I sure do fall in love with a lot of ideas lately, only to be let down by the execution.
I’ve been doing this for 25 years or so now, admittedly, and I continue the trend with Mirror’s Edge. Mirror’s Edge is supposedly a game of running, fast, away from trouble. Or that’s how it is at its best, and how I was told it would be by the demo. And a lot of it is indeed that way; when it works right it’s a lot of fun. Sadly, it spends a lot of time not working at all. It was great idea, marred by merely okay execution that didn’t get a middle ground between hand-holding and massive confusion, exchanging the idea of free movement for linear design.
The idea of the game is that you’re a courier, running who knows what over the rooftops (but too often through the buildings or down the street). You’re being chased by police as a person of interest in a murder case, your sister is the prime suspect, and that’s as good as the story gets. The setting is never explained, the characters are flat (particularly Faith, the player’s character), and the world…oh god, the bloom and HDR abuse prevent much of it from being seen, but it’s a bit too generic and unexplained, even if that’s the idea. A few bits of life in elevators via scrolling text, but otherwise it deels dead. Why isn’t there anyone in the subway? The trains are running, but you only encounter police. Aside from them, it’s a nearly dead world.
That said, it’s all very pretty, clean, smooth lines, good dimension, though things can look a little bland at times with the vast majority of things being a plain white color with a bit of texture added to avoid plain white polygons forming most surfaces. Occasional stripes of color do stand out well, sometimes a little too much, but it does make important things stand out in what is, presumably, an oppressive police state. Nice and whitewashed, except for useful world bits that turn red (the handholding option of Runner Vision, but the more fun one usually). You can turn the vision off, which is more challenging, more rewarding, but ultimately less fun, especially when the persistent clipping issues show up. Walls that look, an often are just out of range to climb, can often take multiple attempts, as if the game just doesn’t know what the hell you’re trying to do if you’re not on the optimum path it provides. The engine seems to think to itself, “Clearly the player is bouncing about for fun, not to climb to the top of that structure and escape death.” That’s definitely the most frustrating portion of the game, countless times I’d jump to something clearly in range, and just not grab on. Either a set of pipes, or a roof I’m right at when jumping, or a platform to climb. It’s a constant, repeating frustration when that happens, especially if it leads to death. At least Mirror’s Edge features lots of checkpoints, but when Faith doesn’t grab a bar slightly to the right of the center of the screen, you get annoyed. A lot.
It’s all too easy to get lost in same-y environments, even when the jumps are being made successfully. One setpiece blurs into another rapidly without runner vision, once again meaning the game is too easy or too hard. And even when players are making the right jump the first person perspective, while normally great, can lead to timing mishaps and a ton of missed jumps in a row. One particular set of late game jumps seemed to succeed or fail randomly, and even though I was going the right way, I spend 30 minutes trying to find an alternate route because the first three attempts from the same place failed. Just to add challenge, the lighting system or similar textures can make it easy to miss what you’re looking for. Too dark, too much metal inside, or too much bloom in outside environments. The HDR is a great idea, and could have worked wonderfully, but someone clearly cranked the slider way too high. Even after a few minutes outside you’re still blinded by bright white reflective surfaces, and I had to turn the contrast quite a ways down to actually see what was going on.
The idea is presented early that one should avoid combat when at all possible, but the game does force a few fights on players. While there are, theoretically, a great many useful attacks, they never get used. Rear takedowns and disarms, flying kicks, wall kicks, etc., are almost never used because the AI knows where you are too often to catch by surprise. If you don’t take enemies by surprise, the odds are staggeringly high that your attack will be countered mid-air, and on hard, you’ll hit the ground dead. To make matters worse, disarms from the front require extremely specific timing, and it’s not often players get the chance to use them anyway, due to the amount of time they take to execute, and the luck in getting the chance. Combat situations mean a lot of dying, only occasionally lucking into success when enemies get isolated. One particular sequence requires a disarm of an enemy you’ve never fought before, and if the one chance is missed, immediate cutscene death. Bad enough as is, but there’s a cutscene leading up to it every single time, and horribly precise timing required. It’s like the world’s most difficult one button QTE, and it’s so frustrating that it’s caused people to quit the game completely, just a few levels in.
Not that they missed a lot, Mirror’s Edge is very, very short the first time around, and when not struggling to find the only functional path, a casual player could probably breeze through the game in five hours or less. The top speed run scores give the game a time of approximately 1 hour and seven minutes, as of now, and two hours is a common average now. If you watch all the cutscenes, which I don’t recommend, the game is still only 8 hours at best the first time. As much as they might advance the thoroughly lacking story, they don’t really enhance the game, and the visual style is absolutely awful. The presentation is somewhat cel-shaded, somewhat crappy kids show, with character movement that looks totally unnatural, in contrast to the excellent animation of the game itself. There’s a lack of borders and outlines on most things, which could look great, but doesn’t fit with the semi-3d appearance. Cutscenes are, however, the only point with any real color, which I’d appreciate more if it I didn’t have such a tremendous disdain for the animation style itself. And at least they’re not loaded with HDR.
Of course, if it was all a failure, I’d never have finished the game. There are plenty of times when it works, and when it does it’s unlike anything I’ve played before. It’s easy to draw comparisons to platforming classics like Prince of Persia (the original or Sands of Time, really). The sense of flow and freedom can be astounding as you leap from a roof, swing off a pole overhead, roll on a landing, leap over a small obstacle and slide under a barricade all in one smooth motion. When the game is doing what the demo promised, it has an amazing purity. Rooftop chases and runs through multi-level building plazas result in a real adrenaline rush when players make a risky move to escape danger. Sadly, the game drops to flat terrain too often, resulting in more of a “run between these big things to not get shot” game, which is much, much less entertaining. Later areas are that more and more often, resulting in many annoying deaths since the player can only take a two solid shots without dying, and the enemy aims very, very well. And, it turns out, can land a punch that’s more devastating than any shotgun shell. Two rifle-butts and you’re dead most of the time, making that disarm approach even more frustrating. Combine that with the fact that you’re often being shot at during the attempt, well, it doesn’t work like it should. That’d be fine, except for the way fighting becomes more and more important later on. It seems like the intent was for players to be able to disarm enemies they got close to and escape, but it falls short in practice.
“Falls short in practice” might be the ultimate summary of the game. As a platformer, it’s fun but has some clipping issues. As a first person shooter on those occasions players get guns, it’s weak. As a racing game, it excels. The best use of the game is time trial mode, speed runs and small courses to challenge players to find the best routes and burn through them, though the clipping issues can become supremely frustrating at that point, killing those precious tenths of a second to reach the next time goal.
With DLC coming out soon based on time trials (granted in a magical floaty world of blocks, instead of the mostly enjoyable urban setting) , and perhaps a patch or two to tighten things up, Mirror’s Edge has the potential to become extremely fun, especially if multiplayer racing is added, as that really is the best part. Racing to escape from your enemies, going where they can’t. An adversarial co-op, allowing players to control enemies positioned in different places, or to just have runners teams compete would have really added to the game’s replay, but for now, it’s a few time trials, a short single-player experience that ends right when the story should take off (the first climactic point in the story, and it ends right there), and a few too many issues to make it worth buying.
Mirror’s Edge gets two out of five canes. The idea is great, the execution is weak. If the price drops and the DLC excels, go for it, but now, it’s a short rental. Here’s hoping the inevitable next installment takes care of the major issues.
