Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 03 December 2008 05:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Faith must find her way through the jumble of rooftops, ladders, pipes and more to get to objectives. To do this the player must master nausea inducing jumps, wall runs, slides and more.
The story is played out on two fronts, in game with Merc providing comms chatter and advice and between chapters with stylistic animated cut scenes. Unfortunately these cut scenes don’t quite work. The modern Orwellian atmosphere they were looking for comes across more like Kim Possible.
There is combat in Mirror’s Edge, but it is secondary to the athletics and escape focus. Faith can punch, and kick her opponents using various moves, bouncing off walls or sliding into security personal to punch vulnerable areas.
Faith also has the ability to disarm her opponents, but rather than a timing exercise, I found that simply mashing the ‘Y’ button when facing the enemy was sufficient to achieve a perfect disarm move.
Picking up a disarmed opponent’s weapon turns Mirror’s Edge into a short lived shooter. Reality quickly sets in though that this is no Doom. Weapons run out of ammo almost immediately, and like the melee parts, taking on multiple opponents in a gun battle will result in an early jump to the reload screen.
Mirror’s Edge, like its name suggests, straddles genres in the gaming world. It is part platformer, part Portal-like puzzler and part First Person Shooter. At times this does not help in the games pacing from time to time.
