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Mirror's Edge

Combat and Other Bits

Faith is fairly squishy - while she can (unrealistically) take a bullet or two without breaking her stride, guards can stop her run brutally quickly if you end up in a bad situation. The trick is to avoid those situations whenever possible, dodging the enemies and in cases where a fight seems unavoidable, isolating them for one-on-one brawls. If you are punching or disarming one guy while another has a clear shot from ten feet away, you will die to a burst of automatic gunfire. Every time.

Guns can be used, but they are a very minor aspect of combat.

Taking out a guard with a swift kick to the head.

In a way I understand why so many found combat in Mirror's Edge so frustrating as he combat has some nasty quirks. When the enemy staggers stunned after a sliding kick or punch, you can't disarm him - you have to wait until he recovers and takes a swing at you with his weapon - only then it flashes red to indicate that you can grab it. If you miss the first opportunity to grab the gun, often you end up missing also the second one and end up dead. You also have no realistic option to evade the enemy once you commit to a melee brawl - if you try to run away after a missed grab, you are nearly always killed by gunfire.

The timing of disarm moves is very tight - you can't hit disarm too early and you can't do it too late. On the other hand, if it were any easier than it is on "easy", there would be no challenge. It's already very easy to dispose the guards at almost 100% success rate - all it takes is practice. Once again, the general theme of the gameplay is worth repeating - harsh, but always fair. Once you get the hang of the game, you can easily outrun a pack full of heavily armed thugs while picking them off, one-by-one - and each time a kick or a grab connects, it feels good because it takes skill.

As I mentioned earlier, on the first attempt the story can take 5-6 hours but once you know the levels, it's perfectly feasible to complete the whole game in well under two hours. This leads to my main gripe - there is not enough beef. Scouring the levels for runner bags to unlock some concept art is a pretty weak reason for re-runs. While there may be interest to replay the game a couple of times, ultimately the Story Mode of Mirror's Edge is just a superb backdrop and gameplay framework with far too little to do.

The PC version also lacks achievements that provide some additional goals on the consoles - in games like this they should be included even if the game isn't a Games for Windows title and all you could do is look at a list of extra goals you have completed - they would give another way to replay the limited content.

Time Trials

But there is more - once the story is all done, you can replay the game in two different ways. Time Trial reuses sections of the story maps for quick runs that demand you to take a whole new look at familiar grounds. The map is dotted with checkpoints and you have to run around the area visiting each one in order. Time Trial also allows you to compete against ghosts of existing leaderboard times and they are an excellent tool to learning how to really race the levels. Unfortunately DICE seems to have a major problem with cheating at the moment - they do prune the leaderboards, removing cheated times but there are enough lowlifes around to ensure that just about every leaderboard is constantly getting re-filled with obviously bogus times done with a teleport hack. This degrades the value of the leaderboards and the experience of competing against other players greatly.

Alternatively you can race full chapters of the main story in Speed Run mode. Actual gameplay is identical to the main story - the mode just adds leaderboards and the clock. Again, cheating is rampant at the moment so you have to take a hard look at the scores to pick something that is actually doable to compare against - the "world fastest" record time is almost certainly from some cheating scumbag.

Unlike Time Trials, Speed Runs allow more room to minor mistakes as it's nearly impossible to run six or seven minutes straight with zero errors. This is also a two-edged sword - it's an incredible feeling to get really far on a Speed Run continuously chaining flawless or near-flawless jumps and moves, but it's also extremely frustrating to miss a "simple" jump due to your own fault 50 feet before the end of a perfect 6-minute run and new record time. Of course this is unavoidable - you can't have that feeling without the challenge and the very real prospect of a slip-up.

Overall, Mirror's Edge goes from average to good on the strength of these real racing modes. It's disappointing that they feel very much like a last-minute afterthought. The lack of anti-cheat measures is an obvious sign, as is the lack of additional trial-specific maps. In fact, it looks like DICE has figured this out as well and is working on a downloadable Time Trial pack. No word yet when it will arrive on the PC, but I'm very much look forward to it. It remains to be seen if DICE can keep expanding the game in other ways - it could really use a head-to-head race option against "live" ghost and actual ghost mode for the Speed Run mode - currently ghosts are limited to the short Time Trial runs.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Combat, Additional Game ModesPage 4: Visuals and PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scores

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