Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve been watching Mirror’s Edge from a distance, pining away for its delicious cityscape, smitten with its sterile and pristine blues, whites, reds, and yellows. It was, and is, a visual panacea to cure the over-bloom-lit, over-brown, over-textured HD gaming landscape. When the first gameplay videos started hitting the net at the beginning of May, Edge’s smooth parkour action and emphasis on non-violent flight transformed my infatuation into full-on love. I needed this game to be as good as it looked, to deliver on its proposed fluid play. I’ve been dreaming about a game based on momentum and escape for years now, and here it was in action. But the proof, as always, is in the play. After playing Mirror’s Edge at EA’s fall preview event today, my first impression is it’s exactly what developer DICE has been promising. Everything you’ve heard is true.
Much has already been written about ME’s brand of platforming – most everything in the environment is climbable given the right positioning, almost every wall can be used as a surface for running or leverage, and the appropriate path over rooftops and through hallways is typically marked in red – but its controls have been something of a mystery to me. It turns out that Mirror’s Edge is quite simple to play, but deceptively so. The four left and right triggers on a PS3 controller (the triggers and bumpers on 360) are coupled with traditional first-person analog controls (left analog to move, right to look) as the main inputs. L1 let’s you jump but it’s also a context sensitive catch-all used to climb up surfaces or interact with usable objects, such as support cables between buildings. Mirror’s Edge wants you to never stop moving through the world, constantly jumping, climbing, or sliding under any obstruction. As a result, the majority of the game finds you using only a few buttons. Actually cutting your path through the world is a different story though. I miscalculated a number of jumps repeatedly, having to re-do them until I had a better sense of the actual timing in the game. This was more reassuring than frustrating; it meant that the game requires practice and skill to play instead of automatically making you look cool with limited inputs. The game, like David Belle’s art of movement, is elegant.
The demo I played is the same one seen in this video. That is the game. It’s only a tiny chunk of the game’s introduction, so it remains to be seen whether or not the rest of Mirror’s Edge exhibits the same level of creative environmental design throughout. This appetizer was enough, however, to get me excited, even downright amorous, all over again. An action game about not killing, a platformer about escape, a game of speed that gives you constant control. I could not be more excited.
Related links:
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.