Mirror's Edge

03/01/09 04:00:02 pm

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• Mirror's Edge
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I find it funny that the 360 is taking the majority of my gaming time lately; I'd never so much as touched one before, but nowadays Nintendo is pretty stagnant (with its one-hit franchise wonders gracing us just every now and again), and Sony is all but off the map for me, save for a rare few PSP titles.

So, Mirror's Edge.  It gets immediate credit simply for being unique, in both concept and artistic style.  You play as a "runner," a member of an underground courier organization... sort of, because you won't actually be delivering anything, and your preferred turf is in fact rooftops.  The story is a little too simple and doesn't hold together well in some parts.  Like the would-be courier business, ideas in the game feel half-baked, like they changed course in development many times without looking back.  Combat, for instance, can be a sticky situation.  You have no gun of your own by default, so in most cases you'll want to run from hostiles (it's what you do best, after all), but in others you've no choice but to fight your way through.  The game does not make this easy - it advises taking out enemies one-by-one, but the enemies act pretty smartly, utilizing cover and generally moving in groups.  You will also often find yourself searching for the proper path through an area while being fired upon by guards, snipers and, often enough, helicopters.

Controls can be an obstacle in and of themselves, as much of the leaping requires proper collision detection, and there are a million ways to mess that up - lose momentum, jump just a little too early, not close enough to the wall to trigger the wall-run, get disoriented when doing the jump-turn-jump sequence, etc.  It's also not always clear how far or how high you can actually go, so you'll have to just go and see what happens.

Overall, I was definitely having enough fun to see it through to the end (though it wasn't very long in the first place), it just got terribly frustrating at times, and never succeeded in drawing me in from a narrative perspective.  The game's final message during the credits seems to suggest that nothing much has changed as a result of your little adventure - a small server hiccup and then it's back to business as usual for the totalitarian city.  Oh well, it was a nice little romp anyway, right?