Mirror’s Edge – A Pleasant Reflection
I have an irrational love for games that require an apostrophe. But I also reserve special praise for games that dare to try something quite different, and DICE’s genre-bending game does that in spades.
The first notable departure is in terms of the camera – this is a first-person game that attempts to deliver the sort of physical gameplay classically delivered by a third-person game. It is a platformer where you are looking through Mario’s eyes. As you jump, roll and slide your way around rooftops you will occasionally catch a glance at your legs as you jump or slide, and the game is punctuated by the heavy breathing of the game’s heroine Faith.
The game is set in a totalitarian futuristic city – as a ‘runner’ you not only operate outside the law as a kind of human carrier-pigeon delivering what are presumably messages from the resistance, but outside normal human existence. Partly because of the minimalist design and because you operate on rooftops, tunnels, drains and service hatches you inhabit a sort of shadow world that feels like it could exist without anyone ‘normal’ ever noticing. It’s tempting to feel a bit like a super-hero, and recall those moments where Superman, Spider-man or Batman stand on a ledge on the roof of a skyscraper, surveying the world that they somehow want to protect. As an introverted teenager (and adult) I always found those moments quite profound in the movies – what it feels like to be different.
Faith is an appropriate name for the lead character. As you travel across rooftops at speed there is little alternative to faith, as you will simply arrive at the edge of a skyscraper and have little option but to fling yourself into oblivion in the hope that you will land safe on some other building. This can lead to frustrating deaths, but also moments of pure adrenalin-fuelled mayhem – at its best this game is one of the most exhilarating ever created. Because this all happens in front of your eyes – it’s the difference between Smash TV in 2D and Doom in 3D. It’s a profound leap forward in terms of a gaming experience.
It doesn’t always work as well as you’d like. Frustrating trial-and-error sections can test the patience – once you have failed to complete a jump in one go, you can never feel the same joy when finally getting it right. And the combat, when it cannot be avoided, is unresponsive and unrefined – experience soon teaches one to avoid the enemy at all costs. But in a way these are inbuilt problems – if combat is satisfying it takes over from the basic gameplay, and without trial and error sections there is no skill in getting these things right.
One thing the game gets totally right is the striking design of the environments, predominantly painted in pure white. In one sense it’s a conceptual playground, and totally surreal, yet the cityscape of the future is familiar enough that we just about believe it. It is so suspiciously clean, and so formulaic and slightly square that it is almost alien – you have to look hard for the blemishes, but then that is what the story is all about. For a defiantly adult-themed game, it is more Pixar than Half-Life, and all the more daring and original for it.
The sense of progress is very satisfying here. After all, it’s a totally new control scheme and ‘feel’ to get used to, and my first moments were disorientating and difficult. But towards the end of my first run-through I was starting to learn some of the shortcuts and tricks that make seemingly impossible feats of athleticism possible – as soon as I cleared the game I couldn’t wait to go back to the earlier levels and play them better for style points. There’s an inbuilt speed-run system and also a series of hugely challenging time-trials to give the game extra longevity. Looking at some of the youtube videos show that there’s another level of skill to be gained – I cleared a time-trial in 2 minutes feeling very proud of myself, then watched a youtube video of the same thing being done in 30 seconds! There’s also a very neat system where you can download the ghost of the best players doing the time trials, and then race against them to try and match their times.
So there’s lots going on here – it’s a very accomplished piece of work. The skill element clearly stands up to scrutiny, with the depth to match any gameplay-based game out there – it actually feels more like the trick system in Skate than the FPS game’s you might be more tempted to compare it to, and like Skate you can spend a similar number of hours trying to perfect it. The game ‘feels’ like nothing else I’ve ever played. Although the story is only mildly diverting, it’s more than made up for by the variety in the levels and the startlingly original overall look and design of the game. It’s a game that dared to be different, and pulls it off triumphantly.
