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[Throughout this, I abbreviate the first game as ME1 and the second as MEC or simply Catalyst. At the end are a few gameplay clips to illustrate some of the points I make.]
My recent back-to-back replay was really interesting. It’s notable to me how I caught myself thinking “ugh, this chapter” a lot in ME1, but thinking “oh I love this mission” a lot in Catalyst. There is a certain satisfaction to the movement in ME1; you’re slower and weightier, so mistakes cost more, but when you get a sequence down fluidly it’s the best feeling in the world. In Catalyst, it’s a lot easier to feel good. The movement mechanics are somewhat improved (my favorite really being just the sense of speed), and the combat is vastly more palatable. But Catalyst feels like it suffers from some deeper, more fundamental design issues.
Catalyst has a big “open world” - but it doesn’t want you to explore it. I remember that it took me a long time to understand the “cameras” the first time I played this game. But any time you hear “scanning gridPrint”, you have to move away as soon as possible - if you stay in a place where the cameras can see you for more than 10-15 seconds, suddenly you have to run from a K-Sec ambush. I’m sure the intention of this was to encourage players to keep on the move and experiment with new routes, but the effect is that new players get frustrated and everyone is discouraged from exploring the area. It’s not always clear when/where you’re in range of a camera, and when you hear the alert (which isn’t subtitled), you only have a few seconds to move out of range (the size of which is also not clear). This leads to the experience I now have when traversing between missions, where I know I have to stay on the move, hammering the Alt key to stay on course (otherwise I have to stop to reorient myself, putting myself at risk of getting scanned), absolutely not able to internalize the routes I’m taking OR explore around for anything but the most minor shortcuts/optimizations, and only the most rudimentary idea of how the city fits together. It also discourages you from slowing down for collectibles, of which there are many.
The map is also largely useless - if you have a waypoint down it can give you a general idea of which way to go, but it’s not detailed enough for figuring out navigation if you’re really stuck or if you want to scout possible routes. The missions themselves are really well-designed, though, and most of them are a real joy to run and try to perfect, including the side missions and deliveries/dashes.
This is a more minor thing, but I also never liked the decision to lock away some of the fundamental movement from ME1 behind progression. There are some neat new movement features, and I generally think the learning curve is well done, but I don’t get the point of taking away skill rolls and quickturns early on. I guess it was to reduce the complexity at the start of the game, but (a) you’re still learning the timing for skill rolls, it’s literally just a different (slower) animation, and (b) quickturns are really fundamental in the first game, so it instantly alienates returning players.
One thing I do like about the movement is the surfacing of the more subtle flow mechanic in ME1 - it's important in ME1 for good movement, but tying it into the combat system was a great innovation imo, since it actually encourages you to run past/through combat whenever possible by explicitly rewarding you for keeping focus. The combat is still MEC's weakest point, but it feels actually integrated with the gameplay and much more satisfying to pull off successfully in the few sections where it's required. While I still dislike the choice to lock them behind “upgrade points,” the additional combat moves of dodging and switching places are so well-executed that I often find myself trying to do them in ME1 (usually right before I get hit in the face by a gun butt).
I can't honestly say I don't like MEC's visual design - it's a very pretty game - but it is much more visually cluttered than ME1, and this contributes to the navigational challenges. In ME1, the pieces of the environment highlighted by runner vision were more like checkpoints - they highlighted the next segment you were aiming for, and were often the critical point in the path. You could get to them any way you wanted, and you could sometimes skip them, but that was either an advanced challenge or not possible. In MEC, runner's vision lights up your whole path. The game tells you “the marked path might not be the fastest,” but the marks are both close together and oddly spaced, and there's not often a good sense of where you're aiming to go that it actively discourages you from exploring other potential routes (other than very obvious minor optimizations). I think a lot of these issues stem from the “open-world”-ness of the map; if, at any given point in the map, you can “go anywhere”, you end up looking at viable paths in every direction, especially when the runner's vision appears as an overlay to the already colorful world rather than more clearly pointing out a destination. Similarly, it's also common to end up in a ‘valley’, where you have climbable routes all around you, but without a good idea of where you're ultimately aiming for, you feel lost.
It was also notable to me that ME1 does a subtle but good job of orienting you in the world, even when it's fairly linear - almost every chapter starts with Merc or Faith pointing out the ultimate goal (“the building with the dog head,” “the CEC news building”), and often starts you off facing it, even if your first move to get there is at a 90 degree turn. MEC abandons this completely, relying on map waypoints and the runner's vision, and as such I often had no idea when things would be near each other, or what part of the city I (or my target) was in. I remember noticing this most notably in an early MEC mission where they tell you to go to “Elysium Labs”, and then plunk you down facing an alley. In ME1, the name of a building would almost always be followed by a short description and at least a brief look at the tower itself.
I think ME1 is a more effective game in that it’s better designed, more directed and focused - it’s not trying to do too much at once. I think the main thing it suffers from is just being a game from 2009. The hint button, while still preferable to MEC’s take, will not infrequently send you careening off an edge if you hit it while running. There are some janky platforms and collisions, especially as your skill level increases - there’s generally plenty of room to grow and change your approach, but some pieces are tunneled so you have to complete them slowly/at the level of a lower-skilled player. And of course, the combat drags the game down significantly, especially in the latter half. The game does not want you to use guns if you have any alternative - guns slow you down, and you need to succeed in what’s essentially a risky and unreliable quicktime event to get one. But the melee combat is limited and clunky, and guns are by far the most efficient way to get rid of heavily armed enemies. While you can (and should!) avoid combat as much as possible, the few gunfights that are harder to avoid bring the game to a screeching halt as you disarm an enemy and stalk the rest slowly through the environment at ground level.
Clips from ME1 to illustrate above points:
Clips from MEC to illustrate the above points: