This review was written by Jon Norris. Thank you, Jon!

In Mirror's Edge, the new first person running/urban exploration/kung fu simulator from Dice (they of Battlefield series fame), you play Faith, part of a team of wingless carrier pigeons known as runners, whose job it is to deliver materials outside regular means of communication, that their clients don't want the omnipresent Big Brother-esque government to get their hands on.  The action takes place in a remarkably polished and reflective near-future city, which, somewhat predictably, isn't as squeaky clean as its exterior may suggest.  You start the game with a short tutorial to explain the controls, which are quite different to conventional first-person controls, with the emphasis on simplicity.  The upper-left shoulder button is upward movement (jumps, vaults etc.), and the lower being downward (slides, rolls and the like).  Soon after your tutorial is complete you must run to the rescue of your sister, and the storyline spirals from there into a fairly predictable romp full of hilarious voice-acting and even more hilarious character stereotypes.  That's not to say the story and characters are bad, let’s just say it isn't exactly Shakespearean in quality.  The question is, at this time of year with a new AAA title hitting almost weekly, can newcomer Faith hold her own amongst the Marcus Fenix's and Lara Croft's of the world?

Read more for the rest of the review...
   
Let me be clear about something before I start – I am not very good at Mirror's Edge.  Having finished the campaign and tackled most of the time trials I can see from the amount of retries some levels took me and my leaderboard standings that I am not very good at Mirror's Edge.  I'm also not very good at Wipeout HD, and I was rubbish at the new Call of Duty.  The mark of a good game, however, has always been that you can enjoy it even though you are crap at it.  Thankfully in this case, yes, you can.

From the first time you are let loose in the city the senses of freedom and opportunity are intoxicating.  This is a game with real atmosphere, as you leap from rooftop to rooftop you can't help but be impressed by the scale of the city.  Sure, you might not get to explore much of it, but it seems to stretch on indefinitely, full of gleaming towers surrounding a sparkling harbour.  If every totalitarian government kept such a clean house I dare say North Korea would be more popular with tourists.  The problem is, the game looks so polished and movement is so graceful and poised that if I'd fall short of a jump or fumble a landing, the loss of momentum and the accompanying thud almost made me feel embarrassed, like I'd let the game down.  After such blunders I often threw myself off a building in despair so I could restart a section to improve my route.

While you may feel like you've let the game down, when you're bounding over rooftops and swinging from cranes you certainly won't feel let down yourself.  The freedom of movement and the range of tricks you can pull off is staggering.  Never has a puzzle as simple as “get up this wall” been so entertaining and rewarding.  You are guided around the game world by 'runner vision', which colours objects in bright red or blue if you can interact with them.  I like this system a lot, its much less intrusive than a big waypoint arrow and allows you the freedom to go exploring without feeling like you're going the wrong way.  Of course this feature can be turned off if you don't like to be nannied and want to find your own way through.  If you should ever lose your bearings while performing a particularly nauseating wallrun, a quick push of O or X (depending on your gaming platform) will re-orientate you towards your objective.  At times all of these elements come together beautifully and it's here that Mirror's Edge really shines, there's a real satisfaction in going from one checkpoint to another without a misstep, or leaping over an armed guard and disappearing round the next corner before they can even react.  The name of the game is momentum, maintaining decent speed and running a smooth line will allow you to jump further to reach quicker routes (vitally important in the speed run mode), and when you're really hauling ass the sense of speed is palpable – the screen edges blur, the noise of Faith's footsteps and breathing increase, and your sole purpose becomes the continuation of that speed.  These excellent fast sections are broken up by not-so-cleverly-disguised loading screens in the form of elevator rides.  They never last too long though and a scrolling news screen will keep you entertained.  The between-level loading is taken care of with cartoons that further the plot and/or explain your next mission; you can skip these if you like as the loading never takes long, even on the notoriously loading-screen-happy PS3, perhaps a happy by-product of the stark minimalism throughout the game.

The main thing to understand about Mirror's Edge is that a lot of it is the complete antithesis of a conventional first-person shooter.  In fact, it isn't at all fair to call it a shooter, as shooting is positively discouraged.  Carrying a gun will slow you down, and there is a trophy/achievement for completing the game without firing a gun.  Where a regular shooter will drop you off at the entrance to a warehouse and instruct you to kill everyone inside, Mirror's Edge will start you a mile or two away from the warehouse, and tell you to get there as quickly as possible.  Don't be confused though – this isn't GTA.  You'll have a clearly-defined route (usually across rooftops, although sometimes you venture to ground level), with opportunities for more audacious routes for adept runners.  When you arrive at your warehouse you'll get a bit of exposition while you navigate around the building looking for plot device A, trying not to attract attention from the police.

