Game Reviews for Mirror's Edge (PC)
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Rarely do aesthetics woo me into falling for a game, but if you combine the fine-tuned lighting effects, well-chosen color schemes, and the general feel that the developers aimed for, you get something amazing. Mix that up with a brilliant soundtrack, a logical control scheme, and addictively immersive play; you get a beautifully artistic game that you can't put down.
Don't take that the wrong way, however. This game is far from perfect. The story will seem like it is going somewhere, but it won't move an inch the entire game. Playing through the whole thing will seem more like a momentary breeze, rather than a long-winded adventure. Also, the variety of combat will be akin to varieties of torture (i.e. No fun for you).
All that said, the experience that is this game makes up for it's shortcomings. As you work your way around surreal, gleaming, man-made structures, and the theme of the game starts to run, you will forget yourself in the moment, and enjoy every minute of it. 4.5 Stars.· Like · Go to review -
To me, this is more of a puzzle game or detective title than an action or FPS one. While the visuals are stunning and at times, maneuvering around the city or pulling off a long sequence of moves can be very exhilarating and exciting, the real challenge is figuring out how to best traverse a section of the city or how to get past a cordon of police. I got this title for $10 and for that dirt cheap price it has been well worth it so far.· Like · Go to review -
Overall... amazing visuals, great music and a good sense of excitement. Certain parts are annoying, especially the ones that break the flow of moment and the ending was weak. Worth the bargain bin price of $20 on Steam and D2D.· Like · Go to review -
I really liked this game for many things. It's unconventional, brave, and has many lovable elements. As a plus you can play it through without shooting anyone. In particular, what stands out the most is the physicality.
As you're playing Faith, a runner, you're not some tough killing machine with armor and guns to equip a little army. You're a girl with fast feet and supreme agility, therefore you have to outwit the slowly moving police, special forces troops and others. I mostly used slide, kick and punch till they drop move, but apparently there are many other ways to overcome the people thrown in your way if you're skilled enough with the controls.
Unlike the other reviewers, I didn't have much trouble learning the controls. They were quite intuitive so it wasn't the control's fault. Besides, you could always mouse aim your jump, so using the quick turn isn't necessary (if that was the issue). My biggest issues were in timing the jump and/or action sequence correctly and estimating Faith's capabilities. It took me quite a few tries to get through certain parts before I saw another way out.
The reason why I didn't give this 5 stars was mainly due to the abrupt end. Although I noticed the game climax part, it wasn't really put apart from the other scenes due to spilling out the same enemies over and over again.. ending was sudden and I almost died trying it, but quite a few (maybe too many) questions were left unanswered.
I'm quite sure there's going to be a sequel coming on. It'd be a slight shame though.. then this game wouldn't be so unique in its style and content and above everything, gameplay. It's a good game and a definite recommendation. Remember to look for the suitcases as they open up extras (along the game completion) including production phase concept art, movies and songs. Racing the levels is also a fun way to hone your parkour skills.
Why aren't you playing already?· Like · Go to review -
The biggest issue I have with the game are the controls. Once you get used to how Faith moves, it's not so bad though.
The ending is kinda lame since it just comes out of nowhere; it's not satisfying enough for my liking. Also, the overall conflict in the city didn't really leave its mark on me throughout the game. The overall story is pretty forgetable.
