Review: Mirror's Edge

[Brian]

Type of game: Beautiful disaster.
Creator: EA.
Summary: HORRIFYING.

Now, for more details.  First off, Mirror's Edge the game, is the concept of 'free-running' (in the U.S.; also called parkour), which is basically the idea of movement being a sport, and dangerous urban terrain is the court.  EA's design team decided to make a game of this, where you can wall-run, jump, have tremendous upper body strength, and generally run around and have fun with freedom of movement.

Then they decided to fuck it all up with people who shoot at you and the false difficulty of not telling you where you should go (if you go the wrong way, you die).

The game is exactly what I described above -- no more, and probably actually much less.  There is a distopian society and some flimsy story that really isn't much of a story beyond, "Yeah, we're in a distopia that conveniently requires the free-running mechanic as a job description."  It was painfully obvious that the backstory is tacked on, because much of the exposition revolving around it is totally illogical.

SPOILER: For example, at one point, you're getting information from some public figure who is hanging from a ledge beneath you by one hand.  The police want to kill your character because this is a distopian society, and you're the main character.  A police sniper kills the man hanging from the ledge.  Despite the fact that there is no cover, your character stands up and looks down at the fallen body.

What sorry excuse for a sniper doesn't take the shot right then?  Why do they kill him, and let the new person who has information have a chance to run away?  They never have hesitated to shoot first and ask questions later before, so why the change now?END SPOILER.

But that's only one example.

The gameplay itself is pretty solid; Faith moves dependably, doesn't really get tired, and assuming you can find cover or run far enough away, all damage regenerates (no HP count or health meter -- the screen just flashes a bit more red until you die/heal up).  There are a lot of cool moves you can do, and much of the terrain has multiple paths across or through it.  The game shines in open-ended areas on rooftops, and is actually quite fun -- the most enjoyable level by far was chasing another Runner without being shot at (though, there were plenty of plot-illogical events at the conclusion of the chase).

Unfortunately, only a small segment of the game is in open areas without a timer.  And the timer isn't visible, either (like health).  It's in the form of guards who have sniper-chain-guns (judging by the combination of rate of fire and accuracy).  They will only very rarely miss, but that's okay -- apparently they only fire rock-salt so you can take probably about 20 of these shots before you die (and you'll frequently take damage anyway, no matter how fast/careful you are) without finding cover/a break.

But, you don't just have to run away.  You can also punch/kick them uselessly while they shoot you to death, or you can play the instant-die-minigame to disarm them.  If you enter melee range and don't melee (since that just causes them to shoot you), they'll try and swing their guns to hit Faith.  The gun will flash red during a split-second window, which has evidently nothing to do with when you're actually supposed to hit the 'disarm' button.  I've hit it precisely, I've hit it as much as 5 seconds late - if you're lucky, it will work.  If you're not, the disarm auto-fails and you take (guessing) around 50% of your health in damage instantly.  If there is more than one guard (or the inevitable helicopter that's shooting at you is present), then a single failure means death.  If you do disarm someone, you can take their gun, which has one clip, and prevents you from using your upper body to free-climb.  The bullets are just as weak for the player character as the guards, except they also have armor.

Obviously the point of the game isn't to fight, if you can help it - in fact, the game gives you achievements or rewards for not killing enemies.

So, this isn't an FPS, and it's not, quite, a racing game.  Is it?  Well, it kind of is ... but you don't get to do time-trials on your first playthrough of a level.  No, your first playthrough of a level is the unfortunate realization that, you must beat the game to earn the right to really play it.  And your first playthrough is also going to be frustrating, with unclear goals and useless help functions.  There is a button that you can press which will make Faith look at her goal, theoretically guiding her to the next step of the path.

But if you're on a rooftop, it'll just make you look at a distant building, not the nearest reasonable path.  Another help feature is the 'runner vision', which will cause things to become hilighted in brilliant red.  Unfortunately, what gets hilighted seems to be a bit arbitrary, and I think instead of being a hard-coded path, the game just hilights nearby markup that Faith can interact with ... even if it doesn't lead anywhere.

Indoors, the help button is effectively useless, as Faith will stare at walls to distant goals that the player has no idea how to navigate to.  The helpful guide on Faith's headset offers such advice as, "Get up onto the rails, then head down-track.  There should be a way out."  If there's a train going in each direction on two separate rails, which way is 'down track'?  Meanwhile, you can't stop and think because there's another of those helicopters (which you cannot defeat -- running is the only viable choice) on either side of the raised railway.  There's also a chaingun-sniper on either end of the track, making what should be a fun experience of sliding beneath safety doors and wall-running between skyscrapers into a tedious cover-chasing game where you must avoid snipers from all four cardinal directions, and oh, yeah, 50% of the track is lethal because there's a train going through at any given moment.

I think on my ... 20, maybe 30th attempt, I finally spotted the red markup with 'runner vision' (I'd passed it several times trying to figure out what to do), except that the part that was glowing ... couldn't even be interacted with!  I had to jump past it and hope that it worked.

The game isn't designed for you to learn what the path through the levels are -- the story is an afterthought.  The game is -- and this is totally unvarnished truth -- designed for people who've already beaten it to play it.  Why do I say that?  Because you have to beat it to know what the path is to participate in the time-trials.

The game therefore has two aspects:

Discovery, and competition.

Discovery is not fun, it's just the grind you force yourself through to unlock the second part.  And, since the game has already been released, and there is a single leader-board for the entire world, someone with more free time than you has already guaranteed you can't win.

The game is beautiful.  The free-climbing system is a bit Shadows of the Colosus without a grip-meter, and a little bit Prince of Persia (the first one for X-Box/PS2), and is actually great fun as far as finding out how many ways your moveset (which never expands; it's got everything you need in it already) can defeat the terrain.  But the design is an utter fail in the end, leaving the initial game confused as to what it is -- exploration and movement?  Combat and survival? -- and the end game just a contest to beat the first part faster.  I think the designers need to have their faces struck repeatedly with shovels for thinking this was 'fun', and should be forced to work with Ewe Boll for the rest of their careers; their end results are of similarly enjoyable caliber.

It was a Christmas present from my brother.  I want to trade it in for the new Prince of Persia, but since we're both online, he'd notice I had a new game and was playing it instead of Mirror's Edge.

Damn it.

[Dracos]

Ouch.  :(

Yeah, this is about what I heard.  Guns really didn't help the concept.

[Brian]

Update: My limited patience has worn out.  I got to a point in the game where you're in a warehouse, and the free-climb system fails.  There's limited cover, you're outnumbered by chain-snipers who won't come down to your level, you're surrounded by exploding barrels, and it's completely random if you can manage to get through it alive.  The entire encounter hinges on the player being flawless, and also lucky.  I very much want to inflict grevious injury on the game disc, but I know that wouldn't really stop EA or the developers from making another disaster.

Tragically, this is intended to be a franchise.

Tomorrow: Trade-in credit for Prince of Persia.

[Dracos]

To think, this could've been a game where the chase and the guns were all in your mind.

Where the entire focus in the dystopian world was running docs and shit between corporations.  Where you had to circumvent police barricades, flee from scary helicopters, and all the rest...without trying to BREAK THROUGH IT.

[thepanda]

Isn't there supposed to be some new content download coming that's basically mirrors edge without the guns, time, and all that stuff? Just you running around jumping on stuff? I swear I've seen a trailer or something for that.

[Brian]

News to me.  But I'm sure it's not free content, and it'd be too little, too late.