Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror

"Dark Mirror not only reignites interest in a dead franchise, but proves itself to be the best, most fully-featured action game available for the PSP"

Syphon Filter was one of the slew of stealth/action games released on the PlayStation in the wake of Metal Gear Solid. The first two games cultivated quite a following, and they established a complex story-line and a cast of unique characters along with interesting gameplay ideas. The third game was not the series' high point, and the more recent Omega Strain suffered because it retained the archaic game mechanics of the first three games. Dark Mirror not only reignites interest in a dead franchise, but proves itself to be the best, most fully-featured action game available for the PSP.

Story
Dark Mirror's story is typical of that of your average Hollywood action thriller. The story starts out with Gabe Logan and Lian Xing, members of an elite covert-ops group known as the IPCA, heading to an oil refinery in Alaska to perform a 'precision strike' after terrorists have seized the compound. The story spirals out of control from there. Nothing is really what it seems, as the terrorists chase after the titular Dark Mirror, which serves as a sort of MacGuffin, motivating both the terrorists and the IPCA through out the story. Unlike a real MacGuffin, what Dark Mirror actually is is revealed as the story comes to a close. There are plenty of tropes employed throughout the story, but that doesn't stop it from being well presented. Pretty much every level starts off and ends with a cinematic that drives the story along, and there are plenty that are interspersed within levels. Aside from the ones that signify a change in locale, none of them are particularly long. The cinematics themselves are done in such a way that it they could be passed off as segments from an upcoming Hollywood film. They're definitely a treat to watch, and they make an old story seem fresh.

Score: 7/10

Graphics
Sony Bend has done an amazing job with Dark Mirror's visuals, wringing out as much power out of the PSP as possible. Characters and environments are made up of surprising amounts of detail. Characters look life-like, although sometimes their limb and mouth movements look stiff and robotic. The game environments are simply fantastic, ranging from oil refineries to bombed-out weapons facilities and war-torn towns. The texture work accompanying every level is clean and crisp. Dark Mirror's night vision and thermal vision effects, which kick in when you use their respective goggles, are mind-blowingly well done. Dark Mirror could easily pass for a recently released PlayStation 2 game.

Score: 9/10

Sound
In much the same way that Sony Bend succeeded with the graphics, they hit a lot of the right notes again with the audio. There's plenty of top notch voice acting in this game, and everybody has plenty of things to say. Gabe Logan sounds like your typical gruff action hero, but the other characters sound less generic. Dark Mirror's music, unsurprisingly, rocks. There are about 20 different tracks, while play according to the ongoing action. While sneaking, slow, suspenseful music will play softly in the background. When a huge firefight breaks out and guns are blazing, the appropriately adrenaline-pumping action tracks play. Mark Snow, of The X-Files fame, contributed to the already awesome soundtrack. The sound effects, however, I cannot wholeheartedly praise without complaint. Most of it is well done, although one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the fact that a few of the selected weapon sounds are simply terrible. The Barrett M82A1 sniper rifle, which fires a .50 BMG round capable of ripping through tank armor, sounds like a toy squirt gun. A few of the automatic rifles also sound like the toy equivalents you'd find in stores; ones that make canned electronic sounds. The rest of the audio more than makes up for these few shortcomings, though.

Score: 8/10

Gameplay
An early video of Dark Mirror's gameplay, which can be found in the game as an unlockable, shows that the game originally played very similarly to its predecessors. For the sake of all PSP players and Syphon Filter fans, that's changed for the better. Dark Mirror isn't an overly complicated game, but it's strongly recommended that you play through the training sessions first in order to get a hold of all of the new features.

Dark Mirror plays very much like a modern stealth/action hybrid. In many levels, you're given the opportunity to approach things stealthily or guns blazing, although when you start out with the latter, you very rarely have a chance to go back to playing it cool and quiet. A few times, your stealth performance affects the difficulty of the game. One example is a mission where you're tasked with infiltrating a heavily guarded casino. You can choose to take out all of the guards and security measures silently. If you make it inside without alarming any of the guards, the next level will proceed easily. However, if you got sloppy and had to shoot your way out, the next level starts with you under fire and guards fully aware of your presence. The only downside is that there's no real way to tell whether or not a guard is aware of your presence, although it does seem like crouching makes you nigh invisible a large portion of the time if you don't approach guards from the front.

