BinaryJack
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Well the review is in for this week's release of highly anticipated FPS without the S.
It did not do too well and I type this with a sigh of relief as the budget is smashed and I need to get Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 still.
(My Fable 2 is up for grabs, I'll even pay for courier, PM me!
)
Part 1
It did not do too well and I type this with a sigh of relief as the budget is smashed and I need to get Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 still.
(My Fable 2 is up for grabs, I'll even pay for courier, PM me!
)Part 1
Little sister is watching: Ars reviews Mirror's Edge
By Ben Kuchera | Published: November 10, 2008 - 11:00PM CT
Most video games can safely be filed under male wish fulfillment. Some part of us always wants to have the biggest gun, to be the best at the martial arts, and to be able to solve any problem with brute force. Heck, even sports games fall under this category; who doesn't want to share in the glory of winning the Super Bowl?
Faith, from Mirror's Edge, is a different beast all together. She's adept at hand-to-hand fighting, but each opponent you encounter in the game is a serious threat. The best strategy is almost never to stand and fight, but to run.
That's what Faith is, a runner, and this is how she sees the world. Every level is a maze of platforms, jumps, and seemingly impossible feats of speed and coordination; being Faith means never having to worry about traffic or parking or any of the other petty things that infest the lives of the people on the street level.
You see, in the world of Mirror's Edge, the city is a perfect, clean expanse of glass and steel. The government has made sure that we're all safely watched and controlled in order to stamp out dangerous things like violence, crime, and free thought.
There are a few people who have been pushed to the outskirts of the city who don't feel like giving into this unholy trade-off of free will for safety, and of course, every now and again, they need to communicate with another set of people across the city. Phones are tapped, e-mail is read, mail is opened.
So how do you communicate safely? You use something better than technology, and Faith is that organic solution. The runners take those messages and rush them across the tops of the city's buildings, running on foot across obstacles that would stop any normal pursuer.
Running across an entire city isn't a hard thing when you're moving as the crow flies, and this is the feeling that DICE's Mirror's Edge wants to give you: freedom.
We see Faith in the third-person during the animated cut-scenes, and she always seems slightly unhappy and worried, weighed down by the sheer fact of being in her skin. Hers isn't the easiest life, and, while stationary, she has time to wonder about these things.
When she's running, however, when we look at the world through her eyes, it all makes sense. As long as she can make the next jump, she'll be fine. If she can lose the police by sliding under a series of pipes and crashing through a door, she has fixed a very immediate problem. It's easy to live when your existence is counted a rooftop at a time; everything else falls away.
DICE and EA have come together to release something very unique, but while new ideas will get you respect from gamers, the title you release still has to be fun; concepts are rarely worth $60. Mirror's Edge plays well in short demos and while viewing the action in a video, but does it stand up as a full-length single-player experience?
An idea is not a game, but it can be stretched painfully into one
Mirror's Edge is a pure first-person game, although at the beginning you will see Faith reflected in the side of a building.
The story is mostly handled through animated cutscenes you watch between chapters, and the art style in those reminds me of work done in Flash. There's nothing bad about that, and I enjoyed the animation style, but it does clash with the strong work done on the in-game graphics.
Color is almost completely washed out, leaving only stark whites and some blues; if you see red or orange, that's Faith's intuition saying you can use that object or surface to get to the next area. The graphics are beautiful and striking, but there is a major problem with this art style, or at least its implementation in this particular game.
The problem? After a while it all looks the same. The roof tops at the beginning of the game set the stage for the entire experience, and you'll get the sense of having been through an area before many times throughout the game. In fact, in at least one instance you go down a large industrial structure and run around underground for a short time, only to have to go back up again rather quickly. It wasn't fun the first time, and it wasn't fun the second time.
I can't even see that this was a trend, as much as it happened a few times throughout the game. It's hard to have any kind of trend in a title that can be beaten in around six hours. This is a very short game, able to be beaten by a competent gamer in a sitting or two.
I played in a very relaxed way, hoping to sit back and enjoy the experience, and when the game was over I was a little shocked; it felt like the entire game should have been chapter one of a much larger story.
It may seem like I'm being a little harsh here, and perhaps I am, but only because it's easy to become frustrated at how good the game plays when everything lines up. The controls are interesting: the left bumper causes you to jump, the left trigger causes you to duck or slide, and the right bumper allows you to do a 180° turn to quickly push off of structures.
The right trigger punches, and by jumping or sliding first, or using context sensitive actions along with the "Y" button to disarm opponents, Faith can use a surprising amount of moves in combat. Remember though, you're better off running, and the gun-fight mechanics are very basic. Holding a gun also slows you down, so you can't make the jumps you'll need to or grab onto ledges to get where you need to go.
The best advice? Don't break stride, stun your opponent with a flying kick, and then be gone before he gets his wits about him. Or grab his gun and simply throw it down; they are no threat to you unarmed.
A long run is exhilarating. Get up your speed, leap onto the next building, land in a roll by holding the left trigger, and you don't lose your momentum. Keep running, slide under the pipes, run up the upcoming wall, and then use the right bumper to twist your body to face the opposite rooftop and jump there, quickly pull yourself up and keep running.
The movements are fluid, the controls are perfect, and you can hear the wind in your ears. Crap, there's a "blue," one of the game's policemen, up ahead. Don't slow down, simply slide under his aim when he raises his gun to fire and then kick up, connecting with his groin. Pop back up and keep running. When you bring Faith into the zone and everything flows perfectly, it's amazing, and the world of Mirror's Edge and the main characters are all complex and interesting.
Long before the six hours of the game are up though, it will become clear that these new ideas have strangled the game: you run on rooftops, and that's fun when you get a good line going, but you do that through the entire game. The more complex jumping puzzles are frustrating and slow; they completely break up the action and don't feel needed or fun. Take those out, however, and you'd be back to maybe four-hours' worth of game.
The loading times don't help either—they can stop the game dead in its tracks as you get closer to a door, and in a game based on momentum, these pauses destroy the flow of the game. Lengthier load times are hidden by, guess what, elevator rides. Where have we seen that before? It's criminal in a game about speed and freedom to be forced to get into what amounts to a silent cage with nothing to do while the game tries to load the next area. It's painful for the gamer, and seems completely lazy from a development standpoint. Each rooftop looks the same! What the hell can there be to load that takes this long?
The story is interesting, but it just doesn't go far enough. There is a threat; it is taken care of in a perfunctory manner, and the credits roll. I wanted more: the world of Faith and the runners is a great one, and the story just does not explore them in the way that they deserve. The game could have easily been three times as long and taken the story to its natural conclusion, but of course that's being saved for the sequels. The game is already criminally short, and the Time Trial mode doesn't make up for it, although it is fun to see just how efficiently you can get from point A to B.
The concepts of Mirror's Edge are sound, but it's too short, and many sections are too similar to each other. Imagine going into a restaurant that everyone has been hyping for the past year, and you order what looks like an appetizer. It's delicious, and you begin looking forward to your entree. Unfortunately the check comes directly after, and you are shown the door.
Another Title I was looking forward to... failed
