to force Reflection into every citizen of Glass, Kruger cracks down on the Runners to prevent them from interfering, tortures and kills Noah to find heroine Faith Connors's location, and scapegoats the scientist in charge of the project to force her into his underground prison camp. When confronted with his crimes, he blames Faith for all of his horrific actions, mocking the fact that he's killed or hurt everyone she's ever cared about.
• Contested Sequel: The game got a mixed reception from both fans and critics, with common high points being the new additions to the movement system, the main quests being pretty good as well being much longer than the first game, and the beautifully rendered city of Glass. Common criticisms surround the combat, the sidequests which take the first game's much-maligned Trial-and-Error Gameplay up to eleven, and the game's world otherwise feeling sterile and empty if said sidequests are ignored.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There exists a glitch that allows Faith to float, involving going to the very edge of a platform (or really anything that has a flat surface and nothing ringing the edge... including atop railings themselves) and pressing Back and Crouch at the same time. It's commonly used to reenter mission areas, such as Elysium and even Kingdom.
  • Another bug allows Faith to ascend slopes she would normally slide down by quickly alternating between the Pause and Forward keys. Practically required to reenter Kingdom.
• Magnificent Bastard: Dogen is the "Crime Czar of Glass" who poses as a high society chef. When Faith accidentally sabotages one of his deals, rather than punish her, Dogen instead offers her a job, recognizing her clear skills and talent and offering her mother's drawing as payment. When Faith fails to complete the job, he remains unsympathetic to her plight, yet still pulls strings to ensure that Faith only spends a year in prison, saving her from exile. Upon her release, he orders her to destroy the Anansi corporation, uncaring that his plan would kill all those inside because they owe him. Upon Noah's death, Dogen gives Faith the harsh words she needs to rise up from her despair, convincing her to go after Gabriel Kruger despite the seemingly impossible nature of the task. Following Kruger's death, Dogen then refuses to clear her debt, reasoning that if he did so, he'd have no reason to see her anymore, and he'd much prefer to continue their business relationship.
• Nintendo Hard: Not the main game, but specifically the Deliveries and Dashes scattered throughout the city. They don't give you very much time at all to get to where they tell you to go and you're going to have to master the art of making shortcuts to stand a chance of making it. A good example is "The Lie" delivery mission mentioned under Shout-Out. It gives you about two minutes to run out of the district you're in, go through the museum using time consuming platforming so you can get to the ground without dying and then go through almost the entirety of another district to get to the person you need to deliver it to. Note that they're not all that demanding, since that particular mission is in one of the later areas, but it illustrates the trials you'll be going through trying to reach your destination in time.
  • There's actually a shortcut through the museum (jump off the structure near the entrance to the upper path and slide down), but even with that, the time limit is far from generous.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Runner Vision. It's meant to be an aid for beginning players to learn their way around the city and find their way if they're stuck in a story mission, but it becomes downright nefarious in the timed side missions for deceiving the player into taking the slowest routes to the goal. This was intended to encourage players to experiment and find their own paths, but the tedium of doing this for every side mission led many to just search for a guide online.
• That One Achievement:
  • The movement trophies are surprisingly doable despite the complex combos required. The exception is Veteran Runner, which requires the player to perform both a Coil and a Skill Roll. The problem is that both of these moves are mapped to the same button, so the game hardly ever registers both of them.
  • Peak Performer requires you to get 3 stars on every dash in the game, all 22 of them. The tight requirements for 3-star timing combined with the game deliberately misleading you about the correct pathways make this a grueling feat even with a guide. But if you see it through, you usually place within the top percentage of players on the online leaderboards.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Plastic's gridleak jumps, just because of the incredibly tight timing required to complete them.
  • The difficult timed delivery missions require almost flawless performance to complete, and you need to figure out the correct path yourself because it's almost impossible to win them with the slower Runner Vision routes.
  • Then there's the diversion missions. Imagine the delivery missions, only with multiple goalpoints and KrugerSec on your tail the whole time. The Henchmen Meetup is probably the most difficult and complex of these, with the longest distance covered and the highest number of goalpoints.
  • The Scenic View. It's one of the longest dashes (a minute and a half even with the best timing) and requires the player to navigate some of Glass's trickiest terrain while flawlessly performing some slick maneuvers, from the back-to-back wallrun at the beginning to the alternating wall-jumps at the end. Getting 3 stars (required for an achievement, see That One Achievement) is often the most daunting task in the game for completionists.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The city, as seen in both trailers, is mind-blowingly gorgeous. Doubly so at night.
  • The characters in the cutscenes are so well-animated and detailed that they dodge the Unintentional Uncanny Valley almost completely.

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