Sadly, there are a few levels that will throw you immediately into the action. The gunfights in this game are fast and furious. You'll often wind up dead if you don't run for cover. Enemies will usually cut you to pieces if you try any sort of head-on attack. Luckily, Dark Mirror features a robust cover system similar to the one found in Namco's kill Switch. Having Logan run into a wall will make him press up to up. At this point, you can shimmy along the wall and peek around corners to fire shots. Logan can also hide behind low cover and pop out to fire shots.

For certified gun aficionados, Dark Mirror features a huge arsenal of weapons and items. You will get a variety of goggles, which include a head-mounted flashlight, night vision goggles, thermal vision and electronic signature vision (for lack of a better phrase). The flashlight and night vision are self-explanatory, as is the thermal vision, which becomes very useful for spotting potential danger lying ahead. The most interesting of these goggles are your EDSU goggles, which can read electronic signatures. This usually means that any environmental hazards such as explosive barrels, trip mines, etc can be easily spotted if you have the goggles on. The EDSU goggles also help you spot helpful armor and ammo crates, as well as health kits that might be lying around. Similarly, players will have a wide choice of firearms to choose from. At the start of each section of the game, Logan will start off with his trusty silenced Mark 23 pistol and customized MB-150 sniper rifle, as well as his taser and K-Bar knife. The MB-150 is equipped with high powered rifle rounds, as well as several types of remotely detonated darts: nerve gas darts, explosive darts and taser darts. Nerve gas darts will release a small cloud of gas, which kills anything that walks through it until it dissipates. Explosive darts create medium-sized explosions, and are great for setting up traps or flushing out a crowd of enemies. The taser darts allow Gabe to shock people to death from long range for a quiet kill. The regular taser, which is equipped as a separate weapon, not only shocks people, but can literally cook them to death in a morbidly satisfying manner. Your arsenal quickly expands from the basic set, as you acquire a huge variety of pistols, sub-machine guns and rifles from fallen enemies. There are over 50 different guns in this game, although a few of them are very similar and many that only appear once or twice in the game. A few of the more interesting ones include a shotgun-like weapon that fires expanding high explosive shells and comes with a thermal scope. With so many available weapons, everybody is sure to have a favourite.

Both the cover feature and large arsenal are very useful, since the game's artificial intelligence is up to par. Unlike most handheld action games, where enemies serve as nothing more than soft, squishy targets that emit blood when shot at, the terrorists in Dark Mirror are well trained. They'll work in groups to ambush you, popping out from cover to fire a few shots before ducking back to reload. They'll try to flank you or flush you out if they notice you've been staying in a particular spot for a long period of time. If they've been injured, they'll limp to a hiding spot. The only thing they don't do is throw grenades, which is quite alright since I don't think any game has ever been able to do that right without making the AI too accurate with them.

Apart from the shooting and stealth, Dark Mirror features a few puzzles that range from simple "find the switch and hit it" affairs to more complex, multi-staged ones. These are quite welcome, although some of them are quite unnecessary and are actually fairly difficult to figure out. Dark Mirror also has a few escort missions, but luckily the AI is highly competent. Only a few times did a friendly AI companion wig out or get stuck in some level architecture. To save all of us from insanity, the game also lets you command friendlies to either hide or follow you, so you won't be forced to fight off hordes of enemies while your dumb buddy tags along.

It should come as no surprise that playing a game of this complexity on a handheld system requires a great deal of precision, and thankfully, Dark Mirror's controls are second to none. Most games on the PSP that have gone through the porting process invariably suffer from the PSP's lack of a second analog stick, but Dark Mirror feels like it was designed specifically with the PSP in mind. In the default set up, the analog nub controls the movement and strafing functions, and the face buttons are used to control the camera, leaving everything else to be done with the arrows and shoulder buttons. The L button serves as the target lock/manual aim weapon, while the R button is the fire button. The arrow buttons are used for crouching, item and weapon inventory, and for context sensitive actions such as activating switches or reloading weapons. It seems like a lot to take in, but once you get into the full swing of things, Dark Mirror's controls become second nature. The second setup available switches the functions of the face buttons and the analog nub, for those who prefer more control over their aiming ability. The last setup is tailored the "Classic" setup, tailored to appeal to Syphon Filter fans of yore. My only complaint would be the inability to switch targets while locked on, which spells death in intense close combat situations.

