Gameplay

The main focus of game play is the parkour-infused running, where your character runs, jumps, and slides from rooftop to rooftop, all while evading the local PD as you try to clear your sister’s good name. Using the mouse and keyboard we all know and love, Mirror’s Edge includes controls for traditional actions like crouching and jumping, while also throwing some new stuff that seem to be hold-outs from the console version, such the ability to turn 180 degrees with the push of a button. Button and action combinations lead to some interesting results, like when you are running full speed and hit crouch, you will do a slide, necessary for maintaining momentum under low-hanging roof ducts. When you throw the attack button in to the mix, you end up with a new way of saying hello to those pesky cops, the sliding crotch kick. You can also disarm unsuspecting enemies on the fly with the push of a button, as well as execute wall kicks and leaping lunge kicks.

I like to move it, move it...

MOVE IT!!

Once you get up to speed, there are a lot of options you can do to deal with most situations. Unfortunately, having so many buttons bound to specific actions makes carrying out a few of these tasks difficult, as you strain to remember which button does what. Once you get used to your control scheme though, you’ll find pulling off special maneuvers easier, albeit it’s by no means intuitive. You’ll find yourself depending on jump and slide the most, so it’s best to bind those keys to common buttons like space or alt.

Combat is pretty much hand-to-hand as your character inherently does not carry a weapon, and even when you pick one up, your movement speed is reduced depending on what kind of weapon it is. DICE has seemingly designed the game around avoiding combat, which could explain why guns feel clunky and unnatural. This doesn’t explain those sections where they have cops blocking the way you need to go, essentially forcing you to fight. It’s reminiscent of those annoying sneaking missions in action games, like Jedi Outcast, where the developer decides that after you’ve killed about 200 people, you suddenly have to be quiet for some arbitrary reason. Mirror’s Edge works best when it’s doing what it was intended to do, namely allowing you to free-run and jump away from combat, not into it.

Do Men in Black cry at night? We think they do.

I'll take the red door

This leads to another issue with enemies and difficulty. Normally, if you attempt to disarm a SWAT member, you get a nice how do you do in the form of a shotgun to face. The SWAT team members can almost always deflect a disarm attempt and they also tend to travel in pairs, so attacking one leaves you open to machine gun assault by the other. Well, these rules get thrown out the window during these forced combat sections where they become instant push-over’s who go down like Sonny Liston to your Muhammad Ali. These sections also conspicuously make the SWAT members far more susceptible to disarm attempts. It takes some enjoyment out of combat once you’ve realized that some of the difficulty has been engineered into whatever section of the game you happen to be playing and whether the game designers want you to fight or run during that particular area.

Ultimately, Mirror’s Edge should be allowed to do what it was designed to, namely engaging in parkour rooftop running, with the occasional jump kick to the face of a random cop. Like action games with sneaking sections, the forced combat in Mirror’s Edge feels out of place, especially after you’ve spent the majority of your time avoiding confrontation. Thankfully, when you do get to just run from point A to point B, movement feels natural and fluid. If you get the controls down tight, you can get a nice rhythm down of jumping, wall running, and sliding your way around obstacles. Mirror’s Edge also includes a time trial mode where you compete to see just how fast you can get across its fairly expansive maps. It’s a shame there isn’t a built-in recording application, because otherwise it could easily open the door for some excellent speed run demos.