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Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Some thoughts on Mirror's Edge

8:05 PM / Games / 3 Comments

I'm always slightly wary of any game that is flaunted by a major publisher as ground-breaking, particularly when that publisher is Electronic Arts. This is, after all, a company renowned for milking its intellectual properties to death, with an annual update to each of its most lucrative franchises coming along with the predictability of a regular bowel movement. It's refreshing, therefore, to see a game specifically marketed as bringing something new to the table actually living up to the hype. That's not to say Mirror's Edge is perfect - far from it, and I'll cover its multiple flaws in due course - but it has style, attitude and originality to spare, and it proves quirky and genuinely imaginative genre-busters are not the sole property of the independents.

The game takes the classic "dystopian totalitarian society" backdrop and uses it as a springboard to launch a first person action game that eschews the usual trappings of the genre. If you had to describe a typical game of this sort, I'm willing to bet it would be a about steroid-abusing, rough-talking muscle man slowly blasting his way through room after monochromatic room of cannon fodder. Mirror's Edge, however, places the player in control of a "runner" called Faith - a messenger of the resistance movement whose weapon is not a gun or even her fists but rather her feet. Enemy encounters are often best approached by avoiding them completely, as Faith can only ever withstand a handful of hits, and the pace at which she moves allows her to outrun all but the most persistent of foes.

In place of combat, the game emphasises fast movement and the stringing together of consecutive actions to build up momentum. Faith vaults across rooftops, swings from poles and runs along vertical surfaces, and the more successive moves you pull off, the faster you move and, in theory, the more accomplishment you'll feel. Successfully stringing together a run of moves is very satisfying, although the downside is that screwing up that last jump and having to repeat the whole thing is deeply frustrating. You can expect a lot of repetition, as the game seems to positively encourage a trial and error approach. The game's checkpoint system, while reasonably generous, is still considerably more punishing than the similar Prince of Persia revamp, which always took you back to the start of your last jump. When I reviewed that game, I criticised this approach for removing any challenge from the game, but Mirror's Edge demonstrates that maybe there's something to be said for the hand-holding approach after all. The biggest issue with this aspect of the game is the uneven difficulty levels: throughout the game, you'll find certain actions to be a breeze, only to come up against a brick wall with a single manoeuvre requiring a dozen or so attempts to get it right.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if, as the advertising suggested, Mirror's Edge was a true world without boundaries, with multiple paths to each goal, but in reality there are only ever a small handful of pre-determined routes. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that the game is in fact strictly linear. You progress through the ten commendably large levels in a predetermined order and are frequently railroaded from Point A to Point B, so it lacks the true "open world" feel of a game like Assassin's Creed. On the other hand, this minimises a lot of the frustration inherent in free exploration games, given that it's generally always clear where you need to go next, leaving the player to concentrate on how to get there.

While the developers do generally encourage the avoidance of combat encounters, there are occasions on which there is no choice but to fight, and it's here that the game's greatest shortcoming rears its head. The word "clunky" was clearly invented to describe these combat mechanics, which consist of a series of punches, kicks and slides that are executed in such a way as to leave little to no room for error. I often found myself repeating the same combat encounter multiple times, finally winning not because I'd mastered the moves but because I'd happened to punch the right random assortment of keys at the right time. Hand to hand combat is hard to pull off in the first person, and while the "slow time" option does help somewhat when it comes to timing punches or grabbing an opponent's weapon, it also adds to the frustration factor when you mistime a move, because it means you have to sit and watch your botched manoeuvre playing out in excruciatingly slow motion.

With all that said, what makes Mirror's Edge such a delight to play is, by and large, its clean and attractive visual style. Faith's world is bright and sun-drenched, which admittedly gets a little repetitive after a while but certainly makes for a nice change of pace from the unrelentingly dour, colourless look of most modern action games. The game uses a handy colour coding system in which objects that can be interacted with are painted red, immediately distinguishing them from their bleached white surroundings. While not without its flaws (occasionally, objects won't show up as red until you're almost touching them, at which point it becomes impossible to interact with them without breaking your momentum), this system provides a much-appreciated level of clarity and prevents the game from degenerating into a monotonous hunt for the grey-coloured lever that looks exactly the same as its surroundings until you're standing right in front of it. The voice acting is also unusually good for a computer game, and the various pre-rendered cut-scenes have an interesting visual style, somewhere between anime and Flash animation. Unfortunately the story is rather muddled, with fuzzy goals that leave you confused as to why precisely you're running across the rooftops and dodging the cops. We're told we're battling a totalitarian regime, but we're actually never shown what's so bad about said regime. Supposedly, crime has all but been eradicated and the city is free of pollution and poverty - sound pretty utopian if you ask me! It hinges on us simply accepting the notion of a police state being a bad thing without actually telling us what's so bad about it. If, like me, you hold freedom of speech to be one of our most basic human rights, then you'll probably be pretty irked by the fundamental idea, but it's all a bit too nebulous to give the narrative the drive it needs.

Mirror's Edge gets a definite thumbs-up from me. I doubt it will blow anyone away, and there are serious issues with which to contend regarding its combat mechanics and story, but it's a genuinely original and, once in a while, genuinely satisfying game with ambition to spare and a keen sense of style. 8/10

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