Mirror's Edge is a flawed gem
Mirror's Edge is probably one of the most unique titles released by a major publisher this generation, taking the first-person perspective normally reserved for shooters and using it to craft a game focused on speed and movement in the shoes of freerunning outlaw Faith.
For being based on a genre where platforming sections are almost universally criticized, Mirror's Edge goes to a lot of effort to make things satisfying. There is a strong sense of momentum to player movement, particularly as Faith picks up speed, and a running leap feels much more satisfying than the usual bunny-hopping motion of most first person games. Faith is also very willing to interact with her environment, being able to wall run, vault over objects, grab and climb ledges, and myriad other abilities that make first person navigation painless. In addition, rather than positioning the player as a camera hovering above a disembodied pair of hands, the game is designed so that your image is taken at Faith's eye level, and looking down gives you full view of your body, making positioning on thin ledges less of a chore.
The bulk of the game has you navigating the rooftops of a vast cityscape, often pursued by various branches of law enforcement, and progression is satisfying, although ostensibly linear. To guide you is a feature referred to as Runner Vision - objects important to progression are textured red, an unobtrusive and distinct visual cue as to where to go next. This feature is entirely optional, and is disabled at higher difficulty, leaving you welcome to go it alone. While the guidance is useful, it does sometimes feel that, with the linear level design and the constant driving force of enemies behind, you're simply following a script that was laid out for you by the developers. The best part of the game for me is a late-game area where you wind up needing to climb a tall partially-constructed room, demanding all of Faith's skills, and your Runner Vision refuses to help you, leaving the game feeling more like a first-person action puzzler along the lines of Portal.
Combat is by far the weakest link in the gameplay equation. Being an athletic lightweight speedster, Faith is naturally not much of a match for the armored SWAT teams that often antagonize her, and the game makes a lot of effort to encourage you to run from encounters rather than engage in them. And yet, at numerous points, the game outright forces you to engage in fights, at which point you need to get into fisticuffs with guys, or try to steal one of their weapons (if you're not interested in the pacifist achievement), neither of which are particularly fun. You are so consistently outnumbered and outgunned in these engagements that it just becomes an exercise in luck, trial and error, especially when playing through on hard where Faith goes down incredibly quickly. While her frailty makes sense in context and engagements in small numbers work well enough, larger groups of enemies should always have been possible to evade or escape, or at least had more creative means of disposing of them within the environment.
Aesthetically, the game stands out from the crowd, taking place in an eternally sunny hyper-clean city full of modern glass skyscrapers with a primarily white colour pallette and the occasional splash of orange or primary colour, a far cry from the 'real is brown' that has dominated in so many titles this generation. A soundtrack of electronic ambiance by Solar Fields acts as a backdrop, which always feels well suited to the action. Between levels the game cuts to vector-art cutscenes which, while not offensively bad, don't gel well with the rest of the art style, and probably would have been better presented in-engine.
The story, written by Rhianna Pratchett, is thin but serviceable. Faith is a Runner, a deliverer of banned communication in a dystopian society, whose police officer sister is framed for the murder of a politician who stood in opposition to the current government. In trying to clear her name, Faith uncovers a plot by the government to eradicate the Runners and complete their grip on society. While there are regular twists in the story, they're often not very emotionally engaging, and it leaves the game with no clear antagonist - Mayor Callaghan, the oft mentioned head of government, is never seen nor encountered. The aforementioned stylized cutscenes also lead to a sense of disconnect, making it hard to identify characters between engine and cutscene. The plot at least does the job of bridging the gap between levels, but the game as a whole feels a little short, and while time trial modes are available the par times are very unforgiving.
Mirror's Edge unfortunately didn't find commercial success, so if you have an opportunity to find it cheap I would highly recommend it, as there is a great game here underneath some unfortunate design decisions. If you're willing to power through some of the more frustrating combat encounters, there's a lot of fun to be had in the platforming, and I can only hope that DICE get a chance to revisit the concept between their biannual Battlefield titles.
