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Ever since I saw a few viral web videos of free-runners—guys who zoom around the urban landscape, bounding, sprinting and vaulting across terrain using convenient handholds and ledges—I've wanted to practice it myself. Then, when I saw Sebastien Foucan leaping between cranes and traversing a construction site like a ballet-trained spider in the parkour chase scene from the James Bond film, Casino Royale, I was hooked. For the first time while watching a Bond film, instead of wanting to be Bond, I wanted to be the guy running from Bond.
Since I haven't put down the controller and gone to the gym enough to do parkour, I'm thrilled that Electronic Arts and DICE (the developer behind the Battlefield games), saw fit to fulfill my fantasy. They decided, however, that instead of being an agile bomb maker, I would want to be a young deliverywoman named Faith who leaps from rooftop to rooftop. (Get it? "Leap of faith"? Snort!)
Faith lives in a near-future totalitarian world where things are so tightly controlled that dissidents send messages and transport paperwork using runners. Runners travel, parkour-style, around the roofs of the city to pass important messages that can't be sent electronically. Over the course of Mirror's Edge, Faith is quickly caught up in a totalitarian conspiracy to eliminate the runners, immediately making her ultra-alternative and uber-extreme as she defies social conventions to run on rooftops and dodge "blues" (police) to maintain people's freedom of expression.
Mirror's Edge encourages players to speed through levels, leaping from pipes to ledges to nearby buildings, dodging police and sliding under ducts to escape to the next challenge in an adrenaline-choked rush of speed. When it works, it's amazing. When the game fails (and that's not often), it's unbelievably frustrating. Like parkour, once I got into the flow and knew my surroundings, I could execute spectacular and invigorating moves. Also like parkour, when I screwed up, it usually ended with the sickening crunch of bones shattering. Fortunately, unlike parkour, I didn't have to wait months to try again—the game just automatically loaded the last checkpoint.
The first time through each level, I regularly fell to my death—but I rarely had to replay much, thanks to frequent checkpoints, and the controls were forgiving as long as I was in the ballpark. Where Mirror's Edge failed was when it worked too hard to create a sense of urgency. So many levels impelled me forward by sending police, mercenaries or even helicopter gunships after me. Often, that was exciting, forcing snap decisions to risk a jump, hoping it would lead to safety rather than a few seconds of freefall.
Occasionally, I'd find myself rushing, time and time again, into a room where I'd be gunned down long before I could press the hint button that would tell me in which general direction to run. That sucked. Dying once in a long and exciting chase promotes tension. But there were two places in the game where I spent more time rushing into an area, dying, reloading and repeating than it took me to finish entire chapters of the game. That's not fun. Once I knew where to go and how to get there, it was easy, but there are few things more frustrating in gaming than being gunned down when I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.
The open cityscapes are expansive, stark and beautiful, evoking a totalitarian regime that can keep even the rooftops sterile. Most everything is white or light grey, with pipes, boards and interactive objects in bright colors (usually red). This works really well outside, but in tight corridors, the sanitized look comes off as unfinished graphics rather than an artistic choice. I also wasn't a fan of the cut-scene art—I liked the idea, but the cut-scenes looked more like low-rent, online flash animations than stylized, cel-shaded masterpieces.
While Mirror's Edge is gorgeous and deeply satisfying, it's not a thinking man's game. In some areas there are multiple pathways through each level, but it's really about finding the quickest path. If you attempt speed runs or time trials, you'll need to find the optimal path and precisely execute a series of joystick motions and button taps. I loved the initial playthrough, and the feeling of freedom of movement. But to me, the speed runs and repeat play felt like trying to perfect my game of Pac-Man, learning a series of motions by rote. To me, that's not replayability. But if you love leaderboards and jumping through exacting hoops, this is so your bag.
Despite its pedigree as an action game, Mirror's Edge discourages players from picking up guns and shooting enemies, no matter how much they shoot at Faith. At first I wanted to take the non-violent approach and rush through, using my marvelous free-running prowess to evade all foes, but on the first play-through, it was so much easier to steal someone's gun, mow down the opposition and calmly look around for the escape. Awkwardly, it's hard to pull off Faith's moves with most guns, so I'd have to drop them before resuming Faith's flight across the rooftops.
Gun or no gun, I enjoyed Mirror's Edge most when leaping around the seemingly wide open levels like the under-construction atrium that leads to a late-game sniper spot. The urgency enemy gunmen lent to the game was a wash—sometimes it increased the tension, while other times it only fed my frustration.
Anyone with a vague interest in action should at least download the demo, and most gamers will love the story mode that can be completed in a day or even an afternoon. But the biggest fans of Mirror's Edge will be those who love shaving seconds off their fastest parkour run through the city—and that's far from everyone. The rest of us will have fun working through the story and be done with it. To paraphrase one of Mirror's Edge's characters, "You can't live all your life playing Mirror's Edge, Faith—sooner or later you have to jump." In all likelihood, to another game.
Fun Factor: Parkour in a near-future dystopia is spectacular.
Game Length: An afternoon.
Difficulty: Usually easy---the real challenge is shaving time off a run.
On the Negative Side: Unclear objectives under pressure result in controller-hurling
frustration.
Bang for your Buck: Play time feels light unless you're a leaderboard junkie.
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