Mirror's Edge is a new genre of game. The developer commentary that they make you feel like the action hero rather than feeling like you are controlling the action hero actually came through. The game was brilliant, but had its flaws.
Despite other gamers' gripes, I found the controls to be perfectly suitable to normal game play. I never got in depth enough to see whether the controls would limit me perfecting a time trial, but that was never my focus in playing the game. The movements were all fluid and the variety of character animations depending on the situation make interacting with the environment exciting without being tedious. I might as well also say that the outside environment is gorgeous, and I wish I was able to spend more time outside rather than running around office building floors and through ventilation ducts.
As we transition to the gripes, my biggest complaint is with lack of direction. At first I scoffed at the idea of seeing red objects that would guide me through a level. In outside environments there are so many objects that you naturally see several paths that you could take and don't need to have your hand held. What the developers missed is that indoors, when they laid out only one or two options for getting to a destination, a little hand-holding would have cut a ton of grief. To express how many times I died because I didn't know that at the bottom of a series of stair cases all I had to do was walk into the revolving doors and it would trigger the end cut-scene (I died many times and needlessly knocked out many opponents before discovering this) or the fact that every boss has one solution (hint: DISARM THEM!!!) but you don't really know that they're a boss until you've been punching and kicking them, tried to get around them, and then realize you're just going to have to try something else. This game needed a big heaping tablespoon of helpful guidance. From the ever present voice in your ear to maybe some marks on the wall to suggest where you might need to wall-climb, something would be appreciated.
Ultimately, this game was designed for the hard-core. You are meant to struggle through the first time with some direction. Later you are meant to push yourself now that you are familiar with the level, until you can do it in an extremely short amount of time. 8 minutes and 30 seconds sound like a pretty short time to pass Level 1? Well the qualifying time for the time trials is 6 minutes so you fail. That's definitely catering to the hard-core audience if you ask me.
So as I packed up Mirror's Edge and sent it back to Gamefly, I'll try to remember how sweet it looked to wall-run, turn, jump, wall-climb, turn, jump to scale between two buildings. I'll ignore the fact that all the time trial stuff existed and just assume it wasn't made for me in the first place. Thanks EA/DICE for trying something different!
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