Mirror’s Edge

Let me attempt, by the all-powerful medium of anecdote, to explain what it’s like to play Mirror’s Edge: you are sprinting down a piercing white hallway, with a sharp blue carpet. Ahead, there is a bright red door, and then you’re at it, and then your forearm has smashed it down and you’re standing on a stone balcony awash with pale gold light. There is a city, dark in the night, and just below you, another rooftop; you run to the edge of the balcony, and leap, leaving the pale gold behind and landing, with a thud and a roll, into dark blue criss-crossed with red laser sights. You’re running; you’re vaulting over a fence, scrambling up a wall, sliding under a pipe; as you run, a sniper shot hits you, and your vision darkens, but you don’t stop; you’re flying, they can’t get you. You reach the end of this roof, and there is another, waiting for you, and you leap again; and in mid-air, another shots thuds into your body. You die. Your broken corpse slams into the pristine flagstones that had been your target, and the colours fade from your vision.

In other words, Mirror’s Edge is stunningly beautiful and constantly exhilerating, except for those moments when it presents you with a huge pile of repetitive deaths that are never – never – entirely your fault. You play as Faith, a free-runnin’, wall-hoppin’, fence-vaultin’, elevator-waitin’ future-courier and central character in some kind of story involving sisters, cops and 2D cutscenes, all of which are instantly forgettable. Partly, of course, because it’s general videogame story fare, but mostly because as soon as the level starts all thoughts beyond running, jumping, sliding and climbing fly out of your mind. Mirror’s Edge, y’see, is a game about movement. No other game, and I suppose I should include the caveat “that I am aware of”, has ever made the first-person perspective as physical or as dynamic as this. DICE attempted to make platforming work in first-person, and, wonderfully, it does. It suffers from some problems that are less common in its third-person brethren – it’s difficult to exactly gauge when to jump without constantly looking at your feet, for instance – but it makes up for it with the sheer unhinged joy of experiencing high-speed acrobatics through your own eyes.  Every level plonks you down at the beginning of a stunningly beautiful assault course full of over-saturated colours and conveniently placed planks and just says … “Go”.

Oh, how I wish that was entirely true. In fact, it says “Go, but by the way here’s an impenetrable jumping puzzle or two and also a couple of rooms full of guards with weapons that can kill you in two hits, sorry”. These are the two epic – mammoth – frustrations in Mirror’s Edge. The jumping puzzles are usually fairly transparent – this is a first-person platformer that works, remember – but on those few occasions when they’re suddenly impossible to fathom, the sound of Faith’s bones crunching on the concrete below becomes an inexorable mantra that drills away at your very soul. I started composing this post in my head while playing through one such sequence, set in a gorgeous yellow-and-black under-construction atrium, and I can report that had I written that post it would have had many, many more instances of the word “fuck”. To be fair the game provides a “Runner’s Vision” path that guides you through the environment via red objects, and hitting the Alt key automatically centres your view on wherever you’re meant to go. Which is helpful, or it would be if both mechanics weren’t petulant teenagers that have a bad habit of disappearing at random or simply being obnoxiously useless (there is one red object here. It is a beam. It is seven convoluted levels above you). Bear in mind, however, that I am a moron that is rubbish at games, and if you are a parkour savant then feel free to sneer at my dependence on such mechanics.

But even a parkour savant cannot outsmart bullets, and it is the combat in Mirror’s Edge that is the real cause of the gnaw marks on my lower lip. Sprinting through a  giant room crowded with assault rifle wielding SWAT squaddies or avoiding the free-running police chasers are the greatest parts of the game, so it is a great shame that frequently there is no obvious way of avoiding your enemies – and Faith dies far, far too quickly under direct fire. If you have the twitch reflexes of a squirrel then you can disarm and takedown the bads in a single move; the rest of us mere mortals can use the bullet-time mode to make things a bit easier, but there are still three other guys in the room and they’re still pumping lead into my fragile courier frame. Most galling of all is when the game suddenly decides that, for instance, suddenly doors are going to take five seconds of valve-twisting to open rather than a quarter-second of forearm-bashing, making the hasty non-violent escape completely impossible.

To sum up, then, the movement and free-running in Mirror’s Edge is eye-meltingly good, and the combat is stomach-crunchingly awful. Hurrah for Time Trial mode! Suddenly there are no enemies, just you, the aforementioned beautiful assault course, a timer in the top right hand corner, and a TrackMania-style ghost to race against. Suddenly Mirror’s Edge realises why it’s a fantastic game, and it just lets you get on with the ferociously pleasurable business of moving as fast as you can through the bleached-white towers, shaving a few seconds off your time as you find the perfect route. Suddenly it’s everything it should be, and the frustrations of the story mode are lost in the brightly-coloured haze. Go.

