I love the first Mirror's Edge so much that I literally cheered when the reboot, now called Mirror's Edge Catalyst

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“ You can't use guns, but what you can do is run.

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“ I can see Billboard Hack being an alluring mission type.

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Good news: we're tracking toward the former happening rather than the latter. I finally got to play the new Mirror's Edge, and I came away very happy. DICE doesn't seem to have screwed it up. They've doubled down on the de-emphasis of firearms. In fact, they even do the original game better: you can't even pick up a gun in Catalyst.My 12-minute timed hands-on allowed me to tackle one of three missions in any order I chose. I could take Faith on a Race, Delivery, or Billboard Hack. The first is self-explanatory -- DICE has incorporated the popular (and excellent) time trials into the main game this time, rather than segregate them into a separate game mode. Laudably, you can simply hold down X for a few seconds at any time in order to restart, so if you screw up and want to take it again, you're spared a few inconvenient button presses and a trip to the menu.I was most excited to try a Delivery, which would allow me to fight some of Glass' armored authoritarians who stood in the way of me delivering a data stick to a drop box. And fight I did, but my short hands-on wasn't enough time to figure out any nuances to the melee combat system. I simply mashed each attack button and the guys dropped. And at one point, I triggered some sort of special finishing move without realizing it, which pulled the camera out to third-person and let me watch Faith put the knockout hurt on a bad guy. I'll need more time with the game to either learn the system's intricacies or see if it's just that clunky.Finally, Catalyst is powered by DICE's own Frostbite engine -- the same tech that now powers Battlefield and, really, most of EA's premier offerings. I wasn't blown away by sharp, primary color-driven color minimalism of of Catalyst's look, but that may simply be because it's not new anymore. I can report that Catalyst sticks to the aesthetic blueprint designed by the original Mirror's Edge. In fact, that sentence still rings true even if you remove the word "aesthetic," and that's exactly what Mirror's Edge fans like me have been hoping for.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.