What Mirror's Edge Catalyst Should Have Learned From Burnout Paradise

Mirror's Edge was the kind of game that seemed to demand a sequel. It needed sharper first-person platforming, a better story presentation, fewer guns, and more things to do.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst delivered many of those surface-level improvements. The controls are more responsive, the cutscenes are no longer stylized like Flash animations, guns are gone, and there is far more content.

But the result still did not fully work. The likely culprit is the most contentious change to the series: the introduction of an open world.

The original Mirror's Edge presented most levels like obstacle courses. There was a linear route through the world, and the player had to build and maintain momentum by chaining parkour moves over springboards, fences, pipes, walls, and zip lines.

The route was often visible ahead, highlighted by Runner's Vision. The challenge was to spot that path at speed, identify faster alternatives, and execute jumps, tucks, rolls, wall runs, and quick turns with precision.

At other times, the game slowed down and became a first-person platforming puzzle. The player looked for a path up a tower or through a maze of platforms and obstacles.

Catalyst still does this well, because almost every story mission and several side missions happen outside the open world in linear, intricately designed locations. Skyscrapers, offices, underground facilities, and server hubs are built to be run through once and in one direction.

Because the campaign's strongest missions are separate from free roaming, the open world is left with secondary roles.

It becomes a way to travel from mission to mission, a place to practice parkour, a container for collectibles, and a home for side activities.

That means the key question is whether those side activities actually take advantage of the City of Glass as a sandbox.

Open worlds can create missions with a wide range of approaches, or make players feel mastery by repeatedly exploring the same locations. For a fast movement game, one of the best comparisons is Burnout Paradise.

Burnout Paradise is a speedy franchise that successfully moved from linear tracks to an open city. It works because every event takes advantage of the sandbox.

Races and marked man challenges send the player from one side of the map to the other, with no strict limits on the route. Road rage and stunt run events let the player take down cars or build combos in any direction, without worrying about a track suddenly ending.

Because all of Burnout Paradise happens in the same city, the player repeatedly drives over the same roads and gradually learns routes, shortcuts, boost refills, and corner cuts.

Every race also ends at one of a small set of finish lines. Over time, the player becomes familiar with the approaches to those endpoints. The city becomes a skill test, not just scenery between events.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst does not work the same way. Dashes, fragile deliveries, covert deliveries, and dead drops are point-to-point runs, but they usually aim at arbitrary spots on short, predetermined routes.

There are often shortcuts that improve the time, but they tend to sit just off the main path of that particular event.

The result is that the open world feels carved into tiny chunks. At that point, the events could almost sit in a menu and feel no less linear than the races in the first Mirror's Edge, which turned small sections of story levels into speed runs.

Shortcuts are found through repeated play of the specific event, not through a broader knowledge of the City of Glass.

That broader city knowledge is limited for several reasons.

First, the main missions do not take place in the open world, so the player does not spend enough meaningful time learning its layout. Second, the city has few memorable landmarks to help orientation.

Third, and most importantly, the game is extremely difficult to play without obsessively following the wispy red Runner's Vision trail.

Runner's Vision can be reduced or turned off, but the confusing city layout makes it feel almost necessary. The open world constantly funnels the player into linear corridors, trapped between towers too tall to climb, buildings too low to land on, and enormous gaps between rooftops.

That structure can recreate the classic Mirror's Edge feeling of flowing through an obstacle course, but it is terrible for navigation. The problem is especially sharp between large clusters of buildings, where there are only a few viable connections.

A waypoint might sit directly ahead, but the only real route could require a huge detour around the city. If that structure comes from loading the world in chunks, it is understandable technically, but it still damages how the player reads the space.

Because of that layout, Catalyst cannot easily support missions like Burnout Paradise or Crazy Taxi.

Crazy Taxi gives the player a broad arrow toward the destination, then asks them to make it under the target time through both driving skill and city knowledge. A Mirror's Edge version could have been excellent: pick up a package, deliver it across the open world, and succeed through navigation plus momentum.

That would create a different kind of gameplay from the campaign's linear missions. It would test whether the player understands the city and can maintain flow across a long self-directed route.

But in the fractured, maze-like City of Glass, that mission would likely collapse into following the red line or falling to your death.

One feature does fit the open world: player-made time trials. Players can create their own routes through the City of Glass, which would not work as well in a purely linear game where the strongest sections are already converted into official races.

Even here, Burnout Paradise offers a stronger model. It puts leaderboards on every road, so competition is passive and constant. The player is always encouraged to drive faster, take risks, and improve their mastery of the city.

Burnout also keeps collectibles aligned with motion. Smashing gates and billboards happens while driving. Catalyst collectibles, by contrast, often stop the player dead to open a fuse box or poke at an object.

Even mission givers in Burnout are part of the motion. They race past and challenge the player to give chase, instead of standing around waiting to be activated.

Catalyst does have one mission type that uses the open world well: security hub side quests.

These ask the player to defeat guards, smash a tower, and then escape from a helicopter. Like stunt run events in Burnout Paradise, the player can run in any direction, picking any route that keeps enough momentum to outrun the chase.

There is no predetermined path and no single correct direction. Any knowledge of the City of Glass helps the player avoid dead ends and drops.

Unfortunately, the best strategy is still to follow the red line to the nearest safe house, where the chase immediately ends. The design gets close to a strong open-world parkour mission, then lets the guidance system solve it.

The lesson is not that Mirror's Edge cannot work in an open world. The movement mechanics are compatible with free roaming, and an open play space could create mission types that complement the linear and puzzle-like campaign missions.

The problem is the combination of choices: a fractured layout, heavy reliance on Runner's Vision, side quests that behave like short linear slices, and main missions that happen in isolated bespoke spaces.

Burnout Paradise shows the stronger version of the idea. If the game is going to be open world, the city has to matter to events, shortcuts, navigation, collectibles, competition, and mastery.

Catalyst has flashes of that possibility, especially in player-made time trials and helicopter escapes. But most of the time, the City of Glass is not a place the player learns and exploits. It is a complicated route network that the red line solves for them.