28 Jan 2009

QUICK CAP REVIEW - Mirror's Edge

It's a white nothingness. White walls, white ceilings and white floors. You run along them, you jump about, you fall... you repeat. It's like limbo, that uncomfortable transition between normality and heaven, except here it's also a transition between the roof of a skyscraper and the ground below. It's repetition, repeated over and over again. Again. It's as beautiful as it is blinding and as stupid as it is clever.

Mirror's Edge simulates the sensation of parkour on your computer monitor. It's innovative and strikingly fun at times. But then, conversely, it's sloppy and evokes feelings of despair. The bad story, the awful enemies. Shoe-horning tired FPS mechanics into this game is like taking the time to nurture the most beautiful white dove before slicing its wings off and throwing it out of a window.

It's a blessing then, that the time trials are where the true fun is to be had. No shit enemies, no poor plot, just you bettering yourself again and again. The repetition's there, but it's fun now. You take your time and learn the courses, watching the clock and honing your skills and then you realise what it could have been...

It's a great game, but it's a bad game.

VERDICT: Worth playing for what it could have been.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The solution: gravity leveler mod like in Ultraviolet + playful sci-glamor maps and a big community.

No Orijunaluhtee said...

i appreciate the verdict over a precentage/grade/star/whatever-the-fuck-people-come-up-with-that-is-stupid-but-used-because-it-is-familiar system that the 'big kids' of gaming sites use.

Rowan Davies said...

Yeah, I decided it was best to get rid of the percentage system. I wasn't particularly happy with the comparison between one/two man indie teams and 40+ people commercial development teams. I mean, it makes no sense anyway, but the gap between what an independent developer and a large commercial one can produce just doesn't fit into a numbered marking scheme... Glad you appreciate it anyway!