I only paid $15 for it because I just bought it last week. If I bought this game at launch, I would've had some serious buyer's remourse. This game is definitely not a [launch price] experience. It's barely a $20 experience. But that's just my 2 cents.· Like · Go to review -
Once you get used to the controls, you'll probably like it. This game resembles the discipline Parkour very well, although the jumps are a little over the top. The bad thing is that you have as good as no multiplayer, no map editor wich would be great, and the storyline is too short. Good Game!· Like · Go to review -
I spent most of my time fighting the controls more than I did the bad guys. You want a game like this to be responsive and slick, something you can zip through, like your agile maincharacter across a rooftop. Instead, there are gamebreakingly frustrating halts peppered throughout the game. Most of your progress will be dampened by the "Trial and error" approach that seems to be the game's mantra. Because you will do the same things over and over again. Frankly, that's just not acceptable. Especially not in a game that looks as good as Mirror's Edge. Rent it if you have to.· Like · Go to review
http://forums.sporadic-mind.com/index.php?showtopic=10576
After an hour or so of having this game installed on my computer I hadn’t done as much playing as one would have expected. This was due to a few bugs, which made my first impression a little annoyed and a little hesitant. The bugs are detailed below as a bit of help as well as a new section this game has inspired me to add but once these bugs had been resolved and I could purely enjoy the game I started to really enjoy Mirror’s Edge.
Gameplay:
The gameplay in Mirror’s Edge is rather odd; it feels unique but also ‘done before.’ It’s essentially a free roaming action adventure game, and initially it feels like a very futuristic Assassin’s Creed. Climb anything, jump on anything, as long as it’s with reach you can do it. This is what makes it feel ’done before’, I mean in the end if you want to be bored then Assassin’s Creed has already been made. But Mirror’s Edge has implemented this concept very differently and after finishing the game I have to say, rather successfully.
The first thing you notice is the first person view. This initially seems odd, as it’s never been the preferred view point for this sort of free-roam acrobatic game. But after playing Mirror’s Edge and thinking about it I don’t see why not. Sure things don’t look as cool when you do a fancy move, you can’t say wow that looked awesome because you never see it, but instead you get a more realistic perspective, one that immerses you in the game rather than trying to wow you. This works great, essentially they’ve gone for substance over style, which in the end is always a good option. Yes, you play Assassin’s Creed and initially think ‘kooooool’, and yes you initially play Mirror’s Edge and are struck by an overwhelming sense of averageness. But play the games for even just half an hour each and already the tables will have turned. You’ll all of a sudden get bored of Assassin’s Creed and realise that beyond hurling yourself over anything, what more does the game have? Maybe a few repetitive quests and an interesting story telling dynamic but that’s about it. You play Mirror’s Edge and you feel like you’re living it, you feel like your stomach actually did a full frontal flip, well as close as a game can get you anyways. Below is a screenshot halfway through a frontal roll, giving you some indication of how odd it looks, trying to make heads or tails of it when stopped is hard enough, let alone when playing, really gives you a first hand perspective. So while a seemingly small change it already does wonders to adding substance to this acrobatic free-roaming genre.
The next point doesn’t really hit you til you’ve finished the game, mainly because you’re enjoying the game and not pointing out all the things that annoy you. While there are plenty of expansive roof tops with multitudes of pathways to reach your intended destination, there are also lots of linear bits, plenty of interior areas where there is only one way out, so instead of just randomly running to a dot on your map you’re limited to one path and the game turns into a puzzle game. I entered a stage which reminded me much of Half Life 2, where you stand there thinking about what you could possibly do to get out of what seems like a tiny barren room or, thinking of a few HL 2 moments, into a tiny barred off room lol. This means that you don’t ever get bored of random paths as you do in Assassin’s Creed, there are so many ways to go that none of the ways challenge you and hence an element of action adventure has been lost right there. But on the other hand you’re not always restricted to this linear sequence of rooms and pathways. It’s very much a ‘Best of Both Worlds’ situation where you free-roam to a linear puzzle which leads to another free-roam, never lingering long enough to get sick of it. The screenshots below demonstrate this drastic change in free-roam world to linear, the first shows a massive free-roam roof top 'playground,' then you get a huge internal area where you have to reach the top and finally a tiny room where there's only one way out.
