Anybody who's talked to me at length about games has probably come to notice that I'm a rather skeptical critic. I'm not unfairly harsh on a game until it warrants such chastising, but I've been burned often enough by games I was excited for up until their release that I know to tread with caution. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, for example, didn't do much for me at all, a viewpoint which still manages to draw controversy to this day if I'm not careful about bringing it up. It's thusly come to pass that a game more often than not has to prove itself before it gets my wholehearted accolades and not "this game is good" and proceed to tack on noticeable reservations I have about it. These days, maybe one to three games which come out at any given year get such treatment. After twelve years of playing this stuff, you just learn to rely on your instinct and experience to tell you what works and what doesn't.
And then came along Mirror's Edge.
I had always been interested in Mirror's Edge from a conceptual standpoint ever since the first public trailer of it came out, but I had my doubts about how well DICE could actually do justice to the vision which the game was trying to portray. After all, this is an FPS studio working on a game which essentially takes out the last letter of the acronym as a main element of the game. A lot of things change with such a removal in emphasis. So in the back of my mind, I thought to myself that if it turned out that DICE didn't manage to completely butcher the ideas driving Mirror's Edge upon its release, I would probably buy it eventually. After all, even if the game is being created by a mainstream studio, the concept is hardly that and my love of oddball games in general would naturally drive it to buy it.
And then the 360 demo came out today and made me want the game to be in my hands sooner rather than later.
It's very rare for a demo to convince to actually go out and buy a game. In fact, the last one to do that was the original Splinter Cell installment, and the GameCube installment at that. (Hey, at least they didn't completely use the GBA lazily.) A game has to be really special in its demo's execution if that portion alone compels me to purchase the full version of the game, yet the one for Mirror's Edges does just that. All of the package's elements felt really cohesive and complimented each other in ways I've seen very few games manage. From what can be best described as a true union between visuals and gameplay to the natural-feeling controls to even the opening of the first level after training, the demo alone led me to put some faith (unintentional pun, I swear!) in DICE and believe that it does, in fact, know what its doing. Considering that this is someone who had never played any other games from the developer's catalog, that's quite a feat.
But the thing which stood out the most for me, the one thing that will probably make the full game iconic in my book, is the game's mentality towards guns.
One of the basic rules of thumb in most first-person games (and imaginably DICE's past works included) is that it's wise to have a reserve of weapons because you'll very likely stumble into a situation where they're your only option out. Mirror's Edge, however, is deliberately designed in such a manner where you firearms aren't actually your best friend. In fact, at least in my case, you actually feel guilty for firing off anything you might pick up from disarmed foes. I became so accustomed to using parkour as my means of survival that to actually take the time to use a pistol and point it at someone's head just didn't feel natural. Not natural in the sense that any of the mechanics for that stuff are broken, but in the sense that you know Faith wasn't brought up to be combative in that way. It feels fine in other games such as Halo and Goldeneye where you know is character is bred to use guns as an extension of their own bodily powers, but in Mirror's Edge, Faith's objective isn't "to shoot shit up." She's meant to do her thing with the help of running and momentum and diverging from that just feels wrong in a way I don't think any other game has ever really conveyed. The Y-Button on the 360 version, which is what you use to discard weaponry, is something you're very likely to become accustomed to using without batting an eyelash.
I doubt that Mirror's Edge will be a game that's for everyone, but at the end of the day, I think it will suffice rather nicely for those wanting a first-person game which shakes up the very core of that genre's foundations. I've become rather tired of most games on both sides of the first-person aisle, namely shooters like Halo and adventures like Oblivion, but Mirror's Edge, if its demo is any indicator, looks like it's bound to avoid the trademarks of both and simply carve its own path. How successful it'll be at the end of the day is still debatable, but I look forward to giving the full game a shake or two and taking it from there.
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