I spent most of the day yesterday and today playing through Mirror’s Edge. I haven’t had so much fun since I played Portal for the first time. For those of you who haven’t heard about the game, Mirror’s Edge tells the story of a society where communication is monitored by a totalitarian regime. You play Faith, one of a network of “runners”, who transmit messages between members of a resistance group while evading government surveillance.
In essence, it’s parkour turned into a video game. The game is presented in a very stylized way. The graphics are clean and sharp, the story makes sense, and there’s a constant sense of urgency as you blaze through the various levels while dodging heavily armed enemies.
On the whole, this game is an absolute must play if you’re a fan of the action adventure genre – or for anyone who’s just looking for something new.
Nice, I’ve been waiting for a review from this game. I am about to check to see if its avaliable for PC now.
Thanks for review, mucho appreciated!
[ass] maybe next time you could post some screenshots or two, and if you are playing on PC what kind of features it has for PC, like avaliable screen rez’s, gameplay settings, whatever…etc. [/ass]
I played it on PC. It supports ridiculously high resolutions. (Maroon uses a 28″ high-def LCD monitor running at ungodly x ungodly pixels.)
There’s a time trial mode and a lot of interesting unlocks.
ungodly x ungodly screen rez. hahaa, nice.
thanks.
That would be 1920×1200. The game runs perfectly stable at that resolution on full settings with an 8800GTX.
nice.
i shouldn’t have any problems then.
I hope that EA pays you guys some royalties, because i am going to buy this bad boy. (as opposed to getting it for free)
I want to respectfully disagree. While the plot and idea were nice, the gameplay, for me, left something to be desired. The controls were intuitive enough for me, ignoring that the turning was too slow to keep up with the demanding pace of the game at times, but my biggest complaint the game seemed to have a personality disorder: half the time it wanted you to run from confrontation, and half the time you had to hit confrontation head-on with the physique of a character meant to run from combat. There were some levels where it was just plain unfair about the number of guys with guns shooting machine guns with a level of accuracy that would leave Bullseye jealous.
The level design, while a nice switch up from the muddy grey-ish grit-fest that has been “next-gen” games, was difficult for a platformer, and many of the jumps were (no pun intended) pure leaps of faith, as seeing the white landing zone against the white background with the excess bloom was just a tad difficult, and don’t even get me started on the collision detection bugs that crop up trying to hop over knee-height boxes.
My final gripe: Good lord, why was this not in 3rd person?! I can understand wanting a clean interface and what not, but there is a reason that platforming in 1st person rarely works out well: All the things that allow us to do that in real life, namely equilibrium and awareness of our own limbs past sight, are things that we cannot simulate in a video game. So more often than not, unless you have run a particular level multiple times, it’s nearly impossible to do anything without slowly turning your head and/or looking down.
All in all though, I can’t hate the game, it was a stab at something new, and during an era where most big-name games have a number at the end, I can’t fault designers trying something that we hadn’t seen before.