I spent a good amount of time playing Mirror’s Edge this weekend. While I own a PS3 and could have played the console version (and spent twenty more dollars on the game), I waited for the game to come out on PC, for two reasons:
- Physx Support
- Consoles are fucking gay
Overall? Mirror’s Edge is certainly a unique experience – it’s something new, something fresh. In terms of originality, it blows the competition out of the water, and compared to most of the other shovelware pushed out of EA’s doors, you could do a lot worse than Mirror’s Edge.
You play as Faith, a “runner” in some futuristic city in the not-so-distant future, where Orwell’s 1984 has come to fruition, and every detail of day-to-day life is monitored. Runners deliver messages to and from people who chose to live outside of this type of society, and although your main sidekick uses some sort of radio to communicate with you during the game, carrying messages on foot seems to be the most logical and obvious way of communication for regular people. I guess.
To it’s credit, Mirror’s Edge does many things well – fluid parkour game play: wall running, sliding, climbing, etc. It boasts a unique art style and a killer soundtrack. That being said, it does fall short in a couple of areas:
- Combat – for a game that focuses so much on non-combat, there are a lot of “forced” combat phases – at least towards the end of the game. I found that most levels, you could avoid this combat, but towards the end of the game, there was really only one path to take, and the only way through that path was to go through three or four, or sometimes nine enemies at a time. And they all have guns.
- And when you get down to actually fighting – most of the combat consists of a very binary style of disarms or attacks – disarms can only occur when behind the enemy, or when they melee and their weapon glows red – otherwise, you miss, they hit you, and usually shoot you shortly after.
- Length of the game and difficulty – I don’t know about you, but I usually enjoy being challenged by games. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t offer a “hard” difficulty until after you finish the game once, which sucks, and ties into the fact that the game can be finished in less than five hours, if you’re dedicated enough. That’s painfully short. Another three hours of storyline wouldn’t kill anyone.
For all it’s faults, though, it is a whole lot of fun. Probably the most satisfying thing is nailing the parkour/combat segments perfectly – nonstop running, sliding, and jumping, where you never have to take a break from the action. It’s fantastic and very rewarding to complete segments of the game in that manner.
Is it worth the $60 bucks on a console? No. But for $50 on PC, it’s almost justified, and probably morso once the price drops. Throw in Physx support (seeing glass burst from gunfire realistically, or cloth blow in the wind or tear from gunfire is pretty awesome), and it’s almost justified. If you’re looking for something new, give it a shot. You won’t be disappointed.
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