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Mirror's Edge PC Review January 26, 2009 Tom Colarusso |
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Summary: With its emphasis on parkour, Mirror's Edge plays differently than your traditional FPS. In fact to call it a shooter would be a misnomer as the game plays like no other FPS on the market. But is different necessarily better? Find out in our review of Mirror's Edge PC!
 Mirror’s Edge Review | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
Story
In Mirror’s Edge, you play a runner by the name of Faith (ugh) who, along with companions Celeste and Mercury, traverses the many rooftops of their unnamed city delivering mysterious packages. Mayor Callaghan has set into place very tight controls on what is and is not acceptable for the human populace. As such, your band of merry men and women find ways to circumvent his system of controls, delivering never identified objects and messages across the cityscape. When you walk in on your sister Kate standing next to the body of Callaghan’s main rival for mayor, it’s up to you to prove her innocence and free the system from his dictatorial rule.
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The story in Mirror’s Edge is not exactly a nail biter, but it has enough twists and turns to keep you interested throughout. Unfortunately, there really is no back story given for how the city ended up where it is. Instead, you are thrust into the world and pretty much told that the government is bad and your raver buddies are good, with no context provided in-game. Thankfully, the game focuses heavily on the gameplay aspect of first-person parkour, so you never really care too much about why things are the way they are.
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Cut scenes are rendered in 2D animations that were probably meant to be somewhat artistic, but end up looking like an art school flash cartoon. Since levels load while the cut scenes play, it was probably more of a technical decision than an artistic one. However, just because you have technical limitations doesn’t mean you have to hire the same animators who did the Esurance commercials.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
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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.
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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.
| Graphics and Audio | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
Mirror’s Edge is powered by a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 game engine, proving along with Mass Effect that UE3 can render environments beyond brown and gray. The city where your action is centered in is a glittery mass of white and silver, with hints of orange, reds, and blues especially in the interior of buildings. As you move from building to building, your “runner vision” will light up specific action points, like ramps and zip lines, bright red which works to draw your attention to pieces of the environment you can use to maintain your momentum.
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Character models can be either hit or miss, with the women of the game looking pretty realistic, while the majority of the men have a definite block-like appearance to them. Textures are crisp and clean, adding to the clean looking aesthetic DICE has imparted on the city. And it’s a good thing too, as playing from the first-person perspective means you will get a lot of close-up looks at walls while you dangle 500 feet from the pavement below. HDR and bloom effects are just about perfect in their usage as they work to really add to the sense of detail and speed you will experience throughout the game.
Audio is pretty much adequate, although positional is pretty muddled regardless of your system settings. Despite a majority of action taking place on rooftops, there is a definite lack of expected wind noise. One area of concern is the mid-mission updates which are delivered via an earpiece worn by your character. For whatever reason, you can never really hear what they are saying as the volume is just a bit lower than your surroundings. This makes it almost impossible to hear what they just said, an obviously problematic situation since it usually revolved around where you need to go next or where enemies have just dropped in your way.
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Voice acting is about average, as most characters match up with their respective in-game models, with the exception of your main contact Mercury. When you hear his voice during the first level, your mind immediately creates the image of a grizzled old timer, especially since he apparently trained Faith and other runners. Of course, once you see him during a cut scene, he actually appears to be around the same age if not slightly older than your character which creates a definite miss-match.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Game Design: DICE has really stepped outside their element with Mirror’s Edge, as they have created a game based on a truly original concept, free running, and then based it in a beautifully rendered world that is nowhere as clean as you are lead to believe. The city’s glittering white image is a stark contrast to a majority of action games who seem to think that the color spectrum consists of only browns and grays.
Parkour: When you are allowed to just move as quickly as possible across the maps, you can really get into a nice rhythm that becomes incredibly rewarding if you can get the timing just right. When an upcoming object turns bright red, you begin to feel a real sense of accomplishment when you catapult yourself off it at a blazing speed and stick the landing just perfectly.
Time Trial Mode: Once you’ve completed the game, which shouldn’t take very long at all, you can easily extend your value by trying to complete levels in the shortest amount of time possible. Once you’ve learned all the little shortcuts throughout each level, you really challenge yourself to get the best possible time.
Cons
Length: We’ve actually played through Mirror’s Edge twice, with the first time being the longest and it honestly took us no more than 6 hours from start to finish.
Complex Controls: After your tenth time attempting to jump from one wall to another using the quick turnaround button, you end up so frustrated that you pretty much want to say it can’t be done. Or worse, that it can be, but it’s not worth the effort since it ruins almost the entire momentum you had going previously. You end up pretty much just using jump, crouch and punch throughout almost the entire game, making the other buttons feel useless.
Clunky Combat: While it’s extremely satisfying to lunge kick into a cop, then disarm him a second later, getting to that level of comfort with the controls takes so long, you’ll be near the end of the game when it happens. Gun combat feels a bit off as well and the inability to reload your weapon makes you want to avoid the whole thing altogether. Which would be fine, except for those pesky…
Forced Combat Sections: When an action game suddenly requires you to go stealthy, we want to find the developers and force feed them the sparkly bits of CD we just ran through a shredder. Well, it goes both ways my friends. If you design a game around stealth, or action, or free running, you are better off letting your game do what it does best. It doesn’t make sense to try to change things up by forcing nonsensical scenarios where your character does actions that pretty much go against what they just spent the better half of the game doing.
| Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |