YouGamers.com

Reviews

Mirror's Edge

Shiny!

Much could be said about the excellence in visual design with Mirror's Edge. It stays consistently true to it's distinct style and It's a classic example how to properly use color and form to convey information. "Runner's Vision" adds to this, highlighting key objects and doors in red, conveying information that helps you stay on track. There is absolutely no HUD beyond a clock in the timed game modes and, much to my surprise, it works. Mirror's Edge doesn't have a HUD and it doesn't need a HUD because all the necessary information is given through visual or audio cues. Health is indicated by the color saturation of your view - all that vivid color turns into dull near-gray as you get injured.

Visual effects are used to emphasis the first-person perspective of the game - camera shakes, depth of field, motion blur, HDR lighting as you move between indoors and outdoors - everything is polished to near-perfection. The only slightly clumsy bit is the character animation of the "ghost" in Time Trial - again reinforcing the feeling that timed modes were a late addition to the game.

When you pick up speed, a notable motion blur effect becomes visible at higher settings.

Depth of field is masterfully used to emulate the focus of Faith's vision.

Major story-related cutscenes are done in animation that mimics a hand-drawn style with stark contrasts and in my opinion it doesn't quite fit the game. I can see that the idea has been to experiment with a non-obvious technique, but in all honesty the in-engine cutscene bits work better. I can't quite place my finger on the actual cause - it may be the jarring transition from strictly first-person gameplay to actually watching Faith or the fact that the animation style used is a bit crude. In any case, it's an interesting and different choice.

PhysX - The NVIDIA Way

The PC version goes noticeably beyond what the console versions offered with the inclusion of PhysX effects. All around the game levels you can find things like flags, scaffold covering, transparent curtains and plastic sheets that move and rip up very realistically. Steam, fog and particle effects from, for example, shattering panes of glass all showcase the strengths of PhysX and overall the game world feels more realistic with the addition of these effects.

While PhysX additions are not strictly needed and don't really alter the actual gameplay, they differ from older "glued-on" PhysX stuff in two important ways. They absolutely fit the game - in fact, the levels feel a bit stripped-down without the additions and they do not kill your framerate on high end systems with suitable hardware - translating to a high end NVIDIA video card or one of those rare PhysX boards, obviously.

You need a GeForce 9800GTX or better NVIDIA card to realistically play with PhysX active, but if you do, the framerate stays perfectly playable. For high end speedruns you may wish to switch the effects off to keep completely constant 60fps framerate, but that's really up to you. On SLI systems you can dedicate the second card to PhysX and easily get solid 60fps+ even with PhysX active. You can enable all the PhysX stuff on any hardware, but as soon as they fall down to the CPU (no NVIDIA video card or PhysX hardware found) the framerate tanks to completely unplayable levels.

PhysX enabled - parts of the scaffolding covered, with chopper fire tearing up the canvas.

PhysX disabled - same spot, just plain scaffolding.

It seems that when NVIDIA bought out PhysX, they finally injected some common sense to the whole concept. Mirror's Edge is probably the first game where PhysX brings clear benefits and (assuming compatible hardware), runs just fine even with the additional effects. It also doesn't get picky about your system - it gracefully falls back to CPU-only processing if it can't accelerate things with suitable hardware. Older games just refused to show the effects, effectively claiming that they "can't be done" on the CPU. Sure, the framerate keels over and dies, often to sub-15fps on quad core systems, but that's the price of high end physics effects running on non-specialized processor - at least you can make some apples-to-apples comparisons on the benefits of the technology.

Performance

The usual standard of the Unreal Engine 3 mostly holds true - you realistically need a dual core CPU of some sort and a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3.0. However, with Mirror's Edge solid framerate is very important so that pushes up the practical minimum somewhat. Visual settings don't really degrade the overall look of the game - when you drop down the settings the only visible differences are seen in shadow quality and number of shader effects used - textures and meshes stay the same.

Minimum settings - playable on the YouGamers minimum system.	Medium - differences are very minor.
High - virtually no difference, adds effects like motion blur.	Maximum. Playable on the YouGamers recommended setup.

Some of the effects can dip down the framerate on lesser hardware - YouGamers recommended is set to give you smooth 60fps at a reasonable resolution with maximum settings and PhysX effects disabled. If you want to enable PhysX and stay at 60fps, you need to toss in a faster NVIDIA card (GeForce GTX 280 or faster) or use two NVIDIA cards with one taking care of PhysX calculations. Alternatively you can get by with the recommended GeForce 9800GTX doing both and accept a 10-20fps loss in areas where you see PhysX-related additional bits.

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

Related Stuff

Tags