Review: Mirror's Edge (360)

Perhaps that line was a bit harsh. There’s plenty to love in Mirror’s Edge it’s just bogged down with unnecessary weight. The story mode starts off well enough. You’re introduced to the main protagonist Faith, before being ferried down a linear training route where you learn the moves and get used to the rather unique control system. To play Mirror’s Edge you have to effectively re-learn how first person games are played. Something that might sound difficult, but after half an hours play it really becomes second nature.

The left trigger is used as the jump button and can also perform all sorts of acrobatics from vaulting over obstacles to doing a wall run. Then the LB button is used as crouch. It becomes crucial when running as it allows you to slide under scenery which in turn keeps up the speed, and that’s what the game’s all about, speed. It’s easy to look at the videos released and become astonished at the flowing nature of each move, but it takes a while to become that good. Deaths will become frequent and most of the time it will be purely your fault. Luckily you are shown the way if you choose to have the runner vision turned on. This makes certain items in the environment turn red and this is essentially the way to the end of the level. It does encourage exploration though, with more than one route to each objective and hidden bags scattered through each level. This is where Mirror’s Edge really shines. The free running is superb and really makes you feel like you’re seeing things through Faith’s eyes. It is a real step forward for the first person genre.

Unfortunately this all comes undone when you encounter armed guards. The game expects you to run rather than enter confrontations, but in some instances this is impossible unless you time every jump to absolute perfection, not to mention having ridiculous amounts of luck. When you do enter fights it turns into a bit of a farce. Manage to get in close and they’ll swing at you with their gun (why they don’t just shoot you in the face we don’t know), then at one moment it’ll turn red and you can cleverly disarm them. However having a gun in your hands will put you at a slight disadvantage, as it is horrific.

We understand this is not an FPS, but if you put a gun in the players hands then you have to at least make it useable. The curser is extremely twitchy and it slows you down to a crawl, making gunfire almost impossible to evade. Faith can’t even run with it, which is a bit hard to believe with the acrobatics you can perform. This all makes us wonder if the game would’ve benefited by just adding melee combat instead of the gunplay. It becomes even more annoying during one of the earlier levels where you have to perform inch perfect jumps all whilst someone is shooting at you from a balcony with astounding accuracy. Thankfully checkpoints are well placed, otherwise it would’ve become even more frustrating.

Despite it being essentially an add-on to the game, we find the unlockable time trials to be more enjoyable. After completing each level you unlock it for a speed run. This is all about speed obviously, and platforming, which is what we wish Mirror’s Edge was all about. It’s a great showcase for the first person viewpoint and it’s really what we came back to. The story mode in comparison is surprisingly poor with a look and script that seems like the lovechild of Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet (two terrible movies in case you were wondering). At least graphically it looks good, and it’s a nice change to have brightly lit environments than the space marine brown many gamers have been accustomed too. It’s got a nice main theme too. Very soothing.

The perfect word that can really sum up Mirror’s Edge is unfortunately, disappointment. It showed so much promise and it’s a type of game that hopefully EA won’t sum up as a failed experiment and move on. Due to the bad sales figures it may just end up that way, as the title is already being discounted at retail.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver