Mirror's Edge Initial Impressions

Having finally finished Twilight Princess, I installed Mirror's Edge on my PC last night. The first thing I noticed was how unbelievably long it took to install; it was seriously in excess of 20 minutes. The installation progress bar was also VERY uninformative. I'm going to throw one point (they were bound to get one eventually) to the console crowd for no/few installs.

Once in the game itself, I was immediately impressed by the visual style. The world itself has a relatively blank/white coloring scheme. The game uses strong colors to showcase certain features of the game. Anything related to the player character or "running" shows in a strong red. Police related events/areas are blue, offices show in strong greens and yellows. I don't think anybody could really do it justice just by explaining it, but it works VERY well. It feels like a realistic world with sort of a comic book drawn over the top of it.

Additionally, all the in-game cutscenes are done in a cartoon/comic style that is brilliant. Once again, it is a perfect fit for the game world and does the game a lot more justice than cutscenes done with in-game assets would. I definitely have to give the art/game designers at Dice props here, I think they put together a beautiful game.

The prettiness aside, the gameplay is a BLAST. I opted for a gamepad, as the game is mostly platforming, which I feel was a wise choice. It's a pretty basic left stick move, right stick look setup, with most of the action buttons (jump, slide, turn) on the various triggers. I'm not a huge fan of having jump as the left bumper (should probably change it), but it isn't that bad. I looked at the mouse/keyboard options, but most of them looked pretty bad in comparison.

The game does a remarkable job of marking you feel fast and/or coordinated. Once you get the hang of the controls, it's really easy to run from rooftop to rooftop jumping, leaping, and diving as required. My only real complaint in the acrobatics is the relatively slow speed at which you climb (either game designers in general set this too slow or I'm just impatient). When I found myself vaulting around the rooftops only to slow down dramatically when I grabbed onto a pipe to climb it, my sense of momentum was greatly impacted. I really feel like somebody as fit as Faith would be able to climb up a ladder/pipe a little bit faster.

The other main element of the game is combat. So far, I've had to do relatively little. Without a doubt, it is the weakest thing in the game. It's fun/easy to run a "blue" down and disarm him, but when I then have to deal with half a dozen other cops, the game definitely slows down. The gun combat feels weak and clumsy (especially with a gamepad). I'm hoping that it doesn't become too big a part of the game, although I've heard otherwise.

Regardless of my minor quibbles, I'm VERY impressed by the game so far. It's a lot of fun and definitely a breath of fresh air after slogging through Zelda. My initial recommendation is to go pick it up (it's super cheap on all systems) if you haven't already played it.