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 disarming would never have worked and you just wasted health and slow motion.

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.

*edit* - I would also like to add for those who dislike the required game installs on the hard drive on the PS3, Mirror's Edge is yet another title to require it. Unlike most games however, this is probably one of best ones that shouldn't cause discomfort. The installation took about a minute or two and I checked the game utility to see that it only installed around 400-500 megs compared to the 5 gigs that MGS4 requires. Not only that, load times were very comfortable as well.

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What do you think about Mirror's Edge?

me and Naz are getting the PC version

Cool, though it sucks that it comes out later than the PS3/360 versions.

Aiming with weapons and more complex platforming should be much better for you guys than it would be with analog sticks.

Me too. Wow, two full quotes already.

I'm glad to see that the game seems challenging.

I saw the commercial for this game for the first time today. Said it was a 10/10.

Of course a commercial would say 10/10. It wouldn't make any sense to not cite the highest scores to hype a game.

Still, it's a decent game and the platforming can be fun and makes you think about how you can get through areas that allow multiple paths.

Is it Heavenly Sword short? It sounds like you beat it in a day. Definitely NOT worth a purchase.

I also received it in the mail today from Gamefly.

The game is mostly running, running, jumping and more running. It is very repetitive as well as the environments. All you have to do is find something red and jump on/towards it. Or you can hold the O button to find out where you have to go. You can't take multiple paths for the levels most of the times. It was fun the first two chapters jumping from place to place, but it gets boring after a while. It is pretty much the same thing thoughout the whole game. It will take you a couple of tries to nail some of the jumps or avoiding the blues. The combat is kinda weak. Its pretty frustating when you're face to face with them, and you're force to take them out. All you can do is do that slow motion and disarm them or try to punch them 3 or 4 times. The shooting is just laughable. The game definitely keeps your adrenaline pumping running away from the helicopters and blues, but that doesn't last long when some puzzling jumps or other stuff gets in the way.

The environments/graphics look pretty good. Very beautiful to watch. The thing that sucks about it is that pretty much everything is white with a few colors added to some walls and whatnot. The trees are even white. If you see something red, then thats where you need to go. When you see the levels, the scales are amazing, but sadly the environments are very limited.

The music is pretty nice. Sound and voice acting are also good. The story is alright, nothing mind-blowing but not terrible. The characters aren't interesting at all. They lack personality. Cutscenes look pretty good. The game has no replay-value other than the trophies. The game is also short. Each chapter lasts like 30 minutes. The time trials aren't worth a look. It is a pretty interesting, unique concept that was poorly executed.

5.5/10

I would say it's a little longer, but still pretty short.

Heavenly Sword had the more interesting cut-scenes considering all the motion capping and acting they did.

So it is worth a rental.