Mirror's Edge - All Hype, No Edge

Author's Rating:

Pros: premise is cool

Cons: but the execution is not

The Bottom Line: 
This subpar action game is only fun for a few minutes before it becomes boring, repetitive and unengaging. 

Author's Review
After getting over my love of the “tech demo” that is Mirror’s Edge, it’s easy to begin to see that everything else that the game is composed of is meaningless hype, from the story to the promise of “unrivaled immersion”.  For the initiated, the premise is simple- you play as a runner called Faith in an IKEA-dominated future, running on rooftops to deliver packages from place to place.   While it sounds cool, after spending the few hours needed to destroy this game, all it is, is really a modern day Prince of Persia with an FPS perspective, with a pathetically dry plot to boot.

But it’s Innovative?  Right? 

Reviewers all over the net gave Mirror’s Edge far too many bonus points for innovation but they failed to see that Mirror’s Edge isn’t innovation.  It just looks that way.    

The whole main thrust of the game comes from its looks, not its gameplay.  The gameplay is really just the standard run, jump and duck; a sequence of moves not any different from the Prince of Persia games even going as far to utilize their famous wall run, and mid air turn and jump.  The only differences in terms of gameplay are the first person perspective, and that the moves aren’t “sticky” meaning that the game mercilessly penalizes you for missing, even when it looks like you’ve made it. 

The look and feel often gets tagged as the highlight of the game- and pundits praise Mirror’s Edge for creating a rooftop world that should have been The Matrix game.  However, once the love affair with primary colors and gleaming white is over, it gets dull rather fast.  Also- once you’ve actually played the game through, only half the time is spent on the roofs, and a strangely large deal of it spent in boring maintenance rooms, elevators and the worst offense, air ventilation shafts devoid of all skill and color.  The game tries its hardest to “mix things up” but the remaining environments are nothing short of uninspired, and were far more of a hassle than they were worth. 

Again I blame most of the industry reviewers for even allowing this game to get a 80.3% on GameRankings.  If they had bothered to consider weighing the rest of the game to other existing games, they easily would have noticed the lack of a good story, length, clumsy controls, and repetitive gameplay instead of being wooed by its visuals.  Mirror’s Edge is just an average if not subpar game.

Controls Send Me Flying off the Cliff Half the Time

Part of the proposed experience is that you gain speed as you run and so you want to kind of navigate rather quickly through your environment by instinct and go with the flow.  That’s some wishful thinking by developers.  The controls could use some work here.  For one, they come mapped in an awkward way, the left bumper as jump and the left trigger as slide.  Keeping the two actions on different hands as a default would have been vastly better, but at least the game offers different configurations.

Still the major suffering of the controls actually lies in the whole first person experience that makes it so innovative.  You can’t always see the bloody runner’s feet unless you’re looking straight down, so you can’t see where you are landing half the time, unlike games like Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider where you can see the character.  This leads to some heavy frustration because there are so many moments in the game where you’ll run and look ready to make it, but you just won’t, despite how possible it looks.  

The stupid limbs that you see onscreen which add to the “immersive” experience as one review harped on, are really just preloaded animations that don’t seem to correspond correctly to your jumps half the time.  When you run and your limbs reach out to grab, they’ll often look like they’re grabbing, but then you’ll find your hands literally going through the ledge as you plummet to your death. 

Melee combat is another area where her limbs are just agonizingly stupid.  Her punches and kicks will get interrupted by built in- counter melee attacks from soldiers, and if you don’t hit Y when their guns flash, well you get the beat down.  This turns combat into the equivalent of those quick-time events that are starting to get abused to ad nauseum.     

Add that to her life meter, which is secretly a formula based entirely on the amount of soldiers in room.  If there’s one soldier in room and you aren’t moving, you die.  If there are two and you are moving, you die.  There are no exceptions to these rules, and as soon as you realize that, staying alive becomes a matter of running around until you can isolate the soldiers to take them out, or alternatively just avoiding them as the game seems to press for. 

Loading... and more Elevators

Again, the infamous Mass Effect loading elevator runs rampant, but for a game like Mirror’s Edge this is unacceptable.  In many sequences you’ll run to a red door only to enter a building to take an elevator to the top.  This happens a lot.  The elevator rides are long and have no entertainment value other than a few fake text headlines scrolling on a wall that have nothing to do with anything.  The other grave sin is the use of “Loading...” in the corner when you’re bursting from room to room hoping to escape guards chasing you.  Another break of flow there in a game that is supposed to give you a sense of hurry- Mirror's Edge could have benefited a lot from some kind of pre-loading system, given the solid color palette doesn’t really seem to require many textures.    

No Free-world Environment Here

If it looks like you’ll have multiple ways to run across rooftops from the shiny gameplay videos, it just not true.  It becomes quickly apparent that the chain-wire fences block you off on rooftops and that there’s only one “right” way to do most of the runs.

Mirror’s Edge ends up from this revelation, less like a game and more like an interactive movie, especially in some of those maintenance rooms I was talking about.  You will perform a sequence of moves in some places, the same each and every time, until you get it correctly and if you don’t, you’ll die.  It’s really that simple.  The final boss is exactly that, and I did it a few times before finding the move combination they wanted, and the rest just became an automatic cinematic.  Mirror’s Edge is completely a one-way street, don't be fooled by eyecandy. 

One Good Soundtrack Piece- the Rest? 

There’s one great mellow-ambience piece that they play for the game credits and trailer, but the rest of the game just lacks good music.  You’d think a running game would play some intense techno or some kind of blood-thumping rock or something, but no- Mirror’s Edge seems to fall more along a weird Zen vibe and so they only use slight ambience depending on whether soldiers are chasing, and that’s about it.  The sounds were barely noticeable other than the grunts and groans of Faith while she’s running which aren’t exactly- melodious. 

Story Told by Awful Cutscenes

The animations are more than subpar, they are worse than the game’s in-game cutscenes which makes me wonder why in the hell they went with 2d-flat cell shade.  I still cannot in any way justify it, but after watching a convoluted corporate frame-up involving Faith’s sister for the first few scenes, I found myself slowly skipping the cutscenes which were intended to mask the load-times, and just going straight for the gameplay.  It’s that bad, and the ending, which I was stuck around for, was to me the final indicator of the lack of substance.  You save your sister, you hug, the game sweeps around with the camera to impress you with a wide shot of the world’s environment for the first and last time and the credits roll.  Yeah, it’s just that bad. 

The Length

The paltry 5-6 hour experience broken up into chapters is really awful, and for speed runners, it’s far less.  There are speed challenges and races to attempt to inject life into it, but to me there’s little initiative for them.  I’d say for most casual gamers, this game has little value after its first run through, again mostly in part to its linearity. 

Conclusion

I love innovation and believe it's the key to the industry (see Bioshock), but the abnormally high score that’s been given to this game for its pathetically executed gameplay, story, soundtrack and control scheme just doesn't make sense.  Sure, they didn’t use the overused brown and rust textures, and the game looks clean and polished- but it’s really just to distract you from the fact it doesn’t play that way.  I can only at most recommend this game as a rental and even with hesitation there.  

Mirror’s Edge might have been entirely something else if they had released it for the Wii and used the motion-sensing controls, but without that- it’s really just another awful 3d-platformer in a pretty shell.  There’s better stuff out there and I’d recommend Tomb Raider: Underworld or the new Prince of Persia over this any day.  While they might not offer glistening roof-tops you’ll still get more entertainment for your money.