Punch my Peggle and call me a casual gamer, but I think I might have hated Mirror’s Edge.
From the wide-eyed ousider’s perspective Parkour is fascinating, both on a practical and abstract level. It seems to be the natural evolution of martial arts for our increasingly dangerous cities, a physical discipline that equips someone to deal with armed confrontation in the most effective possible way – by running the hell away from it. The Mirror’s Edge demo seemed to capture the utter wicked-coolness of Parkour very nicely with its gorgeous bright clean cityscapes and its focus, pretty much unique in the annals of first-person games, on movement and terrain over enemies and fighting. Adversaries were dangerous and largely to be avoided rather than defeated, so the clunky combat controls didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was in it for the running, jumping, climbing trees, the sense of exploration and agility and pell-mell momentum.
Instead, what I got was a stop-start first-person platformer / puzzle game which was made more artificially difficult by having you repeatedly shot at while you were trying to work out your path through the game’s too-often confusing and bland environments. Chances to free-run through the pristine city with its gleaming white skyscrapers were too few and clichéd grey corridors and service tunnels were too many. And whoever decided to set three-quarters of the last level in the pitch dark needs a slap to the chops and a good hard think about what they’ve done. Because if there’s one thing that always improves the experience of finicky platform nonsense, it’s not being able to see what the hug you’re doing. See also: whoever decided that the best way to showcase the acrobatic but imprecise combat was repeatedly locking you in a room with a bunch of heavily-armed motherhuggers and not letting you out till they were all defeated. Grrr.
Mirror’s Edge isn’t totally without merit. When it gets out of its own way there are some nice set-pieces here and there – most memorably, racing down the central staircase of a towering corporate headquarters to escape a squad of armed police – but those moments are swamped by the amount of time spent standing around trying to suss where you’re supposed to go next and how in God’s name you’re meant to achieve that. Chuck in a nonsensical story, diabolical voice-acting and, in a videogame first, cutscenes that are significantly uglier than the game itself and you’ve got one of the most disappointing games of recent years. RANK: D
