Follow your friends and other players to stay informed of their activity.Learn more about the world of MirrorвЂ™s Edge Catalyst with Intel & lore database.Fully rendered 3D map of the City of Glass.Think IKEA by way of Jony Ive.Whether you are at home or on the move, the MirrorвЂ™s Edgeв„ў Companion app keeps you connected to the world of MirrorвЂ™s Edge Catalyst and the City of Glass.ДЇeaturing a 3D map of the City of Glass, the companion lets you see where you and your friends are in the world, track your progress in MirrorвЂ™s Edge Catalyst and facilitate social play against other runners. ThereвЂ™s something gloriously weird and viscerally stirring about an entire city painted gaze-searing white, bathed in blue-sky sunlight, then intercut by Skittles-bright reds, greens, yellows and oranges. Glass may be the first idealist dystopia thatвЂ™s genuinely appealing despite its metaphorical nod to whitewashing. Most utopias steeped in geometric perfection wind up feeling merely sterile (as if anyone really wants to live in a world of anti-idiosyncratic, monochrome blah). Part of itвЂ™s simply how you respond to the aesthetics of the world itself. Thus youвЂ™ll practice, then practice some more, the reward less a brag-spot on the socreboard than in achieving meaningful command of a seamless chain of motion thatвЂ™s at once balletic and visually powerful. Timing the pull of a gamepad trigger after a precipitous fall to regain lost momentum. Leaping to a ledge while running from several feet away. A low-lying barrier leveraged to catapult you higher. Whether this way of approaching Catalyst resonates also depends on your patience for finessing small but critical things: A turn better taken as a wall-jump. YouвЂ™ll finish a route with a one or two star (of three) rating and notice an outlier score thatвЂ™s somehow 10 or 20 seconds faster than yours, then realize thereвЂ™s a completely different way to come at the course. This is where slowing down becomes paramount, however counterintuitive. Here you can explore and maneuver as you like, running routes to challenge a leaderboard of playersвЂ™ best times, or devising grueling runs of your own that show up on other playersвЂ™ maps. Veer off toward the broader cityвЂ™s jutting structures and labyrinthine byways, and Catalyst becomes something else entirely-a glittering playground of kinetic possibility. The villains are boring, hand-to-hand combat feels clumsy and pointless (at least the gunplayвЂ™s gone), the storyвЂ™s typical pablum that telegraphs its twists too soon, and these things ultimately stand between you and CatalystвЂs far better free-range gameplay. But mostly youвЂ™re tailing вЂњrunnerвЂ™s vision,вЂќ the gameвЂ™s candy-apple-red GPS that guides you through GlassвЂ™s urban jungle to tag an endpoint, punch a button and watch a cutscene. And in a few instances thereвЂ™s a ruthless timetable to beat. Corporate underlings pop up along the way-more irritant than threat since you can generally run right past them. So yes, thereвЂ™s a plot here you can chase that reduces the gameвЂ™s open-world to 15 linear sprints from this point to that one.

ItвЂ™s one of my favorite sequences in a video game, a kind of вЂњZen of investigatory acrobaticsвЂќ set against an exquisite Mondrian canvas. But my first try took over an hour sorting runnable routes from red herrings.

Watching vets play this sequence now, amounts to a few minutes of surefooted clambering. You had to probe for connection points, then tilt the view just so to attempt gasping wall-runs, scrambling climbs and heart-stopping leaps. ThatвЂ™s for you to puzzle out, and the moment for me the game finally came together. Looking at a five-story high maze of concrete, rebar and piping, you wonder вЂњHow in the world am I going to scale this?вЂќ Ambient electronica pings and blips soothingly. Dazzling sunlight makes the roomвЂ™s lemon and white checkerboard walls glow. YouвЂ™re in an empty atrium and asked to find your way up along a succession of platforms obscured by a lattice of scaffolding. Towards the end of the original MirrorвЂ™s Edge, thereвЂ™s an area that exemplifies most of what studio EA DICEвЂ™s 2008 first-person parkour game got right.

Mirrors edge parkour