Every so often along this free-roam/linear puzzle ride you’ll be confronted by the ‘Blues,’ or essentially, the police. The interesting thing about these encounters is that you’re not a hardened veteran assassin, or a spontaneously tough courageous soldier you’re a fast nimble light on her feet oriental chick. This brings a very unique aspect to the combat, which comes in to varieties. Your first encounter is of the ‘Get the hell out of here’ variety (as see in the first screenshot below tongue.gif), where your clearly outnumbered and you just have to run, this is a subtle way of adding a time limit to your traveling, so you can’t sit there for ages figuring out a puzzle you have to think on your feet and get out of there. Then the second variety is where the ‘Blues’ are between you and your goal and you have to get through them. Now as a runner you don’t carry around weapons, just your fists and slick moves! You can steal weapons from the ‘Blues’ which you can then use to take out other ‘Blues’ but you only get one round of ammo so combat tends to be rather tactical, you’re weak so you have to plan your moves carefully. Both varieties of confrontation are enjoyable and they never really grow old.
One of the unexpected facets of Mirror’s Edge is that it’s completely story driven. Storyline wise there’s no freedom; you can’t go off doing side missions, you just follow the story wherever it takes you. You start the game getting trained by Celeste, a fellow runner, and during this process you find out that you had been injured and are just now getting back into this ‘running’ business. For the life of me I don’t know what these ‘runners’ do, they seem like a super-committed postal service, but with slightly more interesting cargo then Christmas Card’s and Cookies. To be honest you never really find out why they do it, you never really find out what they are delivering, all you really know is that for some reason the government is bad and all of a sudden they are hunting you down by any means necessary, and this is where we come to the games first fault. The storyline is awful. It never introduces anyone, you really don’t know what’s going on most of the time, so then you never watch any cut scenes and you know even less of what’s going on. It’s not like you’re missing out though because for some reason even though they have a very pretty graphics engine they decide to tell their story using basic ‘stylised’ anime cut scenes, and I think they look terrible. So without going into too much detail the storyline is dreadful, basically nonexistent, all you ever really know is that you’re sister got set up and you spend the entire game trying to fix up her dilemma. But to be honest that’s all you ever need to know, I found playing the game so fun, unique and immersive that I didn’t care, I just enjoyed it for its challenges and its gameplay.
This however brings me to Mirror’s Edge second problem; length. It took me less than 5 hours to finish this game and that’s just not a very long time. Albeit these day’s it seems that maybe that’s about standard. But nonetheless it feel’s short. There are some nice ‘multiplayerish’ features that lengthen the game; these are discussed below but all in all a short game.
Controls:
There are two aspects to the control’s of Mirror’s Edge, due to its console nature there’s a heavy emphasis on a controller, but then obviously keyboard and mouse has it fair share of setup and strangely enough the keyboard and mouse have no problems. I had a random glitch where installing Mirror’s Edge with my controller plugged in caused my mouse and keyboard to not function properly but once that was sorted I had no troubles with the default setup. The mouse control was nice, no smoothing or acceleration and the keyboard configuration seemed fine. There weren’t that many controls so this may have been a major reason why it worked so nicely. The controller support though, surprisingly enough for a console game, was pretty terrible. Given this is an action/adventure game, I initially started playing with my controller. It’s a Logitech Rumblepad, emulates the look and feel of a Playstation 2 controller and I have used it many times and it’s an excellent device. But I just couldn’t use it in Mirror’s Edge. Mirror’s Edge was all set up for an XBox 360 controller (as far as I could gather) which is all good, BUT when it came to setting up my controller it was messed up, buttons seemed unnatural, my forward/backward/strafe left/strafe right analogue pad was inversed, so pushing forward ran you backwards; a lot of problems. But the biggest was that there were no customization options; I could inverse a specific axis (wrong one unfortunately), change the sensitivity and that was it. You could choose different control setups, Left Handed etc.. but no button re-mapping or anything, so it essentially made my controller useless which is never good. It didn’t bother me personally because I always prefer to use mouse and board for anything with aiming but it could be a major problem for some.
