Developed by EA DICE

Release: 2008 (PS3, Xbox 360), 2009 (PC), 2010 (iOS)

Premise

Mirror’s Edge is a first person action game largely focused around parkour, the art of moving quickly to get from one point to another as fast as possible. Mirror’s Edge has seen release on most major platforms, and a sequel, subtitled Catalyst, was recently released onto current generation consoles and PC.

In Mirror’s Edge, the player takes on the role of Faith, an illegal information messenger in a somewhat dystopian futuristic city. While Faith’s job as a ‘runner’ is normally to provide her clients with a clandestine way of trafficking secrets, she becomes embroiled in a plot that reveals deep corruption and a coming threat to her way of life. The player must utilize Faith’s mastery of parkour and close quarters combat to unravel the mystery and protect those she cares about.

The Good

For its time, Mirror’s Edge had a sleek, memorable presentation. Though the game world is highly detailed visually, the majority of the it is generally comprised of simple, loud colors. This is because the palette was purposely selected to highlight objects of note, so as to guide the player through more complicated scenarios. This color coordination is how Mirror’s Edge attempts to achieve flow in its gameplay, by hinting at its most effective routes of travel in each level on a moment to moment, more or less natural way. Though this feature can be disabled, and is sometimes not used particularly effectively, this is perhaps the single most clever innovation one could add to a guided game experience about parkour.

Mirror’s Edge also manages to create complexity in gameplay with simple, intuitive controls. The number of moves Faith can perform with a mere two buttons that contextually activate different actions is fairly impressive. With just two buttons and a control stick, the player can execute a series of maneuvers involving direction changes, wall-running, jumping, sliding, rolling, and spring-boarding off various objects, in most cases without relying on specifically designated locations for doing so. The game often demands perfection in executing these tasks, so, unlike other games with simple quick time events that do not feel like the player is truly performing an action, Mirror’s Edge does offer a satisfying level of challenge in that respect.

The Bad

In perhaps the most horrendous sin a full-priced game can commit, Mirror’s Edge is horrifically short. A complete playthrough of the game’s main campaign clocked in at just around three hours, and after that, the only additional play features are races, time trials, and campaign difficulty options. After experimenting with those additional modes for a short time, reaching this unavoidable conclusion was quite disappointing. Generally I don’t like to judge games based on the hour-value of the content provided, but when an offering is so paltry, it must be judged accordingly.

Mirror’s Edge, though innovative in its use of parkour as a game mechanic, is still extremely broken on a fundamental level. The limited control scheme it utilizes, though brilliant in theory, is unable to compensate for the myriad of situations the player is put in. Execution failures leading to player death are easily triggered accidentally, such as wall-running when one means to climb, as the contextual ‘go higher’ and ‘go lower’ buttons only seem to look at player position, target position, and angle when determining how the player’s interaction will proceed. The player is forced to re-learn how to perform basic climbing and traversal tasks to avoid Faith deciding to take short walks off tall skyscrapers, which makes further deaths caused by these context-driven missteps to be progressively more infuriating.

Additionally, gameplay is often unintuitive or outright broken. Though the game’s system would have a player believing that they could discover their own way to tackle a problem, in the vast majority of cases options are artificially limited in a number of subtle ways. The most potent example I encountered was during a section where Faith is scaling an interior scaffolding structure, where one normal scaffolding panel is very slightly rotated to prevent the player from using it to more quickly solve the climbing puzzle. Combat is also extremely random, with sequences sometimes being completely skippable, other times requiring a series of lucky coincidences for the player to advance. The game tries to indicate which of these fights are mandatory, but on more than one occasion the red aura around enemies indicating that fights were mandatory was not telling the truth.

The Unique

The uniqueness of Mirror’s Edge is pretty self-evident. Parkour is a concept largely pushed to the background of games that feature chasing or climbing in urban environments, and basing an entire game around it is a worthy endeavor. Other than what was mentioned before, there honestly isn’t a lot to write home about. The audio and story accouterments are fairly forgettable, and the gameplay itself is incredibly fickle. However, for those who find endless joy in the rush of Mirror’s Edge‘s style of parkour in gaming, there really aren’t many good alternatives.

Mirror’s Edge is not a particularly smart, polished, or well-designed game, but the niche that it fills is sorely lacking in content. For that, if perhaps that alone, Mirror’s Edge does its premise some justice.