Mirror’s Edge is a game of two feuding halves. On one side you have this beautiful milky looking city to play in, and the illusion that you’re getting to experience the fashionable pastime of Parkour; the insane art of getting from point a to point b via needless danger, the other is the reality that the game is a refreshing but linear 3D puzzle/platform game with clunky actiony gunplay bits bolted on to try and fool a first person shooter fan into thinking that the game is just that. 

When Mirror’s Edge is in full flow though it really is a treat. The food for critism I’ve heard others level at the game seems to come mainly from its trial-and-error gameplay. This is certainly no kind of game-breaker though, and forgivable given the perspective and theme of the game. A ‘free running’ platform game needs to find its difficulty from somewhere, and tricky platform sections that require a keen mastery of the controls (which actually find you quite nicely), and a good understanding of the environment, is all fine with me, as were the frequency of regeneration checkpoints (that seem to bizarrely get more frequent the further in the game you get) which helped to keep the game flowing and not become tiny triangular shards scattered across my living room floor.

Eventually you will find yourself scaling skyscrapers with the grace and ease of Peter Parker (or should that be Peter Parkour?). And you’ll probably, like I did, get the impression that it’s all down to you getting better at the game, getting better at reading the lay of the levels and becoming ‘one’ with its design.  Having stepped back from the game though I came to the belief that might not be the case at all.

Because the puzzles always have a control/action based solution, and Faith (the character you control in the game) only has a handful of controls/actions, you simply get better at reacting to the same four or so puzzle-types that pop up in the game; patterns cleverly disguised by their surroundings.  This is no bad thing though as the game hides this fact by feeling rewarding. 

No, the biggest issues I had with Mirror’s Edge was its banal story, the needless gun bits - which jar heavily against the excellent and polished free running sections - and the clear lack of replay value. Online Time Trials are all fine and good if that’s your thing, but for many people the six or seven hours that make up its single player lifespan just won’t be good enough. I managed to picked it up in Game for £20 over the holidays and finished over the course of two days, and while I really enjoyed the game while it lasted, I can honestly say I haven’t felt the urge to return to it. 

Although the forthcoming VR Missions-style DLC, which is said to remove the story and gunplay in favour of focusing solely on the platforming action, sounds like it has the potential to change my mind.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.