Mirror's Edge + A bit of a 2010 Rant

Mirror's Edge was a game that I got free with my ps3 back when I purchased it back in 2008. I hated it then, and was actually unable to finish it as I just couldn't bring myself to play it through til the end. So now three years have passed and I am older and wiser, so lets see if I can get through this game the second round.

Mirror's Edge is a "groundbreaking" first person free running game, where everything is the colours of the flag of Denmark. A bit of blue sneaks its way in there as well, and green on trees but I digress. You take control of "Faith", which I joked was aptly named as many people had faith in the game being good after the demo, who is a member of the runners. The Runners are basically your framing element for the narrative of this game, but all you need to know is that the police don't like you. You uncover a conspiracy and have to find out the real culprit of a crime, while roaming the city tops and viewing the wonderful scener-- AHH!! MY EYES!!

Sorry about that, just got a bit blinded there by the excessive bloom that this game offers off it's shiny white buildings. My main problem with Mirror's Edge is that the story is rubbish. I have almost no drive to uncover this crime, or to save the framed suspect. This is partially due to Faith being a very unlikeable character, and partially due to the strange decision to have anime-style cutscenes. I understand that they were trying something different, but it just comes off to me as out of place. The controls are unimpressive and the combat is clunky and interesting. What really kills this game from a control perspective is when you try to jump from a hanging edge or a pipe, and Faith slowly turns to see where to jump to. This really hinders a game from the first person, and in a firefight, it is crippling to gameplay.

I paid £3.50 for this game and I still feel that this was too much. At times Mirror's Edge felt like a chore. I had fun at points, but these very quickly fell back into the metaphorical gravy that is bad gameplay choices, bad level direction, and huge glitches at points that can leave you hovering in midair and having to restart from the last checkpoint. Just so you know this happened at least 20 times.

Overall, Mirror's Edge, an experiment, lets hope they do better next time. Whenever that is. 4/10.

Now a bit of a rant about 2010. Now 2010 to me was a very disappointing year for gaming. We had some good sequels to some otherwise alright games, see Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2, but we also had some sequels that just didn't live up to the original, see Bioshock 2. What I want to say here though is that this could have been a good year for gaming. Its just that we have had too many good years already. In my opinion 2007, 2008, and 2009 were good years for gaming. 2010 will not be remembered as a good year for gaming, and thats because it was a very, very, mediocre year. It started off strong, but the ending was weak. The sooner we forget about this, the better.

Just for the record, I am still working through the 2010 games that I wanted to play but didn't, so 2010 could still score some points with me, but this is my defining arguement.

This is Tyramatt, signing off.