Mirror’s Edge is a freerunning/parkour game played from the first person perspective. You play as a courier named Faith who needs to get mysterious packages to their destinations. Your playground is the rooftops of a dystopian city.
The controls for the running part are really smooth. L1 is your „Up“ button, which based on the context, makes Faith jump, vault, or do whichever upwards-directed action would make sense at the time. L2 is your „Down“ button, which makes Faith crouch, slide or roll.
There will be big guys with guns trying to stop you though, which is where your attacks come in. Faith can punch and kick in various combinations and disarm her enemies. The shooting seems purposefully bad and slow, to encourage you to drop the gun and use quicker meleé, instead of shooting.
But every once in a while you’ll come into a situation where you are surrounded by enemies, and simply running is not an option, which is where the „bad on purpose“ fighting mechanics come back to haunt you.
If enemies aren’t your problem, the environment may be. Fairly often I found myself standing still and moving the camera around to find a route to take. You have a hint button, but it just gives you the general direction, which often isn’t much of a help.
An average mission consists of you running from point A to B with a cutscene of you dropping a package with mysterious insides off to someone. And that’s where we get to another problem this game suffers from.
The story is awful. It seems like the plot was the last thing the developers thought about. It’s a completely senseless and boring „Evil people are evil“ story with absolutely no redeeming values. The animated cutscenes where most of the story is told look terrible. I have no idea what they were going for with them, it just looks poorly produced and cheap.. After a few chapters I found myself not really paying attention to things that were happening, because it was just flat-out sleep-inducing.
After completing the game you can go back to each chapter for speedruns, as well as play specially designed „Time trial“ stages, which for the perfectionists out there is almost enough to buy this game for. You’ll constantly be on the lookout for new routes which would shave another few seconds off your time. There are online leaderboards with downloadble ghosts to add to the replay value as well.
The basic running concept here is great and works well, but the game wrapped around it is kind of a bummer. If you can find this cheap it’s definitely worth trying out.