Runs with a bad leg.

One of hardest genres that developers have failed time and time again to get right is the first person platforming. Despite a wealth of great first person shooter games on the market, developers have struggled with letting people experience other genres from the same perspective. Many have tried, some have come close, but none have truly achieved. Then Digital illusions steps up to the plate with Mirror’s edge.

The game takes place in a totalitarian society, where information is a precious commodity that people will pay heavily for. You play as a runner named Faith, who is a sort of acrobatic courier that runs across rooftops delivering packages of importance.  The games basic premise is that Faiths sister Kate has been framed for a murder she didn’t commit, and Faith is out to gather enough evidence to prove it. But it’s very clichéd, with lots of backstabbing, shady meetings, cover-ups, reveals etc. Let’s just say that every possible cliché you can think of is in there. It doesn’t detract from the game, but there is nothing really gripping about the story.

Some of the environments that Faith has as her playground consists of rooftops, sewers, subways and office buildings, and they are presented in a sort of minimalist paradise, with white surfaces and splashes of colour here and there, especially red which works as visual direction. It works well for the game as it always feels like you are running around in a environment that is heavily monitored and very sterilized , but there is also a disconnect here as well, because despite how stylish the game looks, it doesn’t feel real, and it is so easy to get turned around in the corridors of a building when everything looks so similar. There is rarely a moment where you actually think that someone occupies the spaces you are tearing through. Case and point would be the subway tracks; it’s the cleanest subway track in the world, with no oil strains or dirt to be found.

Faith is controlled almost entirely with 3 buttons, which are used affectively to make her impressive movements, with L1 being movements that make Faith go up, and L2 goes down, and then R1 is used to turn 180 degrees. You will be able to do a lot with these buttons alone, and it should be a note to other developers about how easy it really is to get impressive, precise movements without having the player being some kind of finger contortionist.

The main focus is on moving around these environments, from jumping huge gaps, to wall running and swinging. It really does flow well, with easy movements from obstacle to obstacle, and rarely does it get frustrating. There is still a problem with accurately judging depth in a video game though and I would have falling more times than I would of liked if the game didn’t do such a good job accounting for this; giving you a slight margin of error by allowing you to grab onto obstacles without having your off-camera hands matching up perfectly to the obstacles.

Then we come to the biggest issue of this game, and the cause of most of my frustrations; the combat. Faith is told throughout the game that she needs to run, and running is what she does best, but then there are times when you are forced to fight. This is where the game goes from being good, to appalling. You are given a few tools at your disposal; an R2 melee button, and a counter attack button for when the guy tries to melee you with his weapon. The window of

opportunity to use the counter button is so small that you will miss the opportunity so many times and end up being killed. The game does try to help you by providing a way of temporarily slowing down time, but even this doesn’t help much. The melee button allows faith the beat on guy, and when used with either L1 or R1, she can do high attacks or floor level attacks. If she is faced with a loner then it’s easy to take him down, but the real thorn in my side comes when you have to face multiple opponents. It’s incredibly hard, and it’s because the game takes cheap tactics when trying to defeat you, like presenting you with opportunities where you have to charge the enemy within a narrow path, resulting in a death, or where the game has multiple enemies that just keep firing as you are fist fighting another enemy, again, resulting in a death, or where they mix enemies firing at you with acrobatic levels, meaning that you have little time to figure out what to do on the level before be reduced to the human equivalent of swish cheese. The difficulty doesn’t come from a difficult challenge but from cheap game play mechanics, and it really stops the flow of the game when you keep dying in the same area, and have to repeat again and again.

The guns are almost useless and I don’t even know why they let you pick them up if they didn’t put any effort into letting you use them effectively. The enemies also seem to change between generic cops that are used as a stick to pressure your character to keep moving, or acrobatic circus runaways that are the only things in the game that offer any kind of presence that feel like real threats, but they don’t show up until the later chapters, which is a shame because these guys are so much better than gun totting cops that litter the game.

Once you beat the levels in the main game you unlock time trials and speed runs. Speed runs require to play through the levels exactly the same as if you were playing the single player except you need to do it with a set time. I am glad to see that with these unlocks in the game they realise that it’s the free running aspect of the game that it so good, and they incorporated some reasons to keep playing after the 8 hour single player. The time trials have you are placed in a familiar environment that has been set up like an ad-hoc assault course, with multiple paths and directions, you then have checkpoints scatted around each area and you have to complete the level within a set time. This was what I wanted from the single player, and it feels great to shave a few seconds off your time and trying the course again to see if you can take anymore time off.

Mirror’s edge is a great game that really shows us that it’s possible to create a dynamic, flowing first person platforming game that works. It’s just a shame that the combat in the game feels so out of place and brings the game to a halt whilst you try and find a way to beat one area. It’s these little skirmishes that made me incredibly frustrated, and if it weren’t for these areas I would be singing this games praises all day long. But as it stands, it’s great game and worth playing, just try not to break your TV when the game forces you into a combat situation.