244: Stumbling Through Mirror's Edge

[Michael Cook]

Stumbling Through Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge is a beautiful paradox: a first-person action game that emphasized "flight" over "fight." But while it took a familiar genre and reconfigured it into an entirely new kind of gameplay, it was also deeply flawed. Michael Cook examines what brought Mirror's Edge close to greatness, and what held it back.

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[carpathic]

You know, I never once even began to enjoy Mirror's Edge. While I appreciated the novelty, I just think the game failed in the one place that all good games should triumph: fun.

An excellent and thoughtful article, thanks!

 

[achilleas.k]

I completely ignored all its shortcomings. The way the camera moves and the player character handles was just so immersive. The fact that climbing, jumping and turning around while wall-running wasn't some automatic "press X here to jump to the next ledge" was what did it for me. It just makes you feel more in control of the whole situation. It makes you feel as if you understand the delicacy with which each move is performed and how a small slip can make you fall 30 stories onto a slab of concrete. Incidentally, the whooshing sound of the air when falling was scary as hell.

The whole way it handled momentum was also part of this. You have to play with your speed and your direction to keep Faith going (that sentence sounds weird). You can't just turn 90 degrees and keep running at the same speed, or hold the sprint button for 2 steps and achieve max speed. It just felt so ... plausible, to avoid using the word "realistic".

 

[Frybird]

Same as achilleas.k , i could ignore all shortcomings, and other than AITD (mentioned in the other article), i still love this game dearly.

Yes, it's short, the story sucks and any attempt at combat should've been left out to begin with, but it's immersive feel and flow, the great design, cool music and most of all, all those awesome "HOLY SHIT EVERYONE WANTS TO KILL ME RUN AWAY!" setpieces.

And while being short, it has replayability in a way few Action-Games manage: It makes me just want to play the level again to perfect it. There is a lot of stumbling in the game, but getting through a level without failing or stopping is enormously satisfying.


I am still sad that shortly after launch it seemed like every gamer community decided to hate the game for being hard and "weird", because i did not expect it to have perfect gameplay like Call of Gears of Another Shooter 4. I expected it to be a fresh new gameplay experience (you know, the thing that exactly the same people who bashed ME pretend to long after), and i got that, even though there is lot to improve.

So i am still eagerly waiting for an unlikely sequel

 

[cabalistics]

For all it's flaws I still love Mirror's Edge and hope for a sequel

 

[RoyalWelsh]

Sure there were quite a few flaws that made the game a shy away from greatness, but, in my opinion, the game is fun, immersive and visually stunning.

I hope they make a sequel. I really, REALLY hope they make a sequel.

 

[maninahat]

There was never a game I had higher hopes for than Mirror's Edge. The concept, the setup, the aesthetics all looked brilliant. I since bought the game, and couldn't get over the bad parts. The story telling was atrocious. The running, whilst exhilerating, consisted of only a few moves, meaning repetition set in despite the shortness of the game.

I think the game would have been improved massively if, instead of those ugly cartoon cutscenes, you got to stay in the character - HalfLife style. You only see Faith's actual face twice in the game, whilst certain support characters you never see once outside of the cartoons. Perhaps if they could show Faith taking time out, not rushing along with the plot, there might of been time to develop her personality. Outside of looking after her sister, she doesn't seem to have a life.

 

[LorChan]

The problem is that the game came so, so close, but failed in the aspects that really affect the experience. The plot was boring and stupid and the level design, as great as it is, had so many police that it took hours sometimes to get past them.

But it was, after all, a great experience for me, and hearing 'Still Alive' always makes me want to start running. I hope the sequel is something like Assassin's Creed II in terms of fixing the flaws and maintaining what was great.

 

[heavyness]

I made a conscious decision before I played the game, and that was not to use guns. And it paid off! Using a gun in Mirror's Edge cheapens the game (and the mechanics of shooting in the game sucked anyways). The guns felt like they were put in afterwards, like EA's usability came back saying "people want guns in a FPS game, so put guns in Mirror's Edge"...

Did the game have it's faults? Sure. About as much as any other game out there. But with EA committing to this IP, I can see the next Mirror's Edge is going to be great (lets hope they put in some online games of tag!)

 

[achilleas.k]

It appears this game is a pure Marmite, from the comments so far.

 

[CyberKnight]

I definitely had an issue with the combat. I tried going through my first playthrough for the "no shot fired" achievement, which (aside from being an achievement junkie and needing my fix) seemed to me like the way the game should be played. I didn't want this game to be a shooter. Before the game came out, I played the demo into the ground; I was totally hooked on the style of "run, jump, flow" through the city, with "combat" limited to "kick, disarm, drop the gun, and run". That was the game I wanted to play.

Some of those levels were head-poundingly frustrating, though, having the self-imposed limitation of not shooting. The old saying "never bring a knife to a gunfight" is even more true when you have a half dozen guys shooting at you from different directions and you substitute "knife" with "bare hands".

