IllegalPaladin said:
After waiting for a couple days, I found Mirror's Edge in the mailbox supplied from Gamefly today. I popped it in my system earlier today, started playing it and not that long ago, I popped it out because I had beaten it. It's a neat platformer, but a rather lacking experience overall. I had talked about how I'd rather have a keyboard and mouse for this game, but I didn't have much trouble with analog sticks except for in areas where you have to quickly turn left or right after a wall run to grab onto a ledge.
Graphics - The graphics in this game look pretty with a sprawling city for you to look at with clouds and planes overhead and many tall buildings all around you, but the environments will start looking too similar very quickly. This city has the weirdest tastes in colors, it's hard not to shield your eyes as you run through them. Heck, you'll even run inside a building where all the rooms are painted black and white where the only thing ruining the colorless illusion are red couches. What makes the bright colors worse is the fact that the lighting blows out the environment. It can be hard to see walls and where the top of buildings end because they'll be glowing white from the sun. You'd have to really lower the brightness and contrast to see, but then you'd fall prey to platforming inside buildings, where it gets very dark.
Sound - The sound is very good. You'll hear Faith gasping for air as she runs, the smack of her hitting a wall, and the music can really set the mood for you to run like hell. One gripe I have though is that Faith yells too much when you're jumping around. Obviously I could never do these things let alone be silent as I attempt to fail at it, but it gets annoying hearing her yell every time she grabs a ledge and pulls herself up. Lastly, the voice acting is good. With the exception of a monotone news reporter on the radio, I don't recall problems with the voice acting.
Gameplay - Prepare to fall to your death, a lot. There is a large amount of trial and error here and certain areas can be frustrating due to the layout of some of the checkpoints as you'll have to go back and redo a lot of area just for one jump or fight. Speaking of fights, Faith is not a firearms person. Any guns you use have to be picked up off of enemies you've taken out and you can't reload those guns. This is good because you'll spend almost the entirety of the game running away and jumping on rooftops so it would make sense that you can't be decked out with several weapons with lots of ammo, you're a runner so you must be able to move quickly and use your hands to climb.
The game does a good job most of the time with encounters to force you to keep pressing forward to flee, but when you have to fight, it will be a rather frustrating experience. On the normal difficulty, you wont be able to take much abuse, a couple of hits and you'll be pushing daisies so you'll be reliant on melee attacks to take out enemies and pick up their weapon. Hand to hand combat is... well hand to hand combat. It's not terribly effective and since you can't take much damage, the game doesn't want you to do so unless it's neccessary and I'm okay with that. The problem comes in with disarming, it's very hit or miss. What will happen is when an enemy tries to hit you with the butt of their weapon, pressing a button when the button turns red will have Faith knock the enemy out and take their weapon. Where this starts to fail is that there's a VERY tiny window of opportunity here and because of which, you can initiate slow motion for a short time so you can execute your move. You would think this would be good right? Wrong, what happens when you go into slow motion is that the enemy will melee you and his weapon wont turn red until the end of the swing, which means you will have already been hit and have been knocked back making the attempted disarm a waste of health.
Another issue is that you'll be going in and out lots of buildings and taking lots of elevators. Going in and out of buildings is okay, but can get repetative. The problem here are the elevators, rides take a while and it breaks the mood of the game in many cases (at least in ones where you're not under heavy fire as you struggle to press the button, that's a welcomed break).
Presentation - The platforming aspect of this game is pretty well done. Gameplay stays in first person and while it could probably trigger some motion sickness, it really immurses you into the platforming. The jumping and ducking controls are made for allowing you to really get into a grove as you try and outrun your enemies and it's pretty satisfying to nail a wall run followed by jumping off the wall and grabbing onto a ledge.
As I talked about above, the low damage threshold and general lack of weapons make escaping a tense and fairly fun experience. The problem with this though is that you'll spend nearly the ENTIRE game evading. The CPF will be on your ass soon after you start each level and it gets very tiring as there's no real variety to it and you'll be in situations where you'll be forced to take out enemies later on in the game so you'll be dying quite a bit.
Story- To be honest, the story is okay, but not something memorable. Some of the plot near the end is very predictable, but it at least serves a purpose for keeping you running away the entire time.
In the end, I think the game will be remembered as a cool first person platforming game, but that's it. The story is rather forgetable and short, the platforming can be fun especially when you doing many sweet moves in succession, the combat is very hit or miss, the environments get very repetative and tiring, and the ending is anti-climatic.
What other reason is there to play through the game again except to play with a time trial and to unlock trophies? Or to pay some money for downloadable content? Meh, I think I'll pass.
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What do you think about Mirror's Edge?
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