Late to the party

Goozex (on the sidebar) has been a valued service of late. Enabling gamers to trade games with one another in an organized feedback driven manner has been mostly pleasant, save for a couple of occasions where traders have tried to work the system on my dime. Recent fruits of this labor include last year’s Mirror’s Edge on PC, my preferred platform of choice for anything FPS.


Having played the demo on XB 360 last year I finally installed and fired up what had been described as one of the most original IPs from last year. The install was painless, through the initial options are sparse to say the least. The expected ability to tweak the games settings for the best FPS given one’s hardware is absent, requiring alteration of the .ini file. Even without custom settings, it ran fairly flawlessly at 1680*1050 with 4X AA and looked spectacular. The unique design choices and use of color make the game instantly identifiable and also serve the gameplay well.


An FPS exploration of parkour, Mirror’s Edge follows Faith, a runner in the not distant dystopian future where technology has replaced personal freedom. Electronic communication can no longer be trusted so runner carries packages to and from client’s in the underworld. Faith’s sister, a cop, is framed in a prominent murder, leaving Faith to work outside the system to help her. The story and character archetypes are hoary and cliché, but purposeful momentum of the game play is immersive and meaningful.

By using the first-person point of view and a select set of colors to identify the world, the game quickly becomes an immersive excerise in the joys of movement. Linking acrobatic combos with the the linear drive of finding the fastest uninterrupted route to a goal is immensely rewarding, quickly becoming the entire focus of play. The open cityscape is a white-hued glory, and while missions drive some of the action underground into grimy bump-mapped and light-refracted sewers, the majority thus far have been above, under the blazing sun.

The story plays out both through in-game voice via radio and anime style cutscenes between sections though what story there is exists only as a vehicle to drive the player from one set-piece to another. As weak as the story and character moments are, weaker still are the choices made to force the player into more tradtional shooter territory, diluting a truly original experience.

I look forward to plowing through to the end.