Mirror’s Edge

Summa:

Amazon Minimum Age: 144 months
Andmekandja: Video Game
Brand: Electronic Arts
EAN: 0014633156126
ESRB Age Rating: Teen
Item Dimensions: 0.67.52005.3
Väljaandja: Electronic Arts
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
Model: 014633156126
MPN: 15612
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Ilmumise kuupäev: November 11, 2008
Stuudio: Electronic Arts
Seotud tooted:     Vaata veel
Toote
Product Description:

 Imagine a world where communication channels are highly monitored and the movement of human traffic is closely watched. Mirror’s Edge introduces you to Faith, a “runner” in this world. When Faith’s sister gets framed for a murder she did not commit, Faith finds herself on the edge of the city, on the wrong side of the law.

Mirror’s Edge delivers you straight into the shoes of this modern day heroine as she traverses the vertigo-inducing cityscape, engaging in intense combat, fast-paced chases and challenging puzzles. With a never-before-seen sense of movement and perspective, you are drawn into Faith’s world.

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Arvustused
Rating: - Pretty, novel, unflowing, frustrating, short, short, blood pressure raising
Mirror’s Edge is a first person based mostly platformer with some melee and a splash of guns (in your hands, anyway) set in a oddly contrasted “clean” dystopian future.

Faith, your character, is a runner — a person who literally runs across roof tops and through the streets in order to deliver sensitive packages of, well, we never really know. Apparently whatever is in these packages is important enough for entire legions of law enforcement to spend their time sending copious amounts of lead in your general direction. Faith spends most of her time, well, to be frank: falling. And dying. Repeatedly. When she isn’t plummeting to her death (or even worse, a screen redding fall farther passed your last check point) she is busy shimmying up and down pipes and ladders, springboarding off of boxes and chairs, running on walls, and hanging on ledges. She is quite busy with these tasks.

Faith will traverse areas as mundane as high rise roof tops, complete with zip lines and plank bridges. She will make her way through sewer drains, malls, office buildings, empty hallways, a cargo ship, empty hallways, more empty hallways, a construction site, some building lobbies, air ducts/vents, and most of all: she’ll spend quite a bit of time in elevators.

Faith will also battle a wide variety of enemies. Most of which can whip her pretty good, especially if there is more than one — and there is almost always more than one. So the best tactic Faith has is to run, except when she is forced to fight. Which is more than she’d like. Faith will also be forced to fight on several occasions because it, apparently, takes her a while to turn wheels and push elevator buttons — and lord knows that is dicey behavior while under fire.

Mirror’s Edge is an unique game in that it tries to implement a platform game in the first person. This doesn’t quite work as well as one might think. The impression one gets is that Mirror’s Edge is about flow. This is incorrect. You can flow, briefly, on occasion — or if you’ve played a part enough times to memorize it, and, uh, in many occasions, you will — but mostly the game is a series of restarts littered with plenty of “okay, where do I go now, let me walk over here, no I guess I go the other way, oh wait, maybe I go over here… maybe over here…” and so on. I did get some decent flow going once I’d been forced to play the same part about twenty times.

Which brings me to my next gripe: Some parts, whether you like it or not, you will play over and over again. Sometimes this will be because you can’t pull off some delicate timing, sometimes it will be because you can’t figure out what to do (or where to go — the “hint” feature is deceptively useless sometimes) or sometimes it will be because you get unlucky and get peeled like an banana. The check points, thankfully, aren’t too bad — although there are some where you have to do quite a few moves in a row successfully to reach which can be a trial if you flub the last move. Over and over again.

The graphics are stunning at times, if you set aside the eSurance style cut scenes. I didn’t mind the cut scenes, I just found it a strange choice. If you have the time, at the moment in the game, to take in your surrounds you will realize that the art is really well done. It is rather sparse at times but the contrasting of colors makes it very striking. Other times you’ll be running through monochrome hallways to monochrome elevators where you will twiddle your thumbs in tribute to Mass Effect and its load times.

The Mirror’s Edge game is very short. I spent a good portion of time, like some lab animal trying to eat a piece of electrified food, repeating certain specific parts. Even then, the game consumed less than six hours of play. I did play it on the normal difficulty — which mostly affects combat issues — and it got plenty dicey towards the end. There is a version of the game you can play, “Speedrun” which is exactly what it sounds like. There is also time trial and leaderboard stuff, if that appeals to you. Perhaps people partial to that will be much more replayability out of it.

The controls are, mostly, pretty fluid except you do run into odd clunkiness with your character’s motions when the game doesn’t quite connect your moves together right for some reason. Your left hand will definitely be far more tense than your right as pretty much everything is done with the left bumper and left trigger.

