My baby sister celebrated her birthday this past Saturday. This girl means the world to me, I share everything with her… well, except for my love of video games. I’ve tried to bring her into the fold but she doesn’t want to be. Being the liberal arts student that she is, she believes that video games are made for men while portraying women as buxom babes with arses that can suffocate a living being. Being the complete prick that makes me… well me, I chose to prove her wrong and went through a large list of video games with female protagonists, just to find female leads who do justice to the hyper-liberal views.

During my research I discovered two things:

• My baby sister is wrong. A lot of female protagonists are cute, not sexy.
• I should play Mirror’s Edge. Just because it is a different take on the FPS formula

Let’s see how that different take went. 

Story:

Mirror’s Edge is the story of Faith, a runner, a courier for people who don’t want the government to know what they are sending. Faith has spent her full life running from everything. She started by running from her family’s problems and now she runs for the highest bidder. Thankfully, she is not alone. There are other runners who do what she does but Faith is the best of the best.

Faith does have a soft spot: her family. That soft spot becomes overpowering when her sister, a believer in the ways of the law (a cop) is framed for the murder of Robert Pope. Pope was a friend to Faith’s family and against the government’s overbearing control. His death causes strife in the city and while most heroes would save the city and their families, Faith just wants to prove her sister innocent. The city can go to hell!

The game follows Faith discovering the frameup, and the people responsible while trying to prove her sister innocent. All this is delivered by in-game cutscenes and some really cool animation. While the overall story is a little weak, the delivery is sublime.

Sound:

 Got to give props to the sound design team. 

The background music when running is soft, and slow, which lets you hear the world around you adding to the experience. When enemies appear the music goes from being a soft lite tone into a hyper set of beats. The music does an excellent job of carrying the mood.

The voice actors too have done a really good job. Merc and the other characters do a damn good job of displaying their personalities not by their actions but by their voices. Merc especially is damn good. While normally sounding calm, Merc’s voice actor occasionally adds faint tinges in his voice to show emotion. It is really good. Faith’s voice actor, on the other hand, is not as great but that is because she has so much work to do, she has to not only do her lines but also deliver the little snorts, grunts and every possible sound a person might make while taking on physical abuse. The attention to detail from the sound team is fantastic.

Graphics:

I keep saying this but nobody listens to me: Stop trying to make your games hyper-realistic, pick an art style that makes your games playable instead. Mirror’s Edge picked an amazing art style. They chose 3 colours, yes just 3. The world is doused in white, with blue and black for hostile elements, along with red for the important stuff. White tells you that you are on the free, unimportant ground, red tells you where you need to go and blue/black tells you that someone needs to die. It is easy on the eyes but I’m sure it was a huge pain in the arse to design.

While we are on the graphics, let’s talk about the cutscenes: I like anime, hell! I love anime. The art style used for the cutscenes is like the in-game graphics but at the same time is different enough to make go wow! The cutscenes could be cut together for a side story in the world of Cowboy Bebop. Actually, let’s do that:

Gameplay:

The gameplay loop is simple, dead simple: Get from A to B. Nothing fancy, no side quests on the way, just get from A to B. Faith is a runner, she has tons of ways to get from A to B which includes but is not limited to jumping, crawling, sliding and obviously running. All you as the player need to do is to find out how these skills can help you get to B. Nothing too difficult.

The levels are designed about getting from A to B. While they might look like large scrawling areas, they are in fact tiny areas with a linear path. They are well designed adding blockades, climbable objects, and other obstacles in Faith’s way. The level design is the definition of a movement puzzle. You need to run, jump, slide and do every matter of acrobatic move to find your way through most levels. The level designers knew what they wanted, once they had the core loop and mechanics established; they set to work making a world that was great to look at, a path that needed to be thought about but linear enough that anyone could figure it out.

The problem with that simple gameplay loop? it doesn’t add tension, it doesn’t add fear, and it doesn’t add a need for speed (dumb reference intended). Since Dice was already a part of EA at the time, they had a corporate meeting to decide how to add these elements to the game. During that meeting, someone said: “We can add enemies and make faith weak”, which is what Dice did. Adding enemies improved the game’s momentum tenfold. By having enemies hunting them, the player is at the edge of their seat, they need to find the best way through while having no time to decide their moves before they get a bullet in the arse.

This is where Mirror’s Edge’s problems begin. That guy who suggested adding enemies to the game got confident when his suggestion was approved. He wanted to be taken seriously, he wanted to be the hero of the dev team so he forced the team to add enemies everywhere. Do you know what kind of game has enemies everywhere? FPS GAMES! YOU RETARD. Now, Dice has to add guns to the game. You can tell that the guns were not part of the core game because they don’t feel even remotely right: The pistol and Uzi are alright…ish but the bigger guns feel weak and somehow at the same time overpowered with their painfully dull recoil.

Once the enemies guy went to tell his friends what a great job he did, Dice started contemplating how to make enemies in the game acceptable. The first was to add slow motion to the game as a crutch for the player to lean on. The second was the ability to disarm and knock out enemies in one swoop. While slowing down time is easy to implement, implementing a time based disarm is not. The player can disarm enemies when the weapon turns red while being swung but the actual window is off by a bit, as a result; disarms are rarely done right unless you’ve studied the motion.

As a result of these multiple half-baked mechanics: Mirror’s Edge is both frustrating and satisfying at the same time. The running while mostly done needs pinpoint precision, the pathfinding occasionally goes haywire and the gunplay needs to go out a window. That being said; the satisfaction from passing a level is through the roof, running across walls, climbing to an exact point, landing correctly while either dodging or taking out your foes awards an unmatched feeling of accomplishment. Mirror’s Edge is the first game I’ve played since S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl whose bugs make it more endearing.

Conclusion:

Mirror’s Edge has got me at a crossroads, on the one hand, I love the running mechanics, on the other hand, the combat mechanics leave a lot to be desired, and on the third hand that I grew out of my ass, is the gunplay. Thankfully the running is sorted enough to make me care less about the other two. There are two levels that overuse the bad mechanics (Chapter 6: Pirandello Kruger and Chapter 9: The Shard ), these chapters alone prevent Mirror’s Edge from challenging S.T.A.L.K.E.R in my book but Mirror’s Edge is still getting a high score from me.

Before we conclude, I wanted to mention my baby sister again and why this game is perfect for her. My sister is clumsy, I’ve seen her trip on wires most people would step over, she has injured herself doing things she has done tons of times before but she looks like a ballerina compared to how I control Faith. The timing in Mirror’s Edge is unforgiving, and uncaring which makes you cry for joy when you overcome it.

Happy Birthday, sis!

Pros	Cons
Great Parkour	Poor Gunplay
Well Designed Levels	2 Levels seem rushed
Pinpoint precision need for parkour	Game is buggy
Music is great	Nothing
Well Delivered Story	Overall story is weak

Recommended Purchase Price: ₹500 or $10

 Final Score: 8/10