Mirror's Edge Review

So I just found this in my drafts, even though I thought I'd published it a few weeks ago.  So here's the first video game review I talked about before -

Overall Rating - B

Quick Summary: Mirror's Edge is a free running game.  In a distopian future where the police state controls everything.  "runners" (who basically do parkour over the tops of buildings) carry people's secrets for a little cash.  But some shit goes down and suddenly everyone is coming after you.  You spend the rest of the game running - away from cops, towards answers, and really just all over the place.

Gameplay: B
Graphics: A
Story: D
Music/Sound: C+
Replay: B
Multiplayer: N/A

Depth: Low
Playtime: 10 hours

I heard a lot about this game when it first came out which was early in the PS3 days.  It was graphically stunning, and one of the first actual free running games that had ever been made, so the idea was new (it's since been copied quite a bit).  It was fun to get in and play something that I heard about a few years ago. 

While the graphics can't be considered quite as state of the art anymore, they still look great, and really add to the feel of running through a futuristic city.  The story was garbage, really just an excuse for you to be going everywhere you are at the speeds you are, but the cut-scenes between the 11 levels go to a sort of cartoony/anime style graphics that were fun.  I think they did this because the cut-scenes have a lot more on the people/characters that you never get a good look at while you're playing, so it was an easy way to give them life without having to high definition detail them.

Now onto the gameplay, which is really what this game was about.  When the game worked, it worked great.  You would dash along a rooftop, slide under a vent, then vault over a fence while running along a wall to get to another rooftop.  It gave you the sensation of flying.  Usually the game worked when you had to move fast, but occasionally there'd be certain spots where it just didn't want to let you do what you were doing everywhere else.  There was one point where you had to run along a wall, and for whatever reason 9/10 times that wall didn't let you run along it.  Since falling to your death set you back 2 minutes, it was annoying to have to do it over and over again, particularly since there were some hard fights right after that took me a few tries to make it by. 

There were also times in the game where you didn't have to go fast.  Nobody was chasing you, but you needed to climb up a building or through an overly complicated sewer system or something.  Here the game really got frustrating.  Fine movement controls didn't work well for things like when you needed to get right up to the edge of something before jumping, so half the time you just walked right off the edge.  Oh well.  Despite the frustrating sections here and there, by and large the running mechanic did what it was supposed to and kept it fun.

There wasn't much to the music, but the sounds did a good job of letting you know when people were after you, and also of letting you know that you had hit the rooftop, or caught the pipe you jumped for. Also, one of the best little additions to the game was what happened when you fell off the side of a building. Rather than just saying you die, the game kept going until your reached the ground.  The ground starts coming closer and closer, faster and faster. You start flailing. Things get a little blurry. The sound ramps up from light wind to faster and faster wind around your ears. The splat/crunch at the bottom was especially well done, and everything cuts out.  I wasn't entirely expecting it the first time it happened, and it was kind of terrifying. 

All in all this was a fun little distraction.  At only about 10 hours to play through the story, it was a quick easy playthrough.  Once you complete the story there's a number of time trials and speed runs and things like that that you could spend some time with, but after trying a few of them I decided to move on.  Perhaps at some point I'll come back to it and try a few more.