Review: Mirror's Edge

Welcome to the Mirror's Edge, watch you step as you may fall. Scrap that, you will fall, lots.

{ Mon 12th January 2009 }

When Mirror's Edge first appeared you couldn't help but be intrigued. DICE, long-time developers of the (rather successful) Battlefield series FPSs were ditching the 'S' to create a platform/adventure game in the first-person. Set in a rather sterile dystopian future, where the government has become 'big brother' and controls all communication, the game would follow Faith, a runner working to deliver uncontrolled information across the city, by traversing across the top of that very city.

It'd be fair to say that the more I saw and heard about the game the more interested I became. Everything from the thoughtful dot in the centre of the screen (to prevent motion sickness), the gorgeous looking environment (simple, clean and striking), the design of Faith (a female protagonist who's form fits function, and who's action figure wouldn't just fall forwards) and the simple control scheme all sounded appealing. There were red flags of course, the main one being that this was being published by EA, who aren't necessarily the company you associate with exciting new IPs. But hey, I was willing to give it a chance.

So could DICE pull off something a little bit different, a little bit special? Getting hands on with the demo it seemed so, it was the final push I needed, Mirror's Edge has secured my purchase.

This is the Mirror's Edge

Before you can get underway you'll have to sit through the obligatory in-game tutorial that teaches you the basics building blocks of your movement, with moving up and down mapped to the left bumpers, R1 spinning you 180˚ and R2 your attack option. There's a couple of other buttons, an action button, one to engage a sort of bullet-time slow down effect, and one for disarming enemies, though it's the shoulder buttons that will see the most action throughout the game.

The controls are not what you'd expect, but they work rather well: run along and press L1 to hop over or jump up something, L2 will cause you to slide. You can use combinations as well, such as jumping at a wall with L1 and then using R1 and L1 in quick succession to perform a wall jump and get higher still. It takes a little getting used to, but it becomes almost like second nature in no time.

Lady in red

To help your progress through the various levels the game implements what it calls 'runner vision', whereby useful pieces of equipment — ramps you can jump from, pipes to grab or run across, wires to slide down — are highlighted in red, standing out against the cold environments. When this works, it works very well and can help keep you going in the right direction.

However, this is the first aspect in which the game comes a little unstuck. When it works, it does work well, but there's more than a few times when there's either nothing for the game to highlight, or it doesn't really bother. But surely the devs thought of this? To an extent they did, and so one of the buttons is a hint system that will point you at the place you're trying to get to. And if you have a clear line of site on the destination then this also works a treat, but more often than not, especially in any of the games many interior sections, you'll end up staring at a jaunty angle at some wall wondering where you're supposed to go.

For a game that lives on the momentum you build up, of always moving, this is a real dampener to the mood and proves to be one of the games many sources of frustration (especially if it occurs in conjunction with other frustrating elements), though it's far from the worst offender on that front.

More likely to drive up the frustration levels are any one of the thousands (and I pretty much mean that literally) you will find yourself plummeting to the ground and certain doom. This will happen for many different reasons, one being that you went a way you perhaps shouldn't have and got carried away with the momentum. The more infuriating times are when Faith plays the Lara Croft "I don't want to grab that" card and refuses to latch onto the glowing red scenery you missed by the smallest fraction. I lost count of the number of times I'd be a little left of a pipe or ledge, or just hold L1 a fraction too short. Needless to say I coloured the air a little blue on many of those occasions.

Don't point that at your feet

And then there's the combat; oh the combat. It seems DICE couldn't quite abandon their shooter heritage and somehow came to the conclusion that there should be quite a lot of combat in the game. Some of the time you can quite simply run and bound past the 'blues' that show up, but in quite a few places you're forced to deal with them before you can move on.

In these instances you might find yourself once again turning the air a little blue. The combat is no fun, not even in the slightest. With R2 you can punch, or slide and kick, or jump and kick, but landing blows is incredibly fiddly, and the blues require quite a good three or four hits before they'll go down. This is bad news for you as there's often a group of them and the mates of the guy you're currently kicking in the nads won't hesitate in filling you with hot lead.

