Mirror's Edge

"Disappointing; does not live up to hype"

In my twenty years of gaming, I have never seen such a fantastic, original, and creative concept executed so poorly. The infuriating chasm between what this game promises and what it delivers leaves me unable to recommend it, but anxious for a follow-up effort that gets it right.

This game is marketed for its speed, fluidity, and breathtaking stunts. The portions of the game occupied by this sort of activity are as good as you can imagine. You've never seen such graceful and thrilling gameplay before. Unfortunately you'll see very little of it here either. The exhilarating rooftop chases, leaps, and slides sadly act as little more than connections between long, tedious times spent indoors trying to figure out which combinations of platforms to use to jump to some poorly delineated objective location. That is the primary source of my ire with this game - the sense that I've been duped with a kind of bait-and-switch. I was sold on the next-big-thing the game was supposed to be and ended up with what felt too often like a mediocre platform-jumper.

One of the most frustrating issues with the game is the lack of clarity with respect to the path you're supposed to take to reach your objective. For a game concept that relies so heavily on speed and reflexes, this is inexcusable. You can't go anywhere fast if you don't know where you're supposed to be going. The runner's vision function, which turns objects with which you are supposed to interact red, only works reliably where it would not have been necessary in the first place. You can push a button to show your general objective location, but given the intricacy of the path you'll need to take to reach it, this function is largely worthless. There's an inverse relationship between how quickly a game can expect you to act and how much thinking it can reasonably expect you to do. The fact that this game expects both speed and carefully considered decision making based on detailed observation of your surroundings means that you're in for a lot of replays bookended by the sound of your own crunching bones as your character's fragile frame encounters the cold, hard, unforgiving pavement.

The game is not helped by its forgettable story and uninteresting characters. Otherwise mediocre games have driven me to continue playing out of a desire to advance a great story, but here, the cutscenes are less interesting than the esurance commercials they superficially resemble. I didn't care about what happened next enough to play the next aggravating level.

If you want to play a game that does a far better job of executing a similar concept, the original Xbox's Jet Set Radio Future delivers the speed, fun, and stylish presentation that Mirror's Edge fails to provide. Poor marketing meant that Jet Set Radio Future was largely overlooked while aggressive marketing has made Mirror's Edge more popular than perhaps it deserves to be. Jet Set Radio Future and Mirror's Edge both represent missed opportunities to promote the same concept (which I would call the "speed game") in different ways; the former through insufficient promotion and the latter through inadequate gameplay. The rare instances of Mirror's Edge at its best - the jumping from buildings, the sliding down walls and under obstacles, the swinging from bars, lead me to believe that a great concept exists to be salvaged from this mess. I remain optimistic that another attempt at a speed game will produce something special. Here's hoping the third time's a charm.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/09

Game Release: Mirror's Edge (US, 11/11/08)