Despite loving Disney’s Tron all my life, I came away from last year’s Tron: Identity feeling thoroughly underwhelmed. What the short, narrow visual novel lacked in meaningful choices, it made up for in boring puzzles. One thing it did well however, was introduce us to the Arq Grid, a dying system abandoned by its Users, full of factions vying for control in the face of a coming disaster.
While also messy and limited in its own ways,Tron: Catalystsuccessfully manages to build on the intrigue of the first game, and gives us a bold new take on the Grid to finally explore in full in the process.
Finally Exploring Arq
Set some time after Identity, Catalyst follows Exo, a Courier Program caught in a glitch that grants them the power to ‘loop’ – travel back in time and change their actions. Pursued by the tyrannical Core guard Conn, Exo has to use their time loop abilities to raise a resistance against Core, while also working to prevent the incoming Glitch Storm that could spell the end of the Arq System itself.
The game assumes you’ve played Identity, and has multiple returning characters and plot threads.
You’re free to explore various sandbox maps in Arq, from the Vertical Slice city to the ravaged Outlands, and along the way you need to make use of your time loop abilities (and other skills you pick up later in the game) to complete missions for your would-be allies.
Though it isn’t a roguelike, the flow of its combat and how you acquire new abilities from allies who you quickly come to care about far more than Exo makes it feel very Hades-esque. Unfortunately, that comparison isn’t particularly flattering for Catalyst.
Despite having open maps and time-bending powers to play with, Catalyst holds your hand to a fault. While you may loop back and restart an area’s events almost whenever you like, there’s zero experimentation to Exo’s powers – you simply don’t interact with the loop mechanic at all until the game tells you to, and that’s usually at the end of an act after an endless chain of objectives that are simply heading to map markers and pressing a button when you get there.
The combat is even more egregious. It tries to recreate the fast-paced disc warsTronis known for, but ‘clunky’ would be underselling just how terrible it feels. Enemies frequently get stuck in scenery or simply stop reacting, and those that don’t glitch out have tanky walls of HP. There’s no impact to your attacks – enemies simply keep going until they die, with no reaction to you putting a disc through their faces.
The only way to make the combat passable is to unlock the upgrade that turns parries into instant kills. Once you’ve unlocked that, most fights are over in seconds, and you don’t need to worry about silly things like ‘dodging’ or ‘strategy’. I even took out the final boss in a matter of seconds this way.
Light cycle battles are seamlessly integrated into the levels’ more open areas, and are great fun. So long as the NPCs don’t get stuck on the scenery, which they frequently do.
A Bit BASIC
But the combat, and even the story, aren’t the star of Tron: Catalyst – it’s the setting itself. The Arq Gridis a fascinating world, and manages to offer a new take on the neon-drenched Grid while still feeling undeniably faithful to Tron. There’s clearly a lot of love for the series here, while also expanding on its mythology. I particularly loved one side-quest that has you explore Vertical Slice for escaped bits, with the reward being one following you for the rest of the game, happily chirping away with “Yes” and “No”.
The maps aren’t the biggest, but they each feel unique and offer their own obstacles; the checkpoints in Vertical Slice limit your actions less you trigger a security alert that prevents you from looping, while the Core stronghold is more of a stealth area as you disguise yourself as one of them.
Fortunately, Catalyst sows a lot of seeds for a potential third part, so there’s hope we’ll get to see even more of the system in the future.
I’m eager to see where Bithell Games goes with a third game. Catalyst’s story might have been serviceable at best, but its cast of characters have potential to become something very special when they’re not being reset by time loops every few minutes. Unfortunately, we never get to see this come to fruition in Catalyst, as the story wraps itself up and the credits roll with nothing of note really happening.
Tron: Catalyst’s fatal flaw is that it plays everything overly safe, and never rises too far above ‘fine’. It’s terrified of you getting lost in an excellent world that could have been ripe for exploring, and its systems aren’t developed enough to make combat or looping ever feel engaging. It never quite shakes off the feeling of being a budget Hades; it’s, at the very least, a fine way to kill a few hours, even if you forget about it immediately after.