Dead Space

Even if you’ve no interest whatsoever in playing Dead Space – which is reasonable, because it’s a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter – you owe it to yourself to at least try one thing out. Find someone who has it or whatever – it only takes about half a second. Just fire up the game, make sure you aren’t aiming at anything, and then tap the spacebar.

Did you hear that? Hruuugh WHUMP. A determined, desperate war-grunt, followed by the always-satisfying sound of a half tonne boot slamming down onto the steel deckplate. Try it again on an enemy and instead you’ll hear rotten flesh exploding, with a truly repulsive liquid sucking sound. Without question, Dead Space has the best feet in gaming, easily wrenching the crown from Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, in much the same way that a space engineer occasionally has to wrench dead flesh from his face and bash it repeatedly with a mining laser.

The space engineer in question is one Isaac Clarke, whose name is unfortunate only because it means someone at EA Redwood Shores decided against Arthur C Asimov, which would have been approximately a thousand times better. Isaac is the generic-est of a small crew of generics investigating what’s going down aboard the USG Ishimura, a ‘planet cracker’ spaceship that has been rather quiet of late. Let’s not mince words when we could be mincing monsters: the ship is crawling with weird fleshy things with horrible mouths and big spiky limbs that have been munching their way across the ship for some time when Isaac finally places one house-sized boot down onto the bloodstained decks of the Ishimura, probably crushing a skull in the process.

Save for its innovative use of stomping on things, Dead Space’s main unique selling point is the fantastic-sounding ’strategic dismemberment’; your enemies, you see, are monsters, and not the kind of monster that can be easily disposed of with a quick shot to the head. That usually just pisses them off more, and these are monsters that were already phenomenally pissed off . Instead, you have to slice them and dice them, soliciting fountains of gore and some truly unpleasant sound effects, before finishing off the legless maniacs with a few quick, bone-shattering stomps to the arms or shoulders (or, if you’re boring, shooting them some more). It’s a clever mechanic: in games like Dead Space, which trade so extensively in the shock appearance of enemies from vents and … well, just vents, the player will practically always just spray thoughtlessly with whatever weapon they’re currently clutching when a pile of dead tissue crashes down upon them. Dead Space forces you to aim – there’s no reticule without holding the right mouse button – and select which limb offends you the most before you fire. If you don’t aim and bring up the reticule, then tapping the fire button makes Isaac execute a flailing melee attack, swinging his gun around in an insane arc in his desperation to keep the horrors away from him.

Isaac is horribly mistreated throughout Dead Space. It’s not a particularly difficult game, but over the course of my playthrough he was blown up into a shower of red meat, burnt to death, dragged flailing into a tentacle’s lair, sliced in half, torn to shreds by asteroids, and had his head eaten. Dead Space, in my experience, has the best deaths since Crash Bandicoot 2, and in terms of sheer horrifying gore it outdoes even that. This is a game of gore, and it makes no attempt to hide it. Despite its reliance on precision aiming in combat, Dead Space is, in many respects, more blunt force than scalpel subtlety: the enemies are mindless bags of viscera, the story is meaningless, the characters are instantly forgettable, and Isaac’s progression through the ship is strictly linear, though the brilliantly atmospheric vacuum and zero-gravity bits break things up nicely.

However, in those places where it is more subtle, Dead Space excels; and almost all of them are centred around Isaac himself. I couldn’t care less about the missing girlfriend that may or may not be still wandering the Ishimura, but I do feel a certain sympathy for Isaac the beleagured space engineer. He never says anything, but he’s the least mute mute protagonist since Gordon Freeman last winced his way through a fire: Isaac screams, he grunts, he moans, and – best of all -  his breath becomes laboured and rattley as his health drops down into the red. Academically, Dead Space shows you Isaac’s current health on a segmented meter along his spine, as part of its moderately successful crusade against the HUD, but really Isaac’s ill-health is displayed to you by his desperate, lurching limp, his painful breathing and groaning, the way he looks like he’s always about to collapse when you force him to run. I symapthise with the man because, God, he goes through some shit. At the end of the game, he was knackered, and so was I.

Dead Space is not, exactly, fun to play.  The game has some rudimentary RPG elements – you can buy new stuff from a holo-shop, and power up weapons, armour and abilities – and as you progress and get more powerful, there’s a certain primal thrill to be had from carving your way through everything in your path, leaving nothing but oddly resilient torsos in your wake. The game even lets you start a new playthrough with all your fully levelled up gear, though only if you’re playing on the same difficulty as before, which further enhances the I-Am-Become-Death feeling that I’m so fond of in RPGs. But, seriously, fighting your way through a derelict spaceship crawling with malevolent and terrifying looking creatures, stumbling over eviscerated corpses every couple of steps, watching your avatar get torn apart by organic blades; it’s pretty bloody unpleasant. But who said all games had to be fun? Dead Space is a shattering, nerve-tearing experience within a horrendous world, full of unpleasantly atmospheric touches, and that’s what makes it worthwhile, even amongst last autumn’s deluge of quality. And that seriously isn’t bad for a grey-brown sci-fi corridor shooter.

