When I was a little kid I loved running and jumping on things. Living in the mountains made this task easy to find, and I would seek out new boulders and mountains to climb up on. It’s that beautiful childhood feeling of making it to the top, the feeling that you’ve accomplished something that makes Mirror’s Edge such an interesting game. It can be described in just a few words, you run and jump on stuff, you climb, then you run and jump some more. Regardless of the mixed bag of reviews that the game has gotten, it seems that many people have missed one of the most overwhelming points: it’s fun.
Mirror’s Edge is frustratingly fun, it’s Ninja Gaiden II fun, it’s scream at the TV and nearly throw the controller at the screen fun. It’s unrelenting in its demand for pinpoint precision on jumps and that’s what makes it a good game. Well, that and the fact that it’s a first person game in which you can actually see your feet when you look down.
Yet that’s the game’s biggest downfall, the feet that is. The developer’s spent so much time creating your existence inside Faith’s body, from the hands to the feet, you see your legs when you jump and hear the pulse of blood through the heart as you run — then the game switches to a cut scene sequence that looks like a badly done Flash animation or Esurance commercial. The story itself isn’t that interesting, your sister’s caught up in a scandal and you have to rescue her, which, oddly, seems pretty close to the old Nintendo games that Mirror’s Edge evokes. But the world, the world is utterly beautiful, a clean, nearly gray-tone city highlighted with bright primary colors.
It’s too bad that the developer’s dropped the ball on the story because the world itself has enough potential to make for an interesting tale. The point of view is perfect for storytelling, which is proven throughout the game with several first-person cut scenes that, had earlier parts of the game been done properly, might have had more impact on the player. The way your head and body moves is deeply immersive, but when the story jumps to a cut scene, the feeling is immediately lost. It’s bizarre to me that nobody would have mentioned this during the developement stage, because it would have been cheaper and easier to just use the games engine and point of view to tell the story — and also would have added a bit more meaning to the games opening sequence in which you run and jump onto a helicopter and are flashed a mirror image of yourself in a polished office building.
Mirror’s Edge also suffers deeply from the economic woes of the rest of the country. The game takes about eight hours to complete, and sits nimbly on a $60 price tag. If 2008 has proven anything it’s that gamers aren’t willing to shell out that kind of cash for a mediocre-reviewed game that is not only a new IP, but is also short. “It’s a rental,” they’ll say to themselves, or, “I’ll talk a friend into buying it so I can borrow it,” they’ll mutter. What video game companies need to walk away with from this last year is that gamer’s aren’t stupid and they aren’t full of money. We, just like the movie industry, just like the music industry, need launch sales. We need $20 knocked off for the first few weeks, especially with a game like this. Mirror’s Edge is the type of game that is going to strive best on word of mouth, not reviews. It’s the type of game that friends recommend to friends… not review site’s, not magazine’s. Mirror’s Edge isn’t a blockbuster hit and should never have been marketed as one. It’s a game that is going to garner a cult following and be a small, but loved franchise. That is, if EA bothers to release another one.
What Mirror’s Edge get’s right far outweights the things it gets wrong. Simply put, if you’re a gamer that has patience and enjoys dying a lot, you’ll get a kick out of it. It captures the exhilirating feeling of accomplishing something, of getting to the top of the mountain and looking down on the world, and as you wipe the sweat off your brow and grin you can turn around to see another way up, another boulder to climb, a task to complete.
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