You can attempt to disarm the various assailants with a well-timed button press, though this is easiest to execute in the faux bullet-time. This leaves you armed, though rather slowed down, so you need to ditch the weapon if you wish to continue in a speedy fashion (which is the way I chose to play the game first time through). Playing the game without guns makes things somewhat trickier, especially when the game throws a large number of blues at you, but it does have the advantage of avoiding the rather floaty and imprecise gun play (this would be the point at which PC fanboys can make their own console/imprecise control jokes), which rather betrays the fact that DICE should have quite a bit of expertise in that particular area.

It all adds up to a rather unpleasant and annoying combat experience every time a bunch of enemy sorts turn up, and for my money there was about 100% more combat in the game than there should have been.

Deliver this story for me

So what about the story, does that redeem the game in some fashion? Sadly not. The initial, and interesting, premise of a runner delivering information across the city to subvert a totalitarian government is all-too-quickly abandoned for a rather cliché tale of a murder and a cover-up, with a twist you will probably see coming a mile away and still not care about.

That said, it's a passable enough story I suppose and fairly ignorable on the whole. More irritating, and one of the first things you'll notice about the game, is the stylised animation they use for the introduction, as well as every subsequent between-level cut-scene. It's not a bad style particularly, but it pulls you out of the world they've clearly gone to some effort to establish (and have done so well), and feels somewhat clunky. Every time one appeared on screen I'd find myself thinking "Why the hell didn't they use the in-game engine for this story stuff?" In fact for a number of in-level story elements they do and it plays much, much better for it.

Run Faith, fun

But despite all that, all those little elements that were annoying, frustrating or just plain daft, there are moments in Mirror's Edge where the promise comes shining through, and it's glorious. Those moments are rarer than they should be, but when this game is good it is fantastic. Get a good run going, combo a number of moves or spot a crafty shortcut to bypass an obstacle quickly, it's a highly satisfying feeling. It's this aspect that makes me saddest that they ditched the initial runner premise so quickly as it's these moments of just you and the city, bounding over rooftops, sliding under vents and leaping across the skyline where the game is at its best.

This aspect is best explored in the game's race mode, where you need to race against rather tight time-limits to make it through checkpoints and to an end point. There are no guards, it's just you and the level, and whilst I've only played a little of this, I spent more time than I thought I would trying to work out how I could shave seconds off my time (and some real joy when I discovered a tasty shortcut or two).

The only downside to the 'world and you' aspect of the game is the times when the level design descends into a touch of over-repitition and laziness. There's a couple of levels that feel like game levels dressed up in the trappings of this make-believe world, rather than elements of the world that Faith can make use of (as DICE have clearly aimed for). The laziest of these moves are the loading lifts; that's right, free-running Faith will on a number of occasions seek refuge (and loading time) in lifts. Going up please.

Could you sign here

There's so many little things here that have the potential to frustrate that it'd be easy to think that I would hate this game, but despite its flaws (and there's no denying it has many), I can't help but find myself liking it. It's not a great game by a long shot, but it has moments of being a superb game, and if nothing else DICE are to be applauded for their ambition and trying something a little different. Hell, between this, Dead Space and FIFA 09 I find myself genuinely surprised with some of EA's big entries into the winter release schedule.

Sadly though, this game is yet another entry in the 'games that are perhaps a bit too short to justify their price' range that we seem to be getting a lot of at the moment. There is a decent amount of replay value to be had from the race and timetrials element I guess, if that sort of thing appeals, but if bought for just the story element you might be somewhat disappointed by how quickly it's all over.

As such it's another game I like that I can't really recommend the purchase of, though it's exactly the kind of game we should be buying if only to demonstrate to the industry that we don't want mini-game collections and lacklustre sequels. If you can find it cheap then I'd say give it a punt, or perhaps rent it, but it's definitely worth checking out, if only for those odd moments where it really shines.

One thing I will say, if DICE do a sequel and can work out the various kinks, they could have something special on their hands. Watch this space I guess.