Fallout 3 – the Pitt

So – after a nightmarish time trying to get Operation: Anchorage to work, it turned out to be wholly disappointing – only bribing its way into my favour by showering me with pretty loot at its early conclusion. My experience attempting to install this newest downloadable content for Fallout 3, the Pitt, was several orders of magnitude less painful, but we’re still talking fraught, unsuccessful visits to the Games for Windows Live forums here.  Eventually, after installing various Windows updates that may or may not have had anything to do with GFWL, I was able to boot up the game, sign in to Microsoft’s increasingly offensive service, and, y’know, play the content that I’d bought several hours earlier. And now I have four hundred superfluous Microsoft fun points.

Happily, the Pitt manages to redeem itself. Unlike Operation: Anchorage’s brief foray into pure FPS territory, the Pitt is consistent with what makes Fallout 3 great – namely, wandering around a lovingly constructed post-apocalyptic environment, rummaging for loot, and leaving a trail of destruction, or at least change, in your wake. You’re summoned by an emergency radio signal to a point at the extreme north of the Capital Wasteland’s map, and, after stumbling around on cliffs and in radiation pools for a while, you find the radio tower and an eyepatch-wearing, chain-smoking escaped slave named Werhner, who whisks you away to post-war Pittsburgh post-haste, aboard a railway handcar.  Unlike Washington DC, which in Fallout’s vision of the future was pretty much levelled when the bombs fell, Pittsburgh escaped largely unscathed, only to become a breeding ground for disease and decay in the years that followed. It’s home to a colony of raiders and their slaves, ravaged by a disease that transforms its victims into inhuman Trogs. When you casually stroll on to the scene, a cure is close to being developed.

In other words, the Pitt is a meaty and satisfying slice of true RPG goodness – it’s got factions, it’s got conflict, it’s got choice, it’s got proper characters, and it’s got the opportunity to have a dramatic effect on the world around you. Lovely – that’s the way to do it. The main quest is still a little on the short side for your £8.50, but the open levels leave a lot of opportunity for wandering, and there are couple of side distractions chucked in there too. My level twenty character – a charming, silver-tongued psychopath that moves silently, kills indiscriminately and fetishises assault rifle mechanisms -  breezed through Pittsburgh without difficulty, defeated only by a suddenly immaterial handrail on one of the higher gantries. Arguably it is a little too easy, given that most of the people interested in the DLC will probably have higher level characters, but honestly I just enjoyed choosing all the threatening and hubristic dialogue options, knowing that, when the time came, I could make good on my word and visit death upon the decaying colony. Which I did.

None of the new loot is as lovely and shiny as the Chinese Stealth Armour or Gauss Rifle from Operation: Anchorage, but there’s a lot more of it, and it’s all pretty cool in a grimy, rough’n'ready sort of way. Commanding centre stage, of course, is the Auto Axe, a giant spinning whirly death arrangement that fits in so snugly with the Pitt’s aesthetic that it’s hard to imagine playing through the add-on without lugging around half a tonne of bladed metal  and using it to chop up mutants, raiders and uppity slaves. Better still for a compulsive loot-whore such as myself, however, is the host of new armours, a new unique weapon, and a handful of other bits and bobs to spend hours meticulously stacking onto the shelves of my apartment. People that are even more obsessive than me can perform a fetch quest for steel ingots to get even more new stuff, the extent of which makes my excitement at Operation: Anchorage’s paltry-if-awesome offering look a tiny bit stupid.

The Pitt is one of the best environments I’ve seen in Fallout 3 so far, possibly the best – a ramshackle raider settlement clinging around and atop the empty, rotten buildings, all cloaked in thick orange pollution from Pittsburgh’s one working steel mill. It’s not merely an extension of the base game’s barren, green-grey nuclear wasteland, but a separate and internally consistent place, with its own tone and its own feel. This was one of Operation: Anchorage’s greatest strengths too, but where that storyline took place in pretty-but-narrow snow corridors, the levels in the Pitt are wonderfully open, complicated and sprawling – particularly the breathtaking steelyard. It even has new music, some of which is brilliant – and if Operation: Anchorage had any new music then it can’t have been very memorable.

The best part of the Pitt is this: it’s very Fallout-y. My experience with the first two games is still limited, but it fits in perfectly with Fallout 3’s vision of the future; the Pitt is masterfully crafted, very obviously a departure from the Wasteland while still feeling like part of the same world – a place where the same events have had a radically different impact. There’s even a pretty good story spun within it, and one that was intensely gratifying – I waltzed in, did my thing, and waltzed out, leaving the settlement reeling from my actions and my presence. Where Operation: Anchorage was a largely unsuccessful attempt at the FPS, the Pitt is a triumphant return to the RPG.

(Credit where it’s due: my character’s hair in the pictures is from this mod)