Mirror's Edge

A lack of Faith

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Mirror's Edge takes place in what appears, at first glance, to be a sprawling metropolis that has become something of a clean and stark utopian paradise. However, behind the city's thin veil of perfection beats the heart of a nanny state, where information is heavily monitored and teams of agile couriers called 'runners' risk their lives to transport sensitive data away from prying eyes.

The player steps into the gravity-defying shoes of Faith, a young runner fighting to keep the city free who's abruptly dragged into an ominous conspiracy when her sister, a city cop, is framed for murder. Using her quick feet and acrobatic skills, Faith duly embarks on the ultimate runner mission in an attempt to clear her sister's name and expose a mystery that threatens the entire runner community and the city itself.

If the storyline seems like something of a shoehorned device put in place to justify the game's ambitious first-person delivery, that's because it is. To be honest, the narrative structure in Mirror's Edge is somewhat limp and forgettable, which isn't helped by soulless character performances and hopelessly inappropriate 2D animations that provide flaccid plot expansion between individual missions. Indeed, not actually getting to see the in-game Faith makes it difficult to empathise with her as a believable protagonist, which isn't helped by the fact that she has the personality of a house brick and the segue animation surrounding her is appallingly bad throughout.

We can push all that to one side of course, because Mirror's Edge clearly hasn't been developed to showcase fabulously rich rendered sequences or win multiple writing awards, it has clearly been crafted to wow players and critics alike with its thrilling parkour gameplay, which EA and DICE would have us believe provides an "action-adventure experience unlike any other."

And, in a sense, that's a fair statement based on the game's heart-pounding pursuit sequences, which see Faith evading the authorities by bounding from rooftop to rooftop, breathlessly negotiating all manner of obstacles, scaling industrial interiors, sprinting through shopping malls, and even dodging onrushing metro trains. Sadly however, while the game's effortlessly flowing parkour pursuits are superbly visceral and exciting, they fail to elevate proceedings to the heights the initial Mirror's Edge trailers and demo promised.

This is, in the main, thanks to the unwanted intrusion of frequent and fractious gameplay tripwires and lapse level design that all-but destroys any mounting sense of rewarding rhythm. The biggest point of detraction here exists in the developmental decision to utilise a first-person perspective in a game that relies so heavily on the pinpoint execution of huge jumps where failure almost always ends in the sound of shattered bone and splattered flesh. Not being able to gauge the placement of Faith's feet while hurtling towards a gaping chasm between two buildings often leads to multiple jump attempts before finally getting lucky with the correct timing - before then looking to pick up the parkour pieces ahead of the next annoying rinse and repeat distraction.

It's also worth bearing in mind that if the developer had opted to produce Mirror's Edge as a third-person adventure, it would have instantly lost its supposedly 'innovative' angle before being labeled as something of a third-rate mix between Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia, which is exactly what it is when viewed as an action adventure. And, things don't improve when assessing Mirror's Edge on the merits of its strengths as a shooter. Let's just say it's underwhelming in its passable functionality and lack of oomph, which is something of a shock considering DiCE is no stranger to crafting solid entrants to the FPS genre (read: the Battlefield series).

Adding insult to injury, completely avoiding the use of weaponry and tackling Mirror's Edge with nothing more than hand-to-hand combat and slick disarming moves (which is the single most appealing gameplay aspect), is soon rendered all-but impossible. This comes about thanks to single-player progression that leads to an ever-increasing force of gun-toting cops with unerringly accurate weapons proficiency, while Faith's fleet-footed skills mean she has no armoured resistance to their bullets. And here's the rub: if the missions didn't become steadily more populated with enemy opposition blocking Faith's advance, and were instead based on exhilarating parkour pursuits, the game would be over so very, very quickly - and it already lacks longevity with their inclusion.