by Joe Makintosh

Created on: July 15, 2010

Mirror's Edge in two words: Adrenaline inducing. The Swedish Developers DICE – of Battlefield fame – decided to take a blind leap in to something new. Something that doesn't make you feel the sweat and hear the explosions like Battlefield does. Something absolutely, totally new: Parkour.

Parkour has featured in games before, like Free running for the PSP and the Assassin's Creed games, but Mirror's Edge is solely about freedom of movement and using Parkour to get from one place to another. Because of this, the controls are more complex than your average game, designed for movement as opposed to combat. They have quite a bit of a learning curve, but once the player has cracked it they can fluently dive off of buildings, vault of pipes and run along the walls.

Because the game is designed to be about running and not fighting, the combat controls are weak. It breaks the flow of the movement and the highly emphasised disarming system is more often than not all down to luck. Some parts of the game are brutal to players who do not wish to fight, such as the infamous part in the last chapter.

The concept of Parkour would make one think that the game is an open-world, high-velocity excursion, that being able to decide how to get to that building is better than narrow routes. This isn't the case. Mirror's Edge is fairly linear in that you always go in the same direction, but there are many different routes to take. Some sections of the game are more open than others, the Atrium for instance, has tons of different routes to get to your goal, but even the linear sections of the game make you feel that you are in total control.

The Plot – if you can call it that – is wafer-thin, but with the potential to be expanded upon in later games. You are Faith Connors, a “runner” - a courier to those driven underground by the oppressive, fascist government in a city. When your sister is framed for a murder, Faith totally forgets about her job as a courier and goes to save her. The dialogue from some characters like the ex-runner Jackknife is cringe-worthy and would make the player want to skip the flash-animation styled cartoons. The plot is all forgotten by the end of the game, but it can be continued in Mirror's Edge 2.

However, the Story is only a small part of the game. Time-trials and Speed runs are the competitive sort-of Multiplayer in the game. For the time trials You race others for positions on a leader board to get to certain checkpoints in courses based on the story and – in the case of the Downloadable Content – abstract shapes and floating blocks in the sky. The Speed Runs are another leader-board on how quickly players can complete a normal chapter of the campaign. This is where the short cuts really shine. To be able to over-take another player by using a short cut they are not aware of is a truly great feeling, even if they are not playing at the time to notice.

These two components of the game offer many hours of extra playtime after the super-short campaign which only lasts around 5 or 6 hours. Trying to beat your previous best on a time trial can be extremely addictive, but the feeling when you here the sound alerting you that you have indeed bested yourself is worth the hours spent perfecting the run.

To conclude: while the game has a short, shallow plot the way you play it can make the game repayable, especially with the time trials and speed runs. For the cheap price you can buy it for today there is no reason at all not to check this game out.

8/10.

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