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.
