It’s easy to get drawn in by the unmistakable chrome and neon look of the Tron movies. It definitely made Tron: Catalyst, a top-down action game set in a different virtual world than those we’ve seen in the films, catch my eye. But in this case, those aesthetics only carried me so far. It doesn’t make any critical system errors, but almost every part of it seems like it could have used a little more compute time.
Catalyst focuses on a determined and likeable courier program, Exo, who gets mixed up in a sweeping conspiracy relating to a potential hard reset of the server she and her fellow digital consciousnesses reside on. This Arq Grid was created by Kevin Flynn, AKA Jeff Bridges from the films, and is currently the stage for an interesting political struggle between the authoritarian organization Core and their free-thinking opponents, Automata. Getting to explore this world held my attention, but a lot about it felt two-dimensional.
Most of the life it has is injected by occasional dialogue scenes with fairly respectable but somewhat inconsistent voice acting, and I’m not sure the cartoon character art hit quite the right tone. It almost reminds me of the animated kids’ shows Disney often does these days to follow up many of their popular, live-action blockbusters. And that doesn’t quite fit the gloomy, noir vibes of apocalyptic intrigue. I did like the character designs conceptually, though. Every major player is certainly distinct and imaginative.
The plot is also just alright. At the risk of repeating myself, Catalyst really is the picture of a game that is merely pretty good and rarely ever great, in just about every arena. I was interested in the various factions and sub-factions, but they never got fleshed out enough to matter. I was intrigued by the central mystery and the looming threat of the server ending, but I rarely felt a strong urgency to unravel those threads. The writing at least does what it needs to do to move things, but frequently relies on what feel like deliberate leaps of logic to avoid breaking up the flow of a level.
The best example of this is the Glitch, a condition affecting Exo that allows her to reset the server to an earlier state. This is essentially a way to start the current chapter over from the beginning, but retaining any knowledge you’ve gained, abilities you’ve earned, and shortcuts you’ve unlocked remaining open. It’s a very clever idea, but I feel like this mechanic had a lot more potential than what it ends up being used for.
Most of the time, I simply pressed the reset button when the quest objective told me to, or when I’d goofed up big time by getting too much heat from the Core enforcers. There weren’t enough instances in which I felt like I could use it in a clever or dynamic way to open up optional paths or gain an advantage I wouldn’t have had simply by following the main quest rigidly. It’s a time loop story without a lot of opportunities to exploit the fact that you know what’s going to happen. Time travel is always tricky to work with, and Tron: Catalyst mostly plays it safe in that regard.
Combat is also, and I’m sorry again for sounding like a broken record, but… it’s fine. The controls are very responsive and the animations are kinetic and snappy. It looks cool as hell to dance back and forth through a pack of cyber cops, bouncing the light disc off walls and slashing away with stylish violence. But it started to feel fairly repetitive and never really got my blood pumping or my neurons firing in the way a better action game might because its attempts to keep me on my toes never succeeded at breaking me out of the same basic hack and slash routine.
There’s a respectable difficulty curve, introducing new mechanics along the way like the ability to steal an enemy’s code to copy their fighting style, or bosses that can only be damaged by parrying one of their attacks first. But too many fights can still be concluded swiftly and with token effort by spamming dodge and melee attacks. Eventually Catalyst introduces a stealth system, but I didn’t use it except when I was forced to because it’s pretty dull, and fighting through a level the loud way seemed so risk-free that it didn’t even offer a meaningful advantage.
The key problem with combat is that it usually doesn’t feel necessary to think very tactically to progress on the default difficulty. This is the entire skill tree right here, and it’s possible to fill it out completely long before the end of the journey if you’re meticulous about looking for secrets like I am, so there aren’t a lot of either/or choices to make. Even stolen enemy abilities that can power up your attacks like this blade module didn’t end up feeling all that impactful for me, to the point that I wasn’t bothering with them in the majority of fights. To be clear, it’s not bad. It’s fun enough. But that’s all it ever is.
Of course, a Tron game without light cycles would be very odd indeed, so Catalyst gives you one pretty early on that makes it quick and enjoyable to navigate some of its larger areas. Many outdoor zones still ended up being a bit cramped for how fast this thing is, though. And the few instances of light cycle combat or chases highlighted how clunky it can feel in certain circumstances. There’s even a light jet you get to pilot later, but this felt even more like a minigame and less like a well-thought-out mechanic.
Maybe the aspect I was most underwhelmed by, though, was the music. At this point, I associate the Tron universe with the likes of Daft Punk and Trent Reznor. And that’s a high bar, I’ll admit. I doubt any of those guys are available to create bespoke music for a project of this modest scale. But Tron: Catalyst’s subdued, understated, overly safe blend of orchestral and electronic never gave me the chills I was looking for, even when I put my nice headphones on and turned the volume way up.
The score often fades into the background because it’s too repetitive, and it doesn’t vary enough in intensity between stretches of low-key exploration and the biggest plot reveals or action sequences. Sure, it does the job. But if there’s one aspect where I would expect a Tron tie-in to go above and beyond, it would be the music. So it was harder to accept “merely acceptable” on that front.
While it might sound like damning with faint praise, I honestly think one of the aspects of Tron: Catalyst that works best is its restrained scope and length. It didn’t even take me 12 hours to finish, playing pretty meticulously, and that’s just about exactly how much attention I had to give its digital world. It would have been really easy to overstay its welcome, especially with the meager trickle of new mechanics it doles out, so it was definitely a smart decision to not pad this out. Playtime isn’t directly correlated with quality, and I respect how much this adventure respected my time.
