This is one of the most thoroughly fun and enjoyable games I’ve ever played. The story from start to finish is pretty good, a sort of Noir thriller playing out in the most gleaming setting you can imagine.
People talk about games not being colorful, well this one is all brilliant bright and vibrant colors. It captures the feeling of being up high better than any game I played. At times I would have to stop playing because my nerves were so on edge from feeling like I was actually on the edge of a building.
The controls are amazing. Hand to Hand is a bit primitive but not bad. The Parkour running and jumping off of walls is just phenomenal. My biggest complaint was that it didn’t have 100% climbable terrain. It’s always annoying, particularly in a game that focuses a lot on climbing to be unable to climb something that is shaped like a ladder, just because it’s not the right wall type designed to be climbed.
The story follows Faith. Her job is as a runner, which is basically like a glorified foot messenger, basically take foot messenger and splice it with Ninja, and that’s the what the runners are.
After a while when you get good it is just a joy to run leap over the fence, steal an assault rifle and just go through blasting the enemy troops that stand between you and your objective.
The most nerve-wracking things about it were the isolated shaft climbs where you had to figure out some particularly ludicrous jump to get up it. A jumping puzzle that shows you just how wicked cool their Parkour platform is. The other is when you are climbing up a scaffolding with a helicopter firing at you with a minigun. Some of the crazier jumps where you are getting shot at from many angles that have to be hit just right are kind of annoying.
The best things. When you are actually going with the flow, when you are just running full tilt, that’s when the game blossoms. It is the game’s pace that really shows you what it’s about, so if you are one of those careful types that likes to hide behind the walls before checking what you’re running into, this isn’t your game, that play style is very hard to execute in this game. But when you run and you just use all the terrain to it’s maximum potential sometimes you hit the harder jumps by just flowing through it. Running speed is a major factor in the game. You have to get up to speed so it takes a while to get up to a sprint. Then the other mesmerizing aspect is how the color and level design comes into play, you are actually guided based on the way they use the color palette in the background. Where you need to go often has things that focus your attention and draw you to it. Earlier in the game this means that things you can use are highlighted red, but that’s not what I’m referring to. The existance of that tutorial trick meant that I didn’t recognize their use of color until I played through the second time without those things.
I dug this game except for one thing. There was a particular boss that you had to kill by timing an attack just right. It took me a silly number of tries to get past the guy even though I knew exactly what to do.
Other than that, this is probably one of my favorite games ever.
Yeah, that sort of ‘timing stuff just right’ thing was annoying. I know exactly which boss you are referring to. There are a couple that it applies to but only one that was hard for me. I am playing through a second time and now I can fly through the game.
One missed opportunity they had is that the game doesn’t recognize the edge of dropoffs enough. I just took a shotgun from a cop on a scaffolding. I beat the cop to the ground. It would’ve been easier just to drop kick him off of the edge, and way cooler.
I hated this game when I first picked it up, only because or the repition (which is my failing, not the games). It’s just that I hate having to do the same thing over and over and over and over. There were sections of areas, where, like **sleestak **said, I knew exactly what I had to do, I just had a hard time doing it. For like 20 times in a row. And some of the things you had to pull off were minutes long so if you fail before the check-point … you ended up running through the exact same set of moves ad nauseum. Drove me nuts.
Then I gave it to my daughter to give it a shot, and she beat the entire game in about a day.
It is a very cool game. Unique, innovative, all that. I just suck at it.
Now that I have the moves down, I am flying through the game. Parts that I found incredibly tedious went by in a flash.
If you are truly running, or ‘flowing’ as they put it in the beginning of the game, then really no two checkpoints are more than thirty seconds to a minute apart. If you fail and keep getting stuck, then yeah, it gets painful. I had a point recently where I was heading through the sewers and I jumped down disarmed one sniper and cleanly shot the other two snipers on the other side of the room, only to die by stupidly falling at one point. Then I had to start over on the stupid jump from pillar to pillar section and the two snipers on the other side of the room had respawned but not the one whose gun I could easily take. Ultimately it was fun to leap onto their platform and take the gun of the first sniper and shoot the other sniper at point blank with the sniper rifle. This game really gives you the feel of playing like a Matrix style action movie. Very few games do that. There are few of those heroic moments where you really feel like you did something badass. This one has lots of them.
Of course at this point I can disarm the baddies like 80% of the time and I roll through with a shotgun or machine gun and just take the cops down. The closest game that was similar was Assassin’s Creed, and it got boring and repetitive for me much sooner and I was able to just wander the streets killing with impunity in the first act. Mirror’s Edge provides everything I wanted Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia to be but they weren’t.
they should made the game give the controler a rumble just before you reach the edge, so you can jump at the right time, instead of dropping to your death time after time after time
Hmm I would’ve found that annoying. I don’t find I have THAT much trouble timing my jumps, there are very few that require perfect timing, and also it stops you from simply walking off the edge.
I enjoyed Mirror’s Edge a lot more than I expected I would. DICE stepped outside the box on this one, and they made it work pretty well. I look forward to playing a sequel or another game based on this concept.
This game really gives you the feel of playing like a Matrix style action movie. Very few games do that. There are few of those heroic moments where you really feel like you did something badass. This one has lots of them.