Mirror’s Edge

Mirror’s Edge

It’s one of gaming’s certainties that within a year of a new extreme sport’s invention a videogame approximation will follow. Of course Mirror’s Edge isn’t the first freerunning game out but it’s certainly the highest profile and, in terms of its visuals and concept at least, the most striking.

You play as Faith, a freerunner and courier who is on a mission to rescue her sister from the city’s totalitarian government. Viewed from a first-person perspective this translates into an awful lot of graceful skitting across rooftops, shimmying up crimson red drainpipes, bouncing up whitewashed walls and leaping off into space as she chases her mission and flees her pursuers.

The game is beautiful. Powered by the Unreal Engine it’s a world of white sunshine, the light blue sky framing a city of clean lines and sanitized concrete. The city is as much a character in the game as Faith, a tool for the player to master or die trying in a deadly thud on the ground below.

Underneath the extreme sports meets cubist architectural design sheen this is, in many ways, a traditional platform game. You jump, grab, and slide through levels, timing your inputs so that, when everything’s connecting seamlessly, it’s a rush of excitement. As you career along rooftops working out which buttons you’ll need to press to slide under the pipe, bounce on a springboard up onto a ladder and launching yourself onto a zip wire and in the game’s speed run mode, in which you race through levels as quickly as possible, the challenge is exhilarating. In the main campaign however, where missions and puzzles interrupt the sublime acrobatics, the experience isn’t quite as slick and enjoyable.

Much of the problem comes from the fact that you need to learn these levels to get to grips with them. In many cases, you won’t be producing slick runs through them until your tenth attempt, a level of commitment that not every gamer will muster. Important ramps, doorways and ladders are painted with a brilliant red paint, so in theory you should always know where you’re headed, but in reality sometimes the colour cue doesn’t arrive until you’re close to the object, if at all.

Intricate jumping puzzles stifle the sense of flow and speed and while these tricky moments are necessary to extend the game’s core idea, they do upset the pace somewhat. As you’re fighting against the government there are plenty of gun wielding police trying to stop you in your mission and, while it’s fun to dodge past them as their bullets whistle overhead, often their bullets just whistle into you, knocking you over and making it hard to get up and find a way out of the skirmish.

Despite these niggles Mirror’s Edge is a fulfilling and often electrifying experience. Its ideas are solid and refined – far more so than the other, more obvious parkour games on the market – but there’s a struggle to extend these ideas into a full game. Nevertheless, this is a quirky, intelligent, beautiful and idiosyncratic title that deserves a leap of faith.

4 out of 5