Graphics:
The real strong solid point of the game is the graphic’s, this is once again (like I said in my review of Rise of the Argonauts) due to the use of an already established, optimized and setup engine; the Unreal Engine. You can’t really fault the graphics, the buildings are very detailed, at night the lighting and atmosphere looks great. The look of the characters is great, very high detail facial graphics. There isn’t much aliasing; I didn’t feel the need like in many games to try get AA going. The environments kind of ran into each other, all very similar, only the colours really changed, but that seemed to be enough as I never got bored of it, but this once again could be due to the length, or rather lack of, in the game. The game also supported PhysX which I tried out. It looks quite nice, a lot of particle bouncing, fabric dynamics and glass effects. It seemed to work quite nicely with the NVidia GPU PhysX drivers however I only have an 8800GTS 512mb and I hate lag so I decided to keep it off for the majority of the game but it was nice to see some of these new technologies being used effectively and efficiently. Very nice graphic’s engine all round.
Minimum System Requirements:
- Windows XP or Vista
- Processor: Pentium 4 at 2.4Ghz
- RAM: 1GB
- Video: GeForce 6 Series with 256MB VRAM or better
As you can see, these requirements are very low, now the game probably won’t look pretty on a computer that basic but it can run which I think is good; and on any more up to date gaming computer it will run and look very pretty without too much trouble at all.
Audio:
The sound in Mirror’s Edge is nice, I actually noticed it, which means that it is better than most games. The ambient noise sounded brilliant, traffic, crowds, birds the whole works. The wind noises while running at speed sound nice, add to the immersion. The music in the game is very unique and some may not like it, but, it fits the game to a tee and so works very nicely. A very good audio experience.
Multiplayer:
I mentioned above in gameplay that Mirror’s Edge has ‘Multiplayerish’ elements that extend the gameplay. These can basically be reduced to two categories, the Time Trials, and the Speedruns. You can start Time Trials as soon as you start the game, they are courses, laid out where you follow big red waypoints, your timed and your results go onto a big world leaderboard where you can compare to friends or randoms. The freedom in the game works well here, it doesn’t matter how you get to the next checkpoint as long as its quick, this leads to creative thinking and a more puzzle take on your standard Time Trial sort of race.
Speedruns only appear after you have finished the initial storyline. You can basically re-run any of the missions you did in the story and like Time Trials; it’s about doing it as fast as you can. The unique thing about these is it includes the combat elements, taking the enemies down, in whichever way you see fit. This can be thought of as the ‘GTA Race’ of Mirror’s Edge lol. It is also quite enjoyable if you’re into that sort of thing. These game modes are obviously no substitute for a more substantial storyline but they are better than nothing and serve in part as ‘renewable’ gameplay.
Stability:
This is a new section I decided to add to reviews to talk about the games overall stability. Basically all the bugs, problems and hopefully solutions I had with the game. So far I’ve already talked about the controller issue, moral of that story; unplug your controller upon installing Mirror’s Edge. There were a couple of other problems. The first is a regular freeze up problem when PhysX was enabled. I just turned it off but after a moments research I found an update patch that reportedly fixes that problem right up. It’s great to see a fix coming out so soon, so props go to (unusually) EA for that one. The final problem was a few random crashes I had while playing. Akin to the problems I spoke about in Rise of the Argonauts. It wasn’t overly annoying, just a couple of random crashes, and sometimes it wouldn’t start on the first go.
Gameplay: - 7/10 – All the play elements in Mirror’s Edge are excellent and I would love to give it higher but the storyline was terrible and the game was too short so these two factors bring this down a bit.
Controls: – 6/10 – The Mouse and Board controls are fine, nothing wrong with them, but a weird bug when the controller was hooked in and the controller support is atrocious.
Graphics: – 9/10 – I can’t find any faults, they’re no Crysis, but they are definitely pretty, very clean and high detail and the addition of a reasonably efficient PhysX engine is nice.
Audio: – 9/10 – Great ambient sounds, very suitable music and nice wind effects when running at speed, it all fit very well and added to the immersion greatly.
Overall: – 7.75/10 – A fair bit of fun, its short but enjoyable, if you want story then don’t look here but if you want immersive exciting gameplay then this will give that to you, for as long as it can.