Mirrors Edge: Or How to Fall a Thousand Times to Your Death

Oh what can I say about Mirror's Edge that hasn't already been said? Everyone remembers when a demo and gameplay trailer popped up on xbox live and people began to tilt their heads like confused little puppies all asking the same question: What's the catch?

The trailer and demo, more than anything else, were different. It placed you in a shiny world alive with the colors white and red gleaming from all angles. Not that I mind the dreary colors of Gears of War, Bioshock, or Dead Space, but having to don shades to play Mirror's Edge is not a bad change of pace. Of course, once I played the game I realized how quickly wrong I was. However, that's not to say I was completely disappointed.

Mirror's Edge puts you in the red running shoes of Faith, your Asian female protagonist. She delivers packages for the good people the government has wrongly thrown in jail. And apparently she has to deliver these packages via roof tops as the city is "highly monitored" by these evil corporations. However, who these people are or what is being delivered is never really explained, and this plot piece is quickly tossed aside as Faith gets caught up in a conspiracy involving her cop sister, Hope - er, Kate, a Wrestler running for mayor, double crosses by your fellow agency members, and about a million cops that have nothing better to do than chase you on rooftops with choppers in pursuit.

So ya, the plot isn't really there. At all. When you really get into it, its about as contrived a Steven Seagal movie. Actually that may be giving it too much credit, but still we don't watch those for the plot. Where the plot of Mirror's Edge may be contrived, the gameplay is what we came for.

While there is a terribly steep learning curve, once you've gotten a handle on it Mirror's Edge becomes a virtual parkour, or free-running, experience. It's different, especially since they take advantage of the first person shooter view-point in a way that, if you wanted, you don't have to fire a single weapon. However, the first person, while different, is also its crutch, as it limits your camera view to literally what you can see with your eyes. You'll spend several hours trying to jump to various buildings, only to fall several thousand feet to your death. Then you'll do it again. And again, and again.

Ironically, this is the most brilliant aspect of the game. As you control all your characters' movement - arms, legs, head - it comes oddly close to replicating a real experience (with the exception being that if this were real you probably would have died on your first plummet back down to earth).

So does it stick? Its my first analysis and I'd like to be nice. But I'd have to say that the game sticks, then slowly falls, like missing a ledge and plummeting to its death for the umpteenth time.

Yet it should be noted that the game is highly original. It took the first person p.o.v. and did something holistically unique with it. In that sense it has something in common with Portal, it took a very worn game perspective and gave it a fresh dress to put on. However, in Mirror's Edge's case, the dress came with some holes. That's not to rule it out, their use of the first person should be remembered. If we were to take this and apply it to a first person shooter, where you had to make active use of your whole body while engaging in combat, we may create a game with a steeper learning curve, yet with a more, oddly realistic, perspective. Future developers should take note, as the experiment known as Mirror's Edge should not be looked at as failure, but rather a first trial, where many more are needed to perfect this new style of game play and presentation.