You play as Faith, an inhabitant of a bog standard dystopian future society that you've seen done a lot better dozens of times previously. Faith is a runner, essentially a high stakes courier of messages between the anti establishment groups that don't want to use government monitored digital communication. Her sister is a cop who is framed for the murder of a mayoral candidate, and Faith has to try and find out who is behind it all. To be honest the exposition isn't brilliant, and while I'm sure that the game's main message is meant to be one of free thinking individualism all to often the runners come across like those people that insist in skateboarding in the doorways of shopping centres - edgy for the sake of being edgy.
As Faith you're a skilled exponent of parkour, which is all the rage with those kids that self identify as cool these days. While the view point is first person, there isn't much shooter to be seen here. There are guns in the game, but you have to liberate them from government soldiers, and while wielding them you can't run or reload - they are very much a temporary fix to a tight situation. While this has annoyed some other reviewers I feel they've missed the point. Faith isn't a soldier but an acrobat highly skilled at parkour, and it's possible to finish the game without firing a single shot.
Essentially the name of the game is moving from A to B as fast and effectively as possible across the rooftops and through the buildings of the city. Jumping fences and railings, bounding between buildings, running along walls and making the occasional leap of faith. It's similar to games that came before, Assassins Creed and the Prince of Persia series especially, although the draw card is that it's all done from a first person point of view. It works quite well and is reasonably immersive - the camera sways, bobs, and shakes as you'd expect a human head to, and being able to see Faith's body as you're running, or if you look down, really places you in the environment, and what an environment it is.
The graphics are simply gorgeous. I really dig the supersaturated look. All of the environments, indoor and outdoor, are coloured sterile white with a single vibrant colour accompanying. There is a lovely wash out effect that emulates the response that a human eye would have to such a bright environment in real life. However there are a few issues. As much as it looks amazing, there isn't really a lot of visual variety between the levels apart from the time of day, and while the art direction is beautiful the character models aren't the greatest you'll ever see.
Being a runner is reasonably easy to pick up (helped by 'runner vision', which tells you where to go by colouring parts of the environment bright red), but unfortunately doesn't realise it's full potential for more than a few fleeting moments. Possibly the best sequence of the game sees you pursued by government forces with similar parkour training to you. This sequence sees you progress from fleeing through a building, leaping into an adjacent building through a window, onto rooftops in the downtown section of the city, knowing that there are too many government ninjas on your heels to turn and fight them, until finally you lose them by leaping from a building onto a moving train. It's moments like these where the game is the best - while mucking about on rooftops is fun for a time, it doesn't compare to the segments where you're chased across rooftops and through buildings, and survive by the skin of your teeth.
The pacing of the game is problematic too. While there are some expansive indoor settings, a lot of the indoor sections involve slow paced jumping puzzles, and as if that wasn't bad enough also too frequent elevator rides and vent crawling. At least twice a level you're asked to crawl painfully slowly through a ventilation shaft, or spent half a minute standing still in a lift. For a game that the developers acknowledged was all about building momentum it seems an odd gameplay choice. It's akin to demanding that Need for Speed players stop at stop signs, and slow down for pedestrian crossings - it needlessly destroys the entire point of the game. To round out my criticism with some minor niggles, there are segments where the game forces the player into combat, which again messes with the pacing, and the game is also on the short side.
I feel like I may have come across as too critical. Mirror's Edge is a good game. It looks good, it plays well on the whole. It's worth a play at least for the novel concept and art style. Pacing issues aside my real problems with the game are that it doesn't realise its true potential. While it's a good game it falls short of lasting brilliance, instead only sharing a few flirtacious moments and then disappearing back into the crowd of titles that were fun but could have been amazing.
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