Mirror mirror, on the wall…

Posted on 16 May 2008 by Pale Horse

… who will catch you if you fall?

Filed under: Games | Tagged: , , , , , , ,

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5 Responses

  1. rustedangel, on May 21st, 2008 at 4:44 pm Said:

    I am ‘hella excited about this.

    Reply
  2. trippenbach, on May 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 am Said:

    Yeah, that looks really cool. I’m in.

    Reply
  3. rustedangel, on January 29th, 2009 at 3:36 pm Said:

    Mirror’s Edge Review:

    So, what’s the verdict?

    Mirror’s edge has a lot of problems. The FPS bits are extremely clunky. The disarm politics are infuriatingly close to totally abitrary. “Runner-Vision” alternatingly makes things too obvious or fails to show up at all. The uber-cool shoulder bag is ditched in the first mission, signalling the end of any attempt to focus on your character as a courrier. The cutscenes don’t look nearly as good as the interactions that occur in-engine, and the story – despite Dice’s employment of a novella writer to flesh it out – eschews dystopian politics in favor of a pedestrian murder mystery.

    So, is this a negative review? Suprisingly, No.

    I fell for the hype on this one completely, so my expectations were astronomical… and yet, I don’t really feel betrayed. Why? Because the good parts of Mirror’s Edge are really good. The game succeeds in conveying the momentum and physicality of parkour in a way no other game I’ve played has. Whenever I found myself frustrated by the game’s lack of the Orwellian feel I was so desperately hoping for, I’d run into a long rooftop section and lose myself in the joy of running.

    Overall, the game controls well, and scores a lot of points for originality. The story, though seriously underwritten, retains much of the promise that drew me to it in the first place. I can only hope that it does well enough to spawn a sequel – hopefully a sequel that does what Gears of War 2 did; accentuate what gamers loved about the original and remedy what they didn’t.

    A dissapointing, occasionally exhilerating 6.9/10.

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  4. tanith6227, on January 30th, 2009 at 10:03 pm Said:

    Dakalos called me the other day to talk about Mirror’s Edge, and raised some interesting points:

    1) The game is short. He’s had it a week and is on this third playthrough

    2) Some of the plot doesn’t make sense. You have to courrier stuff around because the Government is everywhere and sending data electronically isn’t safe. Of course, your controller talks to you via radio the whole time. And of course there’s the question of whyyou have to run around at all, when the people you work for own helicopters – why not just fly the packages to their destinations? I guess this is why they dropped the satchel stuff.

    Of course, when you start thinking about stuff in these terms, you are to a certain extent Doing It Wrong. Games require a certain suspension of disbelief and a degree of consent from the player. Everything I hear about ME points to the same thing: that when it’s on, it’s really good, and when it steps away from what it does well, it becomes a chore. If it sells enough copies to merit a sequel (and the hype surrounding it almost ensures that it will), let’s hope that DICE fix what’s broker and provide more of what ain’t.

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  5. tanith6227, on February 9th, 2009 at 7:55 pm Said:

    Mirror’s Edge is a truly mixed bag. It’s gorgeous, with a bold yet simple colour palette that reminded me of the Dick Tracy movie. DICE have definitely nailed the first-person perspective; once you get Faith going, the impression of speed and alacrity is truly astounding, and the feeling of freedom you get the first time you string together four or five moves without missing a step is, for me, one of the gaming highlights of the last 12 months. The world that DICE have created, where information is carefully controlled and only the Runners enable people to communicate freely, is compelling. The first four levels are great; you run like hell, avoid cops and leap around like a spider monkey. You’ll settle quickly into the controls and before long you’ll be plotting your path across the rooftops several steps in advance.

    Unfortunately, the game can’t keep up with its promising beginning. Around the time you get to Chapter 5 the game begins to bog down, forcing you to spend more time indoors and battling cops. The interior environments are visually more interesting than the miles and miles of gleaming white rooftops (liberally sprinkled with ventilation units, air ducts, pipes, flag poles and ladders), but are less fun to navigate – when you’re topside there is a wonderful sense of vast scale and enormous freedom (not unlike what I felt the first time I stepped out of the Vault in Fallout 3, actually), and there is often more than one way to get where you’re going, which rewards exploration and risk-taking. Inside, it is generally painfully obvious which way you’re meant to go … until it isn’t, which is usually when your vaunted Runner Vision – which is supposed to highlight useful terrain features in red – suddenly stops working, forcing you to spend long minutes bouncing impotently off walls and breaking your legs over and over until you puzzle out the correct path for yourself. This just compounds the disappointment you’re likely to feel at being caged inside when there’s so much running to do outside.

    There are a few other unfortunate design decisions: as a Runner who’s trying to unravel a high-profile murder, you spend a lot of time evading the cops. Quite often, however, the Blues are between you and your destination, forcing you either to fight them – which is clumsy, with a disarm mechanic that sometimes seems arbitrary – or get past them, which is often very hard because something like 90% of the police officers in The City are on the SWAT Team and carry shotguns, assault rifles or LMGs that will take Faith to pieces in very little time. Also, in order to add a sense of urgency to your flight, cops will frequently burst out of doors as you pass them, allowing them to stay on your tail across considerable distances. While this does light a fire under you, it also makes you feel kind of like a tool. If I’m so great at running, then how is it that these donut-eating pigs in their full body armour are so often able to keep pace with me?
    Finally, the police also have the uncanny (and immensely irritating) ability to know where you are at pretty much all times. Sneaking past them is basically impossible, since they will invariably become alerted to your presence, even if you stay motionless and out of sight (as I did on several occasions).

    Rusty has already mentioned how the story falls flat, and he’s absolutely right. What’s worse is that when you get to the end of the game, you haven’t really solved anything – which I guess is good if you’re a developer thinking about a sequel. It’s not so great if you’re a player looking for a sense of closure or accomplishment.

    Another thing that bugged me is that The City’s entire population seems to consist of a handful of Runners and a hundred thousand cops. Obviously you don’t expect to see anyone else when you’re on a rooftop or infiltrating a shady dockyard, but you might be forgiven for thinking when you’re running through a mall at eleven o’clock in the morning or through a subway station at rush hour or along the street at breakfast or through an office building in the middle of the afternoon that you might bump into a college student or bag lady or receptionist or something. Even Oni threw the occasionally warehouse worker in your path.

    In spite of all this, Mirror’s Edge does maintain a certain appeal. When the game just opens up and lets you run, it brushes up with true greatness. But like Icarus who flew too high, Mirror’s Edge tries to do too much and so fails in several respects. My sincere hope is that DICE get another shot and do to their sequel what Epic did with Gears of War 2: keep the basic formula, while fixing or improving the weaknesses. More open environments, less prancing around with cops and a better story line will do the next Mirror’s Edge a world of good. This game has a lot of potential; let’s hope DICE really kick ass with the sequel.

    6.5/10

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