Mirror's Edge Review

Even though I was only halfway through the game at the end of my last play session, I quite easily finished the game in a second. All told, the length was somewhere right around 8 hours. While that would normally feel short to me, after playing through 36 hours of Twilight Princess, it was a breath of fresh air. I thought about making a separate post to detail the time/stuff I did in my second session, but the game continued on being more or less the same as the first half -- this was not a bad thing. With that out of the way, my final thoughts:

Loved

• Grace/Momentum. When you are able to control Faith properly, this game just... flows. The speed is satisfying, the obstacles are interesting, and overall I felt like I was almost surfing through these levels. I've never played a game that had such a satisfying level of grace and momentum. Even the Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider games, which probably had influence here, never even came close to feeling as smooth as Mirror's Edge does.
• Visual Style. The minimalist/blank color palette coupled with the occasional strong colors worked really well. As I said before, the game felt like a real world with a comic book drawn over the top of it. I discussed this quite a bit in my Initial Impressions; in short, it was just good.
• Additional Content. After I finished the game, I saw that I could also do speed runs and time trials. While a speed run is nothing more than trying to get a good time on a specific chapter, the time trials are really fun. Basically, each one is a piece of one of the chapters. Each of them have approximately 5 checkpoints that you must race through. The obvious goal is to get through all in the fastest time possible, with 1, 2, and 3 "star" times to beat. To get a 3 star time, you not only need to have a flawless run, but take the best possible path. While part of the fun is trying to find these paths, the game also has an online leader board where you can choose any of the top 100 times and actually race a ghost of that time. I think that it is a great feature and helped me to find some new/interesting paths through some of the levels.
• Immersion. Games these days seem to be really ratcheting up the immersion factor and this game was no exception. When I started playing, I immediately turned off the targeting reticule (except in gun mode) which provided me with a completely hud-less experience. As I continued to play, I found myself doing something I haven't done in years: I was actually leaning into the jumps. Not my game character, ME. I realized I was leaning forward when trying to make some of the tricky long jumps and in one brilliant little section where you ride on a train dodging obstacles, I noticed that I was not only leaning side to side, I was DUCKING. It has been a very long time since I have gotten that into a game and it really speaks a lot for the immersion level.

Hated

• Momentum Breakers. Without a doubt, the speed/momentum is what makes this game. Because of that, anytime I hit something that would break/slow my momentum, it would be particularly aggravating. I've compiled a small list of some of the many things that would do this, all of which were ridiculously frequent. In my opinion, the game could have done without pretty much all of these things. The list includes but is not limited to:
• Climbing pipes
• Climbing ladders
• Crawling through a ventilation shafts
• Having to sit around and figure out how to climb up/get down in an interior location
• Carrying any large weapon
• Combat. Combat in this game just doesn't work very well. Disarming opponents generally felt satisfying, and actually managed to allow you keep quite a bit of momentum most of the time, but both hand to hand combat and gun combat felt clumsy. Every so often the game would throw a handful of enemies at me, each of which was wielding a very large machine gun. Regardless of the gun in my hands, they would hit me from 100+ yards while I would WALK towards them (large weapons slow you down) trying to line up my cross hair with the clumsy game pad controls. The only time combat felt any good were the couple of times I got an Uzi-like gun in my hands, as it allowed me to still run. I basically just ran right at the enemies spraying bullets. Now THAT was fulfilling.

While you would probably expect me to complain about the length of the game, I just don't think I can. A game like this could becomes really repetitive if it went on too long, but Mirror's Edge stopped right when it should have. The story was good, but not spectacular; it even left room for a sequel.

Final recommendation: GO BUY THIS GAME. I think you can get it for every platform for <$20 these days and it is easily worth that. Oh, and be sure to add me as a friend in the in game client. I WILL beat any and all times you post.