The story portion of Dark Mirror is quite long. The game itself is split up into 7 different episodes, with about 25 levels. Many of these levels are at least 5 minutes long, and the later ones run up to about 15-20 minutes, depending on the difficult you're playing on. The game gives plenty of incentive to replay the story, though. Throughout every level there are pieces of Hidden Evidence to find. Finding these items rewards you with bonus content in the form of concept art, behind the scenes videos and bonus game music. Additionally, you can replay any mission you've beaten in the campaign in the game's mission mode. Here, you can outfit yourself with weapons you've unlocked and play through missions without consequence. Dark Mirror also has a single player rewards system that you can keep track of in your Career Rating screen. Here, Dark Mirror tracks your stats and rewards your play style in accordance to several categories: stealth, knife combat, elite weapons combat, survival, tactical combat and combat sharpshooter. In order to increase your stealth ranking, you'll have to kill quietly. Obviously, in order to rank up in knife combat, you'll have to perform as many knife kills as possible. In order to increase your elite weapons ranking, you'll have to work at killing as many enemies as possible with the darts in your MB-150 rifle. Survival ranks simply require you to complete a level without dying or failing, which proves to be a big challenge during the final stretch of the game. Tactical combat ranks reward you for using environmental hazards (read: explosive barrels) to kill enemies, and combat sharpshooter rewards you for getting as many headshots as possible while playing the game on hard mode. Acquiring medals in each rank will grant you new weapons and ablities in mission mode, such as extra darts for your MB-150, increased health or the ability to dual-wield small guns. You'll definitely want to replay the singleplayer, regardless, since a great deal of it is so fun and well-designed. There are definitely a few sections of the game that are far too difficult and that I'd never want to replay, but for the most part you'll want to return to the singleplayer.

If these extra features don't entice you to keep the UMD in your PSP, then Dark Mirror's robust multiplayer should do the trick. Dark Mirror has a fully fleshed out multiplayer component with both Ad-Hoc (wireless LAN) and Infrastructure (online) play. The game has the usual deathmatch and team deathmatch game types, as well as Rogue Agent, where a pickup will designate one player as the rogue agent and having all of the other players team up against him/her, and an Objective mode reminiscent of Soldier of Fortune 2's Infiltration mode. There are only a handful of maps, but only 1 or 2 of them seem well-designed. Dark Mirror also has a chat function, as well as leaderboards, the ability to create clans called "Cells" and rank up in multiplayer. This all sounds well and good, but the multiplayer hasn't aged as well as you'd think. While you can't fault the developers for a bad community filled with players unknowing of the definition of sportsmanship, you can blame them for not fully balancing multiplayer features. All of the maps suffer from problems with spawn points, of which there are only a few for each team. The game cycles between spawn points in team based modes, which makes it quite easy for a dominating team to keep dominating by camping and spamming spawns. The nature of the multiplayer ranking is quite flawed as well. You'll start off at a low rank, which means you can only equip and use default guns at the start of matches and when you spawn. As you rank up, you will get more effective, faster-firing weapons with larger clip sizes as well as special abilities such as increased armor or health. However, this means that new players will absolutely get slaughtered by high ranking players time and time again. There are a lot of weapons that could have also used balancing. The dual sawn-off pistols are literally the most powerful weapon in multiplayer - if they don't kill you in one hit, then they'll be able to knock you onto the ground, making you vulnerable to a killing blow. The M16K assault rifle is literally the definition of "cheap". It's quite sad that, in order to seek any sort of enjoyment from the multiplayer, you're forced to run your own server and make sure you play with players of your own rank, since many people are willing to stack teams so that one team will have high ranks and the other team will be filled with newbies. If you can, you'll want to find some buddies to play over Infrastructure or Ad-Hoc mode. Essentially, you'll have to go out of your way to enjoy the multiplayer, but fun can be had.

The gameplay of Dark Mirror undoubtedly has its flaws, and it's quite true that it borrows many elements from past games, but it does so many things right and combines all of these elements in such a well done manner that I don't hesitate to give it a perfect score.

Score: 10/10

Wrap Up
Pros
+ Great cinematics and production values
+ Amazing graphics and sound
+ Long singleplayer with plenty of replay value
+ Interesting, well done bonus content
+ Fully fleshed out multiplayer
+ Best control scheme to date on the PSP

Cons
- Story is cheesy
- Guns sometimes sound like toys
- Multiplayer needs more balancing; suffers from terrible community

Final Score (not an average): 10/10

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/07

Game Release: Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror (US, 03/14/06)