Nov 10, 2008

Impressions: Mirror’s Edge

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Impressions | Mirror's Edge | Review: 360 | Review: PS3

So with the release of Mirror’s Edge demo, we here at Level Select thought we would share with you our feeling towards the game! This is in no way a review but more of a first impression of this game.

So what’s the game all about..?

This game is in essence a Parkour-inspired FPS (Think Casino Royale’s opening sequence, in the construction site!) where you play Faith a “Runner” or basically a delivery driver, but instead of a van you have to use roof tops! And as you would expect you will have to run, jump, vault and slide yourself around various roof tops, factories, sewers and more roof tops..!

Parkour (or Free Running as it’s known in the UK) is one of the games’ main influence. What Parkour is for those unfamiliar, is an acrobatic method of travelling from point A to point B, the idea is to challenge your conceptions about borders, barriers and obstacles. The mantra is to aways move forwards and if something blocks your path, then move over, under or around it. Another very obvious influence would The Matrix films, both in presentation of the world you traverse and in the snippet of story we are fed during the demo.

Ok so that out of the way what did I think of this game?

Well I don’t think I’ve personally ever seen a more stunning looking game before! Yes there have been some outstanding games before but none have had this “Hyper Realism” to them that Mirrors Edge has, As soon as the game was loaded up I was taken aback by the high level of detail this game has, from the tiny details like the cars moving on the ground to the textures of the walls and gravel!

Even the Story Trailer below is outstanding with its own Anime / vector feel to it, and Then there’s the loading screens. Each loading screen has a 3D Faith performing various combat moves against police officers. The differnence being that they have coloured Faith red and the police black and removed any perspective. What’s left is a flat, yet three dimentional character which is both unique and far better than any loading bar.

So how does the game handle? Well I have to say I was shot down in flames last night when playing this by the other members of the LS team because I’m one of those people that never moved on with the FPS controls since Golden Eye on the N64 and guess what, yup there is little if not nothing you can do to change the controls apart from the buttons to jump and slide!

While I did find it hard to play, I wasn’t the only one who did. When passed around for others to play they too were finding it difficult to control Faith. I’m sure a lot of consideration was put into the control scheme, but it seems to me that so much time and effort has been put into the look and feel of this game they somewhat forgot about the controls. It feels like they just closed their eyes and randomly assigned controls to buttons without any thought of what they were doing.

To be fair the difficulty with the controls could simply down to the lack of familiarity with it. I’m sure if I were to play this game for a longer period of time I would become more accustomed to the new controls. The problem is that in my opinion any game should be at the very least playable straight away from turning it on, and on top of this Free Running gives off an air of ease and grace.

Something I definitely didn’t while playing this.

Mirror’s Edge arrives for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on November 11, and even though I wasn’t impressed with the controls I think that with a little patience playing this game will become second nature.