Overdue Review: Mirror's Edge

I have a bad habit of picking up single player games several months after their release.  The experience tends not to be dulled, and they're more value for the price paid, but I miss out on all the hot discussion and general banter that came before.  I'm developing a slight love of 3d platformers, like Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed and the latest Tomb Raider games, and Mirror's Edge falls broadly into this category, so it wasn't one I was going to pass by.  Indeed, I actually feel that its platforming performs much better than last year's Prince of Persia.  But if I had to describe the single player experience, I would lean slightly more towards 'proof of concept' rather than a polished game without flaws.

Platforming

To start off with let's look at some of the best things about Mirror's Edge.  The general running experience is a pleasure to play however you look at it.  In the Prince of Persia review above, I noted that much of the platforming was discrete, i.e. so long as you were in the right place, you would always make a given jump regardless of when you hit the controls.  I prefer a more continuous experience, where the better you time your jumps and movements, the further you go.  Indeed, many of Mirror's Edge's ledges are such that, at a slower pace (Mirror's Edge implements a good system of gaining momentum) you might just barely grab the edge and have to pull yourself up, but if you approach at full tilt and time your jump perfectly, you can almost vault from one building to another.

The running is something that you get very used to after about an hour or two of play, but at the same time, the game was designed with a wide variety of routes through the cityscape built into its levels, giving a lot of replayability once you're beginning to master the ins and outs of the system.  Indeed, there are often some extremely inventive ways of speeding your way through particular areas using your surroundings (and since the game comes with time trials, these have been picked up on by some of the best runners).  There are a few quirks with the way momentum is handled, notably that balling up while in a short jump, and wall running give you momentum, and there are a few issues with the use of attacks while jumping resetting your 'fall height', but these are exploits that people have discovered as ways of speeding up, rather than issues that detract from the single player experience in any way.

Visuals

One very noticeable point about Mirror's Edge is the artistic direction.  White is almost everywhere, and the city looks wonderful for it.  Admittedly there are a few oddities, such as white trees and plantlife, and very rarely the bloom will cause some climbable objects to blend into the environment making your route hard to realise.  At the same time, some very vibrant colours are employed for other areas, which looks incredibly pretty.  Having been involved in theatre lighting for a few years, this left me somewhat confused, as I'm more used to seeing colours used in games to indicate mood, but I'm fairly sure it's just very nice eye candy ( although I'm not sure I'd like to work in an office where the walls are all lime green...).

To help you navigate the city at first, 'Runner vision' paints route-indicating objects in red, a fact that is lampshaded in-game by a, "How to tell if some you know is a Runner," announcement ("A fondness for the colour red").  Sadly, despite having a PhysX card, I was unable to get it to work with Mirror's Edge, so many of the cool physics-based visuals were lost on me.

Story

The story is told using voice comms in-game and flash cutscenes between levels.  I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the cutscenes.  Meanwhile, a couple of the levels, while a joy to play, left me wondering what part of the story I was really involved in while doing them.  That said there are several which have obvious and fairly interesting bits of plot in them.  Nevertheless, I felt the plot was too simple and the manner in which the story was told didn't really make up for it (unlike in Portal, where you have a simple story but the game makes you feel like you're in Chell's situation, uncertain of what is going on around you and wary of the disingenuous way GLaDOS gives you information; I didn't really feel like I was Faith so much as I was watching Faith, perhaps because many of the things that matter to Faith happen when you're just watching rather than playing yourself).

Combat

The combat is really where I felt a sort of 'tech demo' issue come on.  The learning curve for melee combat is, I feel, very poorly drawn out.  In the 'tutorial' you are given a quick explanation of combat, but this doesn't really cover very much at all of what you need to know.  In general, this would be solved by practice, but the game doesn't throw that many enemies to practice on at you; most all of your practice involves failing at a task, then retrying it again and again until you start to understand combat.  Unfortunately, because this involves dying, it's not that pleasant an experience.  I can understand that the designers didn't want this to be a combat-focused game, but at the same time, doing the game melee only can be a frustrating experience.

To be totally fair, you don't have to play the game using melee weapons only.  You can pick up the weapons of anyone you knock out and easily gun down opponents that way...  but it doesn't feel right at all.  The melee combat system is much more interesting to play with, especially since I personally felt that Faith wouldn't be the kind of person to kill someone (so much so that I committed suicide without hesitation after accidentally kicking a man off a building... poor Faith just couldn't live with herself).  One of the nice things about doing combat this way is how fragile you are; you can rarely take on two 'SWAT' members within view of each other, so getting your opponents out of each other's lines of sight is necessary and a fun challenge.

However, DICE didn't think this through when you meet armoured guys with SAWs.  Twice in the game you meet these guys - who never move - in line of sight of each other, at the end of a combat section.  You have a high chance of dying, and if you do, you have to repeat the entire section again; it's more a matter of luck than skill to take them out.  The learning curve for these guys is very steep indeed.  There is also the matter of the Pursuit Cop, who tends dodge many of your normal melee attacks.  Not only are these guys exceptionally resilient because of this, but you meet them without weapons so melee combat is your only way through.  And when you first meet them, there are three: you're thrown in at the deep end, and many players found this section frustrating.

Now, with most enemies, you can disarm them, with a quick-time event when they try to melee you if you get in close.  You can also automatically disarm someone so long as you are directly behind them.  After a lot of time spent fighting Pursuit Cops, I and the friend I was playing with discovered that you can 'disarm' them by getting behind them and using their tasers against them, instantly knocking them out.  They turned from one of the most difficult enemies in the game to one of the simplest, but you have to find this out yourself.  In one sense, exploring the many options of combat is great, but in another, I don't think this is a well thought out learning curve.  As I said, I can understand DICE's desire to keep Mirror's Edge from being a combat game entirely, but I think they should have structured it much better to let players learn a bit about each new foe, allowing them to experiment a bit, before throwing more and more of the enemies at the player once they've had the opportunity to master each new style of fighting.

Overall: Worth Buying

Although it clocks in at somewhere between seven and twelve hours' play for a single go, the Mirror's Edge story is, I feel, quite replayable (there is a harder difficulty setting without Runner Vision and Faith is even more vulnerable to the - rubber? - bullets).  I'm not the sort of person to do Time Trials, but learning most of the different routes is enjoyable (and there are a few hidden items to find in each level if you're interested in that sort of thing).  I expect a sequel, and if DICE keep the platforming as it is, but introduce the combat more sensibly, as well as perhaps adding a bit more enemy variety, a few more challenging ways to circumvent obstacles for time gains, and give us a stronger story, it'll really put Mirror's Edge on top of its genre.  And even though I take it to task over the issues above, they don't ruin the game; if you haven't played Mirror's Edge yet, do so.  It's cheap, enjoyable and a good indication of the road 3d platformers should be looking at going down in the future.