Double-Joint

This is at best old news, but I just played through Mirror's Edge. I'm more pleased than displeased with the experience, although there were some obvious shortcomings that would have made me frustrated had I payed the price it was originally sold for.

Story-wise, its pretty damn predictable and flat. There are only a handful of characters in the game, so clearly, when you finally track down the masked assassin, its undoubtedly going to be one of those characters. My main thought is that they probably could have done away with almost all of the animated cutscenes in the game and gone for a plot that left the player a lot more in the dark, and saved the fighting till the very end of the game. As it is, you fight on every single level for some portion of it, and it ends up just being a distraction from the cool parts where you can get a flow going in your movements. Enemies always try to blast the hell out of you, and in the plot, this is hardly supportable. Considering the main character does not seem like a cold-blooded killer, you feel compelled to throw away every weapon you disarm from an enemy, but it is completely open for the player to simply start blasting away. If that were somehow tied into the non-interactive story elements, it would make sense (somehow force you to kill an enemy at some point, and then have the rest of the game pivot around the fact that you're a cop killer).

I felt the same way when I started playing Uncharted the other day. As a character, it doesn't make sense for Drake to be blasting the hell out of all of these people, but the game forces you to. If the character actually dealt with that in some way during the storyline, it would make sense, but it is just taken as a given. In any case, too much killing.

As a final note on the combat, I found myself using the same few combos (slide kick, punch, punch, jump kick), rather than using the environment to jump around and do interesting attacks like I expected I would. This is partly because a good number of the fights are in areas that give you very little room to get any speed going. It could be that I just suck, but the coolest thing I did was on like the second stage where I wall-ran off of a pillar onto an enemy and did this stomp attack with both my feet. Beyond the basic wall-run kick, that was the only special move I saw in my playthrough. Even if it looked contrived, it would have been good for there to be more locations where things are relatively obviously setup for you to do some interesting jumping attack. Since, really, the rooftops are fairly clearly built for navigation by your character, this would not have been terribly out of place.

The free running aspect of the game is fairly well executed, and is the most enjoyable aspect of the game. There are a reasonable number of points in the game where you can get a good flow of moves going, and these moments make the entire game worthwhile. The interior platforming (as opposed to running) areas are often a pain, however. I found myself wasting a ton of time in those areas trying to figure out what stack of boxes I was supposed to climb up, and it was not at all satisfying when I finally got it. Very much a "That's it!?" feeling.

Stylistically, the game looks like you're running through a city that Flower attacked and made white and primary colors. This could be a bad thing, but the contrast between indoor and outdoor zones works well. For once, bloom seemed fitting.

For the first time ever, I tried playing a game quite close to the TV. This actually worked out pretty well, and it felt quite natural and immersive. Probably not good for my health, as TVs emit electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum.

Overall, more of a gg than just a g. Oh, and quickturn should be able to be mapped to R3.

-Steinkamp