Mirror’s Edge Preview: Fluidly Unique

Mirrors Edge immediately caught gamers attention with it’s slick free running concept along with it’s slightly left-field first person perspective. Although free running isn’t a new concept for games we’ve only seen it from the third person point of view. Games like Assassins Creed, Tomb Raider and most recently the upcoming Prince of Persia have all strongly featured free running. Mirror’s Edge moves closer to the action to show a jaunty first person perspective that already offers something highly sort after in game development, uniqueness.

The game then is focused on Parkour-esque movements where it becomes vital to keep up your momentum. From what we saw Mirror’s Edge has a Skate aesthetic behind it where it becomes your main objective to keep up a decent line with a fluid and continuous flow of movements. Unlike Skate, it simplifies the controls by only using two buttons, up & down. The up button will allow you to vault, climb and wall run over obstacles while down will cause you to roll or slide. Obviously the game does a good job of keep all these controls context sensitive.

The game’s individual approach is then heightened with an ability called Runner Vision. This highlights all obstacles that you can manoeuvre a strong red colour. While during the opening few hours of the game these will be everywhere, towards the end of the game these hints get less common. You are also aided with Reaction Time, which is basically a form of bullet time that lets you clear larger gaps. It also allows the player more time to contemplate the next path to take.

Throughout the game you’ll encounter many government operatives that you’ll have to take down or avoid. The protagonist, Faith is hardly armed with a weapon and thus giving you two options. Single them out and use hand to hand combat to disarm them or use your free running skills to escape the conflict. Despite the game being developed DICE, a team that are well known for their work on the Battlefield series, this is not primarily a first person shooter although the game can be that if the player decides otherwise. Take note that you can complete the entire game without shooting a single bullet.

Due to the amount of camera bob and other visual effects many users encountered Motion Sickness. Luckily they’ve cleared it up by bringing the field of view back and they’ve included a small dot in the centre of the screen. This is the only form of a HUD seen in the game.

Mirror’s Edge has received it’s fair share of critics with most of them wanting a third person view. Despite the amount of call outs the game has received on this issue the developers are staying true to the original concept of Mirror’s Edge. So far that concept looks pretty damn good and personally I can’t wait to try out the final version.

Mirror’s Edge is due to land Late 2008 on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 & PC.