TRON is a difficult franchise to adapt and carry forward, especially as a video game. It’s always been a divisive series, often revered for its unique visual style and just as often brushed off for its paper-thin storylines. For fans of the series, the story was never the point; it’s a vehicle for visual metaphor and slick as hell neon light on black glass geometric designs. Just thinking about it gets my mental juices flowing. But for a franchise rooted so deeply in video games, TRON games have always struggled to find footing even with some of its most dedicated fans.
Reviewer’s Note: This review was written prior to the news about Bithell Games staff layoffs and we are deeply saddened at this development. Our sympathies go out to all of the people affected.
Bithell Games seems like one of the most logical choices then, to compliment the iconic visuals of TRON with engaging storytelling and meaningful character development. For a series that has always been big on spectacle, heavy-handed with metaphor, and superficial in its attempts to create meaningful story, this is a sensible pairing, especially considering TRON: Identity, Bithell Games’ first outing in this playground, fared decently well among critics and fans alike.
Unfortunately, while TRON: Catalyst does deliver on strong characters and an interesting story, it stumbles over the same troublesome bits that many of its forebears have in gameplay that isn’t particularly bad nor particularly great, so much as just gameplay that’s there and is perfectly fine but mostly unexciting and serves primarily as a means to move you from story point to story point.
I am a long time fan of TRON, dating back to seeing the first movie in 1989 at the tender age of five, and having it leave an indelible impression on my very much in-development child brain. I spent my entire childhood and teenage years craving more content in that universe, and in 2003 I finally got a big chunk of more content with Tron 2.0, Monolith Production’s direct sequel to the original movie in the form of a first person adventure and shooter that was frankly better than it had any right to be owing to Monolith’s pedigree as a really good game studio.
I ate that game up. My friends and I had small LAN parties dedicated to playing the light cycle and disc warrior multiplayer modes. As an 18 year old, it felt momentous. I also unapologetically saw TRON: Legacy in theaters three times when it came out in 2010, and I enjoyed every moment of it. You know what, that movie is pretty good, actually, even with its flaws and middling story. It’s a visual feast and it knows exactly what it’s doing, and you can’t fault it for that. It also doesn’t have to worry about designing engaging gameplay that needs to hold up for at least eight hours, so it’s not a fair comparison.
TRON: Catalyst nails several aspects of its deliveries; the character design is excellent, and the implementation of the 3D world in the unmistakable TRON art style is also spot on, to the point that I think the game does a great job of introducing really fun new visual elements that feel right at home on the Arq Grid, Catalyst’s new setting that gives it room to take creative license with the world and try new things without breaking established concepts. It’s a smart move.
The game world looks utterly fantastic, and as you start to roam the rain-soaked city streets in the game’s early stages it feels as much like a Noir-inspired crime thriller as it does a game set within TRON, which is a pairing that works really well and sets up a lot of opportunities for things to get fun and exciting. And you do spend a fair amount of time having conversations, chasing down mysteries, and gathering information; you know, things a detective might do, which is where the game is generally doing its best work.
While moving between locations to talk to different characters and explore spaces is fun, it does sometimes feel like the world is somehow both full of programs but light on anything substantial to do; things sometimes feel too spread out and most of the NPCs don’t have much to say (which is fine, they’re NPCs), but that ends up feeling in conflict with the scale of the world that’s been laid before you and the amount of running around starts to feel just a bit too much.
Catalyst‘s special sauce is the Glitch loop mechanic, an ability your character gains very early on in the game which allows you to “reset” the current loop you’re in, where you maintain all of the knowledge, items, skills, and unlocks you’ve gained but move the clock back to the beginning of the current cycle, which allows you to advance the story that require your presence or intervention at crucial moments that you would not have been privy to before. It’s a good use of a system that has worked well in other games, and in many (but not all) cases it leans on your knowledge more than anything to set you up to move forward.
There’s also a fair amount of fighting, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in most cases, the combat scenarios that break out are there for good reason, and you’re well equipped to deal with those scenarios thanks to being able to use your Identity Disc for a both melee and ranged combat. The combat system does a good enough job of making you feel like you’re inside TRON doing TRON disc combat, which is to say that’s generally how combat is portrayed in the films and so at least competent disc combat is required for it to feel accurate.
The combat isn’t bad by any stretch; you’re well empowered enough to dispatch most enemies and the upgrades you can unlock give you sufficient power to really whoop some ass, so much so that parrying becomes somewhat overpowered and combat is generally more of an exercise in clearing the screen as quickly as possible than it is anything meaningful. Again, this is fine, and not necessarily a problem, so much as it’s just another thing you do along the way, and that is where my quibbles with it lie. It sits somewhere between “routine” combat and power fantasy fulfillment without really committing to either and so it feels like a side activity.
I don’t know if that was intentional or not; the things I have always enjoyed about Bithell Games’ offerings are the focus on stories and characters, and the combat here seems designed specifically to be just enough of a bump to give you something else to do on some occasions, but not enough of a bump to break your momentum. It makes sense that you would have combat in a TRON game, and it is fitting for the scenario and the character’s circumstances, but I’m not convinced it’s particularly additive.
This is something of a microcosm of the entire game’s condition; much of it feels caught in between wanting to be multiple things but not able to fully commit to any of them. It comes so close to being a full-on cyberpunk crime thriller in the vein of something like Shadowrun Returns, but it doesn’t go nearly as deep in its story and world building, or its combat design. There are enough moments where I can feel TRON: Catalyst straining to be a deeper, richer experience, that I feel like I can see sources of inspiration (and even aspiration) hanging just offstage, but where mechanics were deliberately kept lean in service of advancing the story.
That approach does make sense in this case, given Bithell Games’ previous work and their emphasis on story-driven experiences. TRON: Catalyst is a perfectly fine game that is enjoyable enough, but I can’t get past looking at what it could be instead of what it is; either another story-focused experience similar to TRON: Identity, or a really fleshed-out cyberpunk experience borrowing from the likes of Shadowrun or Disco Elysium or even Stray, marrying rich story with intricate systems and deliberately designed environments.
I’m not sure that it was ever intended to be any of that, though; I think it’s doing exactly what it was designed to, which is to be a more feature-rich vehicle for the story Bithell Games wanted to tell, and to that end it succeeds. It’s a fun ride, I liked the story, and I’m always happy for any excuse to spend time in the world of TRON. I would love to have seen TRON: Catalyst push even more though, as I think the potential within it is greater than what it delivers.
A Steam code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
