What was bad about Mirror's Edge:

- The story. Good god... I almost don't know what to say. It felt like some cookie-cutter conspiracy story really, and the story sequences being animated certainly didn't help one bit.

The background story was good. The save the sister motivation was good. The cop framed for a political murder is ok (it's not like it couldn't happen). That ex-Runner guy being the main villain of the whole story (sort of), BAD! The final scene was kind of simplistic, not realistic in the game world, felt rushed and lacked inspiration. The feeling of the ending thou made up for it.

- The combat. The whole disarm thing was incredibly annoying to use. Time your button press just a little wrong and your odds of living were small. The whole idea behind Faith's martial arts abilites as well as the idea of guns being a temporary powerup were great on paper, but just not that well executed.

The disarm thing was ok, as you could easily disarm a common street cop, but the more advanced units of professional soldiers were much harder to disarm, and were much deadlier, which was quite ok. Using reaction time was the answer for those disarms. Easy and fun for me. The short distance gun play was ok. But the targeting was bad, lacked fine control, which made the gun play exponentially worse as the distance to the target increased (except when using the sniper rifle, which was just sub par overall).

- The technology. This is a pretty huge area, and it's easy to put a lot of things in here, because some of them were barely up to par. You could tell it was UE3 being used to power the game, because all the characters were incredibly lifeless and plastic-like, more so than in most UE3 games I reckon. The graphics were quite crude to say the least, though they were saved by the phenomenal artdirection. Then there are the dreaded elevator-rides, that substitute loading screens... Then there was the pretty lousy hit detection, which is quite critical for a game about using the environments as much as Mirror's Edge. To round off, the enemy AI was pretty bad, though still functional. Rarely have NPCs (enemies and friendlies alike) been this stiff and lifeless, both in graphics and behaviour.

I never studied the NPC's in game, but the enemies didn't look lifeless to me, although the couple of civilians that I saw, did. I liked the graphics, no complaint from me there. I was thankful for the elevator rides on a couple of occasions, so I have no problem with them :). I had no problem with jumping trough a pipe or anything, but on occasion I did feel that Faith should have grabbed the ledge but she didn't. That should be improved. The enemies killed me pretty well, so enemy AI satisfactory. Lifeless civilians need overhaul.

- Support. This is about the characters speaking to you while you're running around. It does get rather tiresome to listen to, and I would much rather that there was more of a conversation going on in Faith's head, rather then the bad dialogue spoken in those very forced sequences.

Had no real problems with this, actually it seamed logical to me that support for navigating the huge city and threat assessment would come through a com system from a live and not from an augmented reality system exclusively.  

- Length. Through the Speed laps of all the game's levels, it became painfully clear that all the levels could be completed in less than one and a half an hour.

This is the only game that encourages you to speed run it. This can bring out the fact that one can finish the game in under one hour. But paradoxically, those who are able to do that, are the ones that played it for hundreds of hours. After all, there are 30 minute speed runs of DOOM II or Half Life for example, and no one ever accused those games of being short. That being said, I want more chapters :).

Improvements for Mirror's Edge 2:

- The combat. Rework the disarm mechanic and get the other mechanics some serious polish. And this is just a minimum!

Improve the current disarm mechanic and melee combat. (Can Faith block in the current one? I don't know). Improve precision aiming, via iron sights, but don't make shooting unrealistically precise.

- The technology. On thing I think the game could really benefit from would be to be in 60 FPS. The controls would be even smoother, and I think the game would get an overall better feel. And with the graphical standard set by the first game, it shouldn't be that hard to accomplish (lol). And also, switch away from UE3 please...

Evolve the current engine. Add long range over the city view capability. Add weather. Optimize. Seek some help for the PS3 if needed.

- Storyline. I am almost inclined to say "start over!" because the first was anything but well-executed, and I think that wiping the board clean could benefit the game. Have more actual running missions in the game, have more stuff to do than just trying to solve a conspiracy. We are playing as a runner, let us do just that in the story, or as a sidemission or something.

Don't start over. I want to kick the mayor's ass.

- Levels. Have more ways for us to go about the world, more choices for what routes to take, more things to do. Hell, however challenging an sandbox world for this game might be to make, it could be epically awesome (unlikely though, but still...)!

Free running freely through the city would be great, but...

- Multiplayer. This doesn't need to be big, but having running missions in coop, or players competing to deliver packages or whatever, could be incredibly fun! This could be a selling feature alone!

Nope.