Wow, the Holidays have been crazy. I have now been able to successfully round out my collection of the current generation of systems, and now own all of them, consoles and handhelds. While I haven’t been writing feverishly, I have been getting through some games, and falling back on some old fail safes. I have been playing LittleBigPlanet on my PS3, Crush on my PSP, SSF2THR on my 360, and today I should be beating the New Super Mario Bros on my DS. I’ll admit though, a good amount of my time has been spent getting back into Defense of the Ancients with the TDA community. It’s great to have a large community where the competition bar is high enough to get a pretty good game whenever you feel like it. I just seem to be getting the luck of teaming up with everyone who is seemingly new to both the community and the game itself. 
A few months back I beat Mirror’s Edge, here’s my take on it!
Overview
From Wikipedia:
Mirror’s Edge takes place in an unnamed city where a totalitarian regime monitors its citizens through invasive surveillance, tracking all forms of electronic communication in order to reduce crime and quell any challenge to its power. An upcoming mayoral election seeks to retain Mayor Callaghan in power to keep the government’s control on the city, though a new favored candidate Robert Pope promises to bring change. The Eurasian protagonist, Faith Connors, is a “Runner”, a person trained in parkour, to stay out of sight and to use rooftops and other means to help deliver physical messages between revolutionary groups within the city. Faith along with another Runner, Celeste, were both trained by Mercury who also provides radio support for the two.
Impressions
Not too long ago I played Assassin’s Creed and fell in love with a chunk of the game. It looked great, had a few choice design elements that I truly enjoyed (mainly, the “teleport” system for major cities), and I absolutely loved the movement. I had mentioned to friends that if there were a game where movement movement felt this fluid, and the major part of the game, I would snap it up instantly. Needless to say, Mirror’s Edge was that game for me. I had followed the bits of information that came down the stream counting down to its release, and I had preordered my copy months in advance. Needless to say, my experience with the game was fairly positive. I thoroughly enjoyed the movement system, went along with the story, and dealt with the fighting.
What makes this game important to me though, is it took something that we are so completely familiar with (the First Person genre) and turned it on its side. Rather than act like every other shooter out there, and be another Halo, or Counter Strike, or Call of Duty, or Far Cry, or Resistance (I could go on..), they made a First Person game revolve around tactical movement, and tried to create an open system (in terms of the paths you take, and moves you perform) for the player to decide how he or she progresses through each obstacle set. The game itself isn’t about mowing down tons of enemies, its about avoiding them. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t focus your attention to specific groups and NPCs within the game, but forces you to soak in as much of your landscape as possible to decide your next move. And in this day in age where shooters and rockers (while still good products in their own right) dominate – Mirror’s Edge succeeds at delivering a package that is perpendicular to current consumer expectations and offers a breath of fresh air to the industry. Sadly, in the current economic situation that we are in, people perceive risk at a much higher value, and a $60 game that doesn’t conform to a standard that the consumer might be looking for, the game’s sales are going to take a hit.
Issues (Possible Spoilers Ahead)
Shoddy story. The story was fairly shallow – yes, there was an arcing story, but it left much to be desired, less to be explained, and far more to be questioned about how exactly everything panned out at the end. The story seemed to end far too abruptly, as if the writers were implicitly cutting us short to either meet deadlines, or to scream “WE NEED SOME CONTENT FOR THE SEQUEL!”
Cutscenes. Rather than use the engine for cutscenes between levels, (and to mask loading time), DICE used animated movies to show the progression of the story. This concept slightly reminds me of the “Story Time” you can get with the princess in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s not the same story that you’re currently progressing through (in the sense that the cutscenes are filling in narrative gaps) you are definitely breaking out of the beautiful world that Galaxy presents to you in order to follow a side story. Some people argued that with such a great engine and implementation that DICE did that the cutscenes should have just stayed ingame, but I’m inclined to enjoy the switching between story and gameplay as the mode progresses. With a game as intense and fast paced as Mirror’s Edge, an animated sequence can provide a rest to the gamer.
What I didn’t like about these animated shorts was that sometimes they seemed like they were rushed (production wise), or done in Flash with some awful tweening/repetition. Two ‘broken’ scenes off of the top of my head that I still remember: Faith running around the time she meets up with Celeste for the second time, and one time when Faith is walking back into the shadows. The perspective on this scene tween is all types of skewed, and too easily noticed from even my untrained eye.
Fighting System. Simply said, the fighting system in this game is pretty bad. It is incredibly easy to die – which is acceptable. Your a runner with no protection on whatsoever. Taking more than a few bullets and not dying would be too far a stretch of the imagination. The enemies placement can be frustrating at times, and downright infuriating towards the end of the game. My first run through of the game I was going for the “Pacifist” achievement, where you cannot shoot anyone. Towards the end of the game though, I was looking to put a bullet through my TV. I ended up resulting in taking quite a few near death leaps in the “circular” staircase level, and resorted to hiding in corners in the levels that had an absurd amount of enemies, and took out the baddies one by one until I had cleared enough of them out to make it to the next exit.
In Left4Dead’s commentary, they talk about how they automatically do some things for a player when they get near certain areas (they were talking about automatically ducking when walking towards a vent) so that the player focuses on the fear and survival and bigger picture of the whole situation, without having to worry about a simple game movement like ducking. In this sense, isn’t Mirror’s Edge about the movement? So why not make the fighting system be a little more forgiving? Rather than having multiple whiffs when you’re trying to kick someone in the balls, let the game have a larger acceptance of error, and auto-aiming those crotch shots / uppercuts to make things go a little more smoothly, and let the player focus on what’s important: getting the hell out of wherever you are.
Linearity. In retrospect, this game was a bit too linear for me. While you could definitely take the scenic route in certain areas, there was definitely a best route for everything. I think this was partly due to the fact that the only real goal Faith had throughout the entire game was simply to run. “Getting away” can be a fun thing to do, and it can easily be a good reason why the game was on the shorter side – you can only run away from so much before the idea starts to become boring. But when you have such an open setting such as the rooftops and indoors of a city, and my choices are to either jump over or slide under a pipe that is in my way, the magic of the game seems to slowly fade away.
Consider this though: make the game a little more open-worldish, a little more Half-Life 2. Since Faith is explicitly a courier, working for what the government considers criminals, there are a myriad of things that could have been added to the story more than simply delivering packages. Interacting with NPCs to find out more about her sister’s issues, dive deeper into the corrupted body that the government has become, rather than it just being some ominous, sentient machine that deploys foot-soldiers in the proper areas at the worst times. Faith could have missions in areas, help other runners accomplish their tasks. If this were so, Merc wouldn’t actually look like he is running an operation, rather than being a guy who keeps tabs on (from who we met ingame) three runners from his computer. With respect to Valve’s shooter, put a bit more emphasis on physics, and throw some puzzles into the mix. Why not make Faith rearrange the landscape to be able to make jumps? Kick down a sign to make a bridge, or move the construction vehicles to line it up with a proper jump. Just a few of these would have added to the variety that this game could offer, would easily work well in the first-person view, and would have added to the total gameplay time offered to the user.
One more note, there’s DLC coming out for Mirror’s Edge in January 2009. They completely weeded out everything that the game provided before, and went for an abstract, texture-less (minus some coloring) design of a bunch of downloadable levels. It simplifies the game down to the basic element – movement. Penny Arcade had said something like “this is the game style that we fell in love with when watching previews about Mirror’s Edge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I stand by this game, as the successes in what Mirror’s Edge achieves to do outweighs the shortcomings.
