- Jul 31, 2009
- 1,590
- 410
Mirror's edge iffy. Mirror's edge need MP. Mirror's edge feel rough around the edges.
I decided to test this by borrowing and playing the game on normal difficulty. It has taken me only a few hours to finish, and a disproportionate amount of tha ttime was spent re-trying the same few seconds of gameplay for various reasons, primarily those related to (A) ambiguous "context-sensitive" controls (B) a badly-introduced combat system. (When leaping off a pipe, aim upwards from your destination.) A large fraction of the remainder was figuring out where the heck the game actually wanted me to go when I didn't already know Building X was over in a given direction.
The story was a strange mix of "predictable" and "unfinished". It needs MP because single-player is too dang short. While I have to give kudos for having the guts to try a first-person platformer, I fail to see what they did to actually solve any of the problems inherent in the genre. (The usual solution being "don't make it third-person".) The ending is bitter letdown.
The game suffers from the fact that your character's view is so strongly locked to your ability to move. While this is moderately "realistic", you spend all your time looking ahead and none of it enjoying the scenery or seeing alternate routes, especially when under pressure from enemies.
In the end, I think it's one of those things where game developers focused a bit too much on "realism" and "immersion" and in doing so lost sight of the fact that abstraction in games is part of what makes them work. (An example would be if someone made a "physics based inventory system" simulating trying to fit things into your pocket.)
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