Faith, apparently, has some sort of neck injury which does not allow her to look down while hanging on a ledge, will climbing a ladder, or while shimmying on a pole. Odd for someone evidently made of rubber. She also can’t seem to look much passed her shoulder when hanging from a ledge — this requires her to drop an arm and slowly turn away from the wall. These are minor irritations through out the game, though.

All in all, the game was mildly entertaining with sporadic moments of coolness poisoned by a river of frustrating game play. I feel better off having played the game, but my over all impression is a very mixed bag. I’m not sure it really justifies a straight up purchase — and if you are on a limited budget, or are choosey/particular about your games, I would highly advise renting it. Or talking someone else into buying it just so you can watch their blood pressure rise and their wireless controller soar through the room.

Rating: - Awesome
After beating GoW1.2 in about 2 days with limited playing time I was frustrated and wanted a good game that had me thinking quickly. And boy does this game do that. Its hard at first to see the lines and figure out where and how to run. But once you get the buttons down and start getting good- Boy does this game have some cool parts.
I will agree its damn frustrating at times- Hell the guards have unrestricted ability to mow down anything and when you are being chased by the Helo its a PIA. All in all I am super happy with the game and believe its definitely a contender for GOTY.

Rating: - Mirror’s Edge: Holding On By Its Fingertips
Two-and-a-half stars out of five.

Mirror’s Edge, from EA DICE, is as far as I know video gaming’s first foray into the world of parkour. It executes the subject admirably. The innovative engine it uses to simulate running along rooftops and jumping from foothold to handhold to foothold is excellent; neither so difficult that it quickly becomes frustrating nor so forgiving that the player does not feel like he is working hard for every meter of ground. I frequently found myself holding my breath during particularly challenging leaps. The parkour portion of Mirror’s Edge could be a game in itself. In fact, it probably should have been.

I bought Mirror’s Edge despite warnings that it contained SWAT teams because I assumed that, as one friend described it, the enemies would be there to discourage slowing down. An important part of parkour is the speed with which one travels from point A to point B, and in a game with a plot that has nothing to do with the sport of parkour, there should be something in place to create a sense of urgency. I do not have a thematic objection to the presence of enemies in the game. Indeed, there are many ways that the police in Mirror’s Edge could have been utilized well to encourage constant movement, and on rare occasion the game does hit on one or two of them. Unfortunately, the developers do not seem to have recognized their value, and instead incorporate enemies as an unpredictable and frustrating element of their puzzle construction.

In fact, despite the game’s early warnings that hostiles should be avoided rather than fought, Mirror’s Edge is constantly putting the player in situations where direct confrontration, if not conflict, is required by the environment. The player’s radio contact repeatedly warns her to “be ready for a fight” from about the third chapter on. Police appear directly in the path of the player without explanation, even when that path involves overcoming considerable inaccessibility. And these are not the blue-uniformed pistol-bearing cops of the downloadable free demo. These are armored men carrying assault shotguns and rifles, and in some cases 50-caliber machine guns. If there is one message I want to express clearly in this review, it is this: the police are everywhere in this game. Expect the majority of this game to be parkour, but parkour under automatic weapons fire.

Even this could be forgiven, despite the fact that they are armed in this fashion to deal with the threat of a single woman armed only with her speed, if the police had good code governing them. But they do not. There is no stealth system in Mirror’s Edge. Enemies become aware of the player when they are activated, regardless of the player’s actions or concealment. And once they are aware of the player, they never lose track of her, no matter how insane or hidden her movements. The player will never step out of cover in Mirror’s Edge and not be greeted by a hail of bullets. The police can and do track the player around corners and through solid objects.

In many cases, the police do not spawn until the player has wasted too much time in a single area, but this is not universally the case, and there are a few locations in the game that contain enemies from the start and require the player to perform a time-consuming task while there, outside of cover and essentially stationary. The game never explicitly requires combat, but when climbing a pipe or opening a hatch takes two or three seconds, and the pipe or hatch are not protected, failing to deal with the armed men beforehand has predictable results.

In the end, what makes the combat in Mirror’s Edge a failure is not its inclusion but its execution. It would have been a simple matter to always have the police in a pursuit role, or if that became too contrived or difficult, to make the player significantly more vulnerable to gunfire while stationary and significantly less vulnerable while moving. Instead, the enemies are often directly in the players’ path, and gunfire is extremely erratic, to the extent that the player can make a run under fire without taking a single bullet that on a previous attempt resulted in her being gunned down instantly - and vice versa. If a designer is going to use gunfire in puzzle design, their algorithms for accuracy simply have to be more reliable than that. The demo could be beaten without taking a single bullet by making no more than two well-aimed slide kicks. If the whole game had played like that, this would have been a very different review.

