Mirror’s Edge is the story of Faith as she runs for the freedom of the citizens of a heavily policed world, ultimately searching for her sister that has become imprisoned by the government. Find out more inside.
by:
November 11, 2008
Electronic Arts has been on a mission to make more original content, and with games like Dead Space, and now this it seems as if though they are on the right path. The start of the game you are greeted by an incredible title theme, “Still Alive” by Lisa Miskovsky, and throughout the game you hear different equally amazing variations of the title theme by the likes of artist Paul van Dyk, Teddybears, and Benny Benassi. When loading the title up you are treated to an incredible loading screen unfolding the story of Mirror’s Edge protagonist Faith. Faith is a runner, skipping across the rooftops delivering information back and forth while on a ultimate mission of finding her sister that was taken from her family by the government. The government has a hold on all communications with every single word uttered or written monitored, and with this many people protested, Faith’s parents were killed, and many have created underground movements to counteract this ultimate policing state.
The game is all about speed, and while it seems like a first-person shooter at first, it is more like a first-person platforming game. You must traverse, scale, jump, slide, and hurdle your way across rooftops to deliver your precious messages as some kind of renegade mail woman. As you pick up speed you see the wind gliding across your body, see Faith’s body as she thrusts her weight in front of her to make the gap fifty stories in the air, and it is done gracefully with absolutely no heads up display to distract you. The only kind of display you see is a dot in the middle of the screen to help you keep your balance and sense of direction.
The controls are fairly easy, although take a bit to get used to, using mostly left bumper and trigger for your jumping, crouching, sliding under objects as you race towards, them and glide gracefully through the wind. Sometimes to get a few extra steps in and propel yourself Jackie Chan style, you mix it up by using the right bumper and trigger for some actions as well. Along the way you can disarm the militant police you come across, hit them with a few punches or a flying kick, but really you just want to run past them if at all possible. If there are to many of them then you can always press the X button allowing you to concentrate and effectively slowing down time, so you can time those disarmament moves just right. Probably the biggest complaint I could have about the game is that you have to train yourself not to confront to much opposition, because after all you are wearing just enough to cover yourself up so that you can glide easier through the air, and it can be easy to misjudge a jump and plunge to your death.
Visually Mirror’s Edge is completely unique thanks to a combination of the Unreal Engine 3 and special in house developing tools developed by DICE. An over saturation thanks to the sprawling pale cityscape and the punishing sun sounds very boring, but it is beautiful and minimalist. The landscape is bleached out, and incredibly clean, with the only true hints of colors in the soulless world comes from the incredible fluidity of your movement and seeing objects in red that indicate your “runner vision”. The runner vision is something that is the ability to see objects that you can jump off of, or slide under, indicated by being bright red and trust me you won’t miss them. As you progress through the game less and less objects will be highlighted red, adding to the difficulty, but at the same time the openness of the game. There isn’t always one straight route to get to your target goal, and this leads to improvisation and a far less linear experience despite being restricted to rooftops for much of the game. Check out Xbox Evolved later this month for our full review of the game, in the meantime you can find wallpapers and more at the official site for the game.