That, and I found the controls extremely unforgiving. Way too often, I felt like I was fighting the controller as much as anything else. I'd know that I'd want to make a certain jump or turn, but if I didn't hit the right bumper button at the right microsecond, I'd find myself flat on my back on a platform thirty feet below with the wind knocked out of me, if I was lucky. (And using the bumpers anyway felt really awkward; my hands always seemed to feel more cramped after a night of Mirror's Edge than any other game.) It's even more aggravating when you're working on a time trial and that one microsecond miss results in complete failure.

 

[Karacan]

It was the "you need to go here, do this, go there, jump there or don't progress" level design that took out most of the fun of the game for me. For a game that prided itself on its "free running", the linearity of the levels was absolutely shocking and disappointing. I didn't mind the combat segments at all, actually - I liked the "disarm, grab, shoot"-mechanics.

But the linearity of the levels? I'd much rather have something like Assassin's Creed II there for the next part, with the ability to properly free-roam.

 

[Doc Cannon]

What I really hated about this game were the classic fps elements: the gunfights (especially the mandatory ones). I think the innovative aspects of the game were lots of fun and very well implemented. Sure the cutscenes could have been better, but I liked those, I prefer them taking the time to make an animated cutscene than just making them with game models (I still resent Warcraft 3 for that).

To me, this article is pretty much the opposite of this one: The Tragedy of Alone in the Dark [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_244/7253-The-Tragedy-of-Alone-in-the-Dark]
Alone in the Dark had many great ideas, but they only looked good on paper.

 

[Digikid]

Mirrors Edge was an awesome game. It had NO FLAWS. All the flaws were just players whinging about indoor levels and stuff that they did not understand. Crybabies indeed.

Personally I hope that they do not change a single thing for Mirrors Edge 2.

 

[Therumancer]

Actually, I think one major point of consideration is that the economy is in trouble and has been for a couple of years now. As a result I think a lot of people who were the target audience for a concept like this when it was conceived years beforehand, simply did not have the money to buy it. That and increasing caution lead to a lot of people taking reviews a lot more seriously than they did previously.

One of the concerns I've had about EA is that it's going to give up it's innovation and use this period as a way of justifying how being deritive pays off, without any concern for what kinds of things are currently influancing the market other than the game industry and advertising itself.

Face it, no matter how much you promote a game, if people can't easily afford to spend $60 on entertainment, nothing you can do is going to change that.

 

[InvisibleMan]

I would say that Mirror's Edge is the most misunderstood game masterpiece I've ever played. I got it on its launch date, and I'm still playing it (as of last night!). I'm currently in the second-to-last episode in Hard Difficulty to get the Pro Runner achievement while trying to get the Test of Faith achievement at the same time (call me a masochist), so I have something to say about the biggest complaint this game has: the combat system.
I think, while trying to get these achievements, that I figured out how the combat system is not really flawed. I understand now how you can get out of even the tightest spots filled with armored gun men without having to face most of them. There is always a way to either run around them, or trick them into facing you one-by-one so you can knock them out without disarming them. And I don't think the developers half-assed the shooting mechanics, they just tried to make them believable for the type of character you are playing. Faith, you see, has a very small body frame, so she can't move as swiftly carrying a machine gun, nor can she withstand more than a couple of hits to the face with the butt-end of a gun. Plus, she often is facing a much bigger person than her wearing an armored suit.
I have to admit that it took a lot of play-throughs to get to understand the game's combat mechanics, as well as some of the trickiest parkour moves. But like the Xtreme sport it is modeled after, you should expect that you won't just fly through the game's challenges on the first, second, or even third try.
On a related note, I actually love the story, and I also loved the art direction and the way it was presented. Maybe Mirror's Edge is like an art film, a labor of love meant to be appreciated only by the gamers that really stick to it. I did, and my personal opinion is that this is the best game I have played on the Xbox 360 so far. I'm only hoping DICE won't break the gameplay to pander to the general audience for the sequel!

 

[Michael Cook]

Hey folks! I can't say I'm surprised to see a mixed results here - some people loved Mirror's Edge, some hated it. This article was a great opportunity for me to finally conclude my love affair with the game - I had spent last Summer exploring it fully in a blog dedicated to it, The Runner. You can still read the runner over here:

www.bluecasket.co.uk/runner

If any of you are in doubt over my feelings about the game - I think it's superb. It's an interesting study in terms of game design - for all it did right, ultimately it forgot to cover the really important stuff in full.

The sequel's confirmed and I've got high hopes. Glad to see some of you do, too.

 

[Wakefield]

I made a conscious decision before I played the game, and that was not to use guns. And it paid off! Using a gun in Mirror's Edge cheapens the game (and the mechanics of shooting in the game sucked anyways). The guns felt like they were put in afterwards, like EA's usability came back saying "people want guns in a FPS game, so put guns in Mirror's Edge"...

Did the game have it's faults? Sure. About as much as any other game out there. But with EA committing to this IP, I can see the next Mirror's Edge is going to be great (lets hope they put in some online games of tag!)

This is exactly how I feel. I love Mirror's Edge, we need more people with the guts to do something different. Of course the first game isn't going to be brilliant? What you think the first FPS, RTS, whatever was brilliant? No it was deeply flawed. That's Mirrors Edge deeply flawed yes, but it is still a good and one well worth a sequel.