Tron: Catalyst Review (Patreon)

Tron: Catalyst is the follow-up to 2023’s Tron: Identity, which established the “Arq Grid,” a server separate from most of the Tron stuff you’ve seen in the films. This really gives the games room to breathe on their own, and the writing is smart about how and when it makes references to those movies. Identity is a visual novel, which is fine for establishing the world, but between some lackluster puzzle design and its overall pacing, I found it to be pretty hard to get into. On some level I’m just never going to be a visual novel guy, I suppose. Catalyst trades in much of the visual novel stuff in favor of an isometric action game, with real-time combat against groups of enemies, a skill tree, and what ends up becoming the widest parry window in on the grid. All together, it’s an enjoyable story that incorporates time loops to interesting effect, and a decent enough action game to keep you moving through its various locations.

In Tron: Catalyst you play as Exo, a courier who, after an accident, becomes glitched and starts experiencing time loops. This provides both the game’s main narrative thrust as well as a solid video game-ass reason for you to respawn after falling in combat. The game exposes you to this concept early on by having you just miss someone you were trying to meet after succeeding in the arena. By clicking in the right stick, you can bail out on your current loop and do things differently next time. The story keeps track of that stuff for you and guides you, in this case, directly to the character you need to meet. You retain the knowledge gained on each loop, so this isn’t a game about precisely retracing your steps again and again to have the “perfect day” or anything. Instead you get in, get the info you need, and if you need to roll things back to get new information or access, the game lets you know. This makes it a mostly linear experience, though it does have a handful of secondary quests to complete along the way.

In Tron: Catalyst you are either talking to people (well, programs), fighting people (programs!!!), or navigating the world to go between those two things. The world itself is mostly straightforward, and story progress will bring you from one zone to the next. In some of the larger areas you can drive a light cycle, and in the main city someone behind Tron: Catalyst was cool and smart enough to know that there should be a drawbridge that’s always up, giving you a place to do some sick light cycle jumps. The nature of the camera angle means that you can sometimes get caught fighting in the shadow of a building, making it hard to see the action, but it’s fine. Combat is… not especially difficult, anyway.

While you can occasionally talk your way out of a fight, there is quite a bit of combat in Tron: Catalyst. It’s a straightforward affair that develops some interesting tricks along the way. At the start, you can perform melee attacks, throw your disc, roll, and block/parry incoming attacks. The skill tree and story progress gives you a few new tricks, such as the ability to suck code out of stunned enemies, which changes up your attacks for a brief period of time. I found the two most useful upgrades on the skill tree to be one that increases the damage on your successful parries to the point that it kills most enemies in one hit and a second that widens the parry window to an almost ridiculous degree.

With those upgrades, you can wait for any flash of an incoming attack and just hold down the Y button to more or less automatically parry and kill the incoming attacker. A few enemies prefer ranged attacks, but if you close the gap on them they’ll try out a melee attack string that you can immediately crush. Once you go down that very short road of upgrades, the combat in the rest of the game is pretty much an afterthought, at least on the default setting. Even the game’s final boss went down after a single parry, it’s… I mean, I don’t know, it’s too much? It seems overpowered in an almost broken way? That said, the combat itself is a little plain across the board, so having a win button that at least makes you feel like an overwhelmingly powerful warrior of the grid wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Just don’t go in expecting a lot of depth.

As you make your way through the story, the game continues to do surprising and neat things with the time loop concept, eventually giving you reasons to revisit every little corner of the world one more time on your way to the final confrontation. While this final chapter is a lot heavier on the backtracking than the rest of the game, it’s for reasons that feel very meaningful and cool, from a story perspective. And that story, ultimately, is why you’re here. Watching Exo deal with the different factions of the city, befriending one of them just long enough to get info only to rewind time and do something entirely different next time. Or going on crazy, combat-heavy incursions into what would normally be thought of as friendly territory because, hey, you’re going to loop back to a point before all that, anyway? Really neat. By the time you start to figure out what’s actually going on and what you’re going to do to stop it, you’ve seen the story from a lot of different angles, giving you a great look at every faction’s motivation. It might’ve been nice to have a little bit more control over that outcome, but the way the story goes in the end is compelling enough on its own to override that need for “player” “choice.”

You don’t need to have played and remembered everything about Tron: Identity to get the story in Catalyst. There are some interesting callbacks that certainly matter, but the game does a fine job of explaining those to you as they’re happening, preventing you from getting lost. There’s also a codex to visit, in case you want to get your head around anything from what the Automata faction is all about, what the heck ENCOM is, and a lot of stuff in-between.

Tron: Catalyst has a lot of fun with its core concept and takes you on a neat little ride over its six or so hours of action. I do think there are a handful of things about it—the combat could be more compelling, a lot of dialogue isn’t voiced, and so on—that could be tweaked and improved, but as someone who has found it almost impossible to get into a lot of the Tron side stuff over the decades, from games to comics to cartoons, I found Catalyst very easy to enjoy.

4/5