The police (or “blues” as they're called, bring your own pun), by the way, are your worst enemy and a genuine threat.  Running away is almost always your best option.  There are a few frustrating instances when you're forced to stand and fight - these can be truly infuriating as even on normal difficulty you die almost instantly if you end up facing anything bigger than a pistol, and the combat/disarming system does not lend itself well to tackling multiple opponents, often I'd find myself disarming an officer, having snuck up on them, only to be killed by another waiting around the corner while the disarm animation played out.  You have very few offensive options – only two, in fact.  Get close to them somehow, wait for them to try to punch you and disarm them, or give them a quick dropkick or punch to the head and run away before they open fire.


Luckily these encounters are few and far between; you can avoid coming to any harm by vaulting over an air conditioning unit, up onto an overhang and off around the corner.  There are a couple of supremely satisfying moments when the combat system and the freerunning system meld seamlessly into one another, for example at one point while running along a rather high and precarious scaffold, a policeman comes lumbering into view from around a corner.  Before he can turn around you will have (assuming you're not as fat-fingered as me, that is) run up onto the wall, jumped off and delivered a spinning kick to his head, sending him sailing gracefully from the scaffold and in to the sweet embrace of the concrete hundreds of feet below, while you come to a halt, teetering on the edge with inches to spare.  It may all sound very complicated, but due to the elegance of the control scheme, this whole sequence can be done with three button presses.

One nice touch I noticed was that after I'd dispatched that particular officer, I clambered onto an adjacent building and looked down to find a crowd had gathered around his body.  Not in any way needed, as most serious players wouldn't even think twice and keep moving, but a welcome touch nonetheless.

Which leads me onto the real star of Mirror's Edge – the city.  Dice have really played to their strengths here, and the result looks fantastic.  There are none of the usual problems that dog games using the Unreal Engine 3, and the lighting is in places nothing less than spectacular.  The game uses a quite ridiculous amount of HDR and bloom effects, but where it would be a distraction or even an annoyance in other games, here it is all part of the dayglo, whiter-than-white Mirror's Edge world - it's a refreshing change from the disparate wastelands that have been so popular of late.  Even when you burst out a door into bright sunlight and immediately fall to your death because you couldn't see where the hell you were going, it's forgivable, not least due to the excellent checkpoint system in place (which is needed, believe you me).


The main gripe I've heard levelled at Mirror's Edge so far is that the campaign is too short and there is too little in the way of multiplayer.  The latter is a gripe that I cannot help but share.  I completed the campaign in a little less than half a day, and if you were to take all the current best speedrun times and combine them, the entire campaign could be polished off in a little over an hour and ten minutes.  I don't have too many problems with the campaign however; it does what it set out to do and is pretty damn fun to boot.  If someone were to say to me the campaign was too short, I'd say to them, well, you shouldn't have run through the whole thing, idiot.  My main problem is that for me, far and away the best levels of the single player were when you were being pursued by or pursuing other runners, so why oh why didn't they include a multiplayer component like that?  Imagine a weaponless capture the flag, where the emphasis is on speed and style rather than superior firepower – now that would truly help Mirror's Edge shine amongst the plethora of new titles this autumn.  As it stands, the closest you can get to competitive freerunning is to download the ghosts of other people’s times on certain levels, which in today's online world of four-player co-op and 64-person battles just isn't adequate.

As a whole package Mirror's Edge is pure high-concept.  I'm sure you've seen the game advertised all over the place – I saw the trailer for it when I went to see the new Bond film last week, and have seen numerous print ads for it.  There is a soundtrack coming out and various accoutrements available for purchase.  EA have obviously seen something special in this franchise and I can't fault their decision.  This is a Portal-esque game that takes a familiar formula and flips it on its head with style.  That's not to say its without it's problems, the aforementioned lack of multiplayer is nigh-on unforgivable given the obvious potential, and the combat system definitely need to be addressed in the (already announced) sequel, but as a single player experience it rarely dips lower than glorious.

If you can get past the lacklustre storyline, the ham-fisted social commentary, and the occasionally frustrating combat sequence, and simply revel in the near-perfection of the freerunning system, then you are in for a real treat.  Mirror's Edge is a game that wants to be played and wants to be mastered.  That, I think, is the difference between this title and so many of the others released recently.  I may be crap at Mirror's Edge, but by god I want to get better.

8-D
• Intuitive, simple controls
• Gorgeous setting
• Immersive as hell

>:-(
• No multiplayer to speak of
• Limited combat options
• Simplistic push-button puzzles break the games flow

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