The only thing keeping Mirror’s Edge from being a two-star game, despite the excellent parkour engine, is the time trial mode. These are genuinely fun rehashes of the parkour in the game’s story mode, often with some changes to the required route to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, in order to unlock these, you have to first beat the story mode of the game. The speedrun mode of the game is just the story mode with a timer attached, and adds no real value. Hopefully, if DICE produces a sequel, they will make the time trials available from the start and will also do something to eliminate or at least reduce the ubiquitous combat content from the original. Mirror’s Edge is not the game it should have been.

The final encounter of Mirror’s Edge is a short, entertaining boss fight that does not involve combat (only about half the “boss fights” in the game don’t), but rather quick and skillful use of parkour abilities. I successfully executed the required maneuver first try and happily watched the villain receive his comeuppance, only to then immediately succumb to the numerous high-powered gunshot wounds to my back. The experience defines Mirror’s Edge pretty well, in my mind - a good game ruined by poorly designed content that was irrelevant to begin with.
[…]

Rating: - Back to the old jump & run days
I really really want to like this Mirror’s Edge game. Badly. But frankly, I don’t.

I was really looking forward to this game, it’s ideas, concepts, graphical design, gameplay in a very vertical city. But it just doesn’t work out like it should have.

I like the general idea of doing this in first person, and it certainly is the best first person jump & run game I’ve ever seen. What they did with that is really amazing. But you know what? Once this aspect wears off and you get over that they made a mechanic work that isn’t supposed to work, you realize that even though the jumping aspects work well for a first person game, they are horrible compared to a third person approach. Too many times do you fall to your death because you can’t tell whether you could make a jump or not and where to jump off. Are you at the edge yet? No idea unless you stop and look down at your feet, which is something you can’t generally do as the game is all about momentum.

The first person perspective also means that you can’t see all the awesome stuff you supposedly do. I would really like to see Faith (your character) do all this amazing stuff, but all you can see is the world slide by.

The graphics are nice. It’s a really unique artistic touch. But it also wears off, and eventually, you are just in a much less realistic looking city than you should be in this day and age. At times, you even get the impression this could be a title for the old xbox. (And I explicitly use the word “impression”, because I realize this wouldn’t have worked on the xbox, but the art style makes it rather hard for the developers to impress you, since it is too comicy at times).

I was also disappointed that I never really got all that much of a sense of verticality. Sure, you go up and down or climb up on pipes the side of buildings, but too often, you are just on the rooftops which seem to form a new “bottom”. Everything is very linear. Since you do not have the choice to go elsewhere (down in particular), it doesn’t matter much that you are on roofs.

The real problem with this game is that it isn’t fun. It is all trial and error and not often did I get a sense of achievement. At the end of a level you are relieved you did it, but not satisfied. Things just don’t often flow well. It is like a throw-back into the old days of jump & run with pixel-perfect jumps you have no way to time. You fall to your death a lot or get shot all the time. Never do you get a sense of “holy moly this was an incredible thing I just pulled off with ease” like you do when you play Prince of Persia (for instance), a relatively old offering at this point.

This is a real bummer. First disappointment of the year. Not a bad game. It is still quite unique. But not the stellar experience I had hoped for.

Rating: - Memorable and flawed
Mirror’s Edge is one of those rare games which manages to create a strong sense of amazement and utter frustration simultaneously.

The Mirror’s Edge game is vivid, exhilarating, and identifiably unique. Yes, there have been many platforming games, yet none are portrayed in a first person perspective. The controls are simple and responsive and when you manage to pull of a chain of impressive maneuvers, you’re sense of satisfaction and enjoyment will be unparalleled. Playing a game from an established perspective in a new way is flat-out awesome. Some of the greatest moments are when you manage to evade groups of heavily armed cops by the skin on your neck, never once having to actually engage in real combat.

Graphically, the Mirror’s Edge game is vibrant and bright, the antithesis of of the brown, desaturated, and dark games that seem to dominate the market. Framerate manages to stay playable throughout, and effects like motion blur and depth of field create the illusion of speed.

Unfortunately, the game often fails in the gameplay department. While seemingly open and free, the game is restrictive and linear. There were several situations where I should have been able to move through the level, but I encountered invisible walls because the developers wanted me to do a specific chain of moves, instead of the ones I had improvised myself.

Trial and error gameplay rears its ugly head here, as well. I died over and over and over again until I figured out the proper method to progress. For a game that wants you to run away from fights, rather than fight, the number of times you are forced into combat makes things rather difficult, more so than it needed to be.

And finally, the city is gorgeous and sterile. We’re supposed to believe that big brother watches everyone and everything. Yet, by the end of the game you’ll start to see it’s all superficial. Where are the civilians? Where are the drone-like workers in the offices? You’ll run through long empty corridors, large lifeless offices, and only get the glimpse of a few people walking in the streets below you. Instead of feeling dystopian and conformist, it feels dead and lifeless.

Despite these flaws, I still think that Mirror’s Edge is one of the most memorable games I’ve played in a long time. Memorable, yet flawed.

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