Mirror's Edge Problems

First off I want to say Mirror's Edge is a brilliant game. I've played it for hours, and will play it for many more hours. It's the first game since Thief: The Dark Project to take first-person action in a bold new direction. That's phenomenal. I'm a happy camper.

But let's talk missed opportunities. Let's talk about THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM. I'll only cover a few parts of the game that were so IMperfectly included that I'm stupefied. The developers very obviously wanted to, and loved to, include this or that feature but accidentally completely botched it instead.

Really the only rational explanation for these problems is that the publisher rushed the release of the game, or that the entire development staff was suddenly stricken with blindness and deafness about 3/4 of the way through development, or that the game staff was literally a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters who got mostly lucky.

Sliding Speed

What could, would, and should be the funnest maneuvre in the game-- the slide-- makes you feel like a tortoise. At one point in the game you get the chance to dive down a nice smooth escalator median, and slide down it like a kid on a playground. At another point (SPOILER) you get to slide down the slightly curved facade of a huge modern skyscraper. But you barely move when you're sliding! And the slide emits a ridiculous squeaking noise like you're sliding down a leather couch without any pants on! SPEED UP THE SLIDING! SPEED UP THE GODDAM SLIDING PLEASE! When I'm sliding down a steep beautiful shiny surface, I should be ZOOMING.

Have you ever slid on a dud slide in real life? You know, a metal slide at a playground that somehow isn't smooth enough, and your butt hardly goes anywhere when you get on it? So you just stand up and get off it, or you use the bottoms of your feet to pull yourself forward? That's how fun sliding is in Mirror's Edge.

It baffles me that a developer could make a parkour game where the world is a playground and the whole premise of the game is to jump/run/slide/bound off everything you come across, but you can't go zooming down a polished metal surface at more than a snail's pace.

False Sense of Urgency

Who needs urgency? Not me, personally. One of the most brilliant sections of Mirror's Edge has no urgency at all about it. You must physically navigate, by any means possible, all the way to the tip top of a frighteningly tall atrium using scaffolding, concrete, banners, construction equipment, and whatever else you can get your feet or hands on. Musical cues complement the "revelations" you experience as you figure out the next sequence of dazzling parkour moves that brings you substantially closer to your goal. It's fantastic. I've never seen anything like it in a game. Just fantastic.

But at many other times the game forces you to run urgently away from the police through bland linear corridors and tunnels. In these sections, which happen way too frequently, the parkour stops dead because there's no obstacles or structures to jump on. The walls are colorful, but the hallways are just flat and rectangular. The game does everything it can to create a sense of URGENCY at these points. Your partner tells you through your earpiece radio: "Keep going! You don't want to know what's behind you!" The game would have you belief that's the case, and does what it can to give you the definite feeling that there's a gang of angry cops behind you, plus you have your friend's word to go on. But if you ignore your friend's warning and all the fast-paced music, and stop in your tracks, maybe check on your watch or tie your shoes, or try to remember what you have in the fridge, you'll see that no cops or anybody else ever catches up to you. Nobody converges on you. Nobody shows up. The posse of bogeymen you were desperately running from doesn't even exist. Everything-- visually and musically-- suggests that if you let up your mad sprint for one second, a pig-pile of cops will be on your ass and your goose'll be cooked. But they never come. The hallways stay empty.

The developer's reasoning seems to be: "Well the player *knows* they're supposed to keep running. It's pointless to bother putting in any pursuers, because the player is running so fast they'll never see them anyway!"

It was the single-most illusion-breaking experience I have ever had in any media ever. It played out like a heavy-handed avant garde / fourth-wall experiment. It almost made me sit back and say: "This is all fake. Video games are hollow illusions. They are pathetic constructs. What a profound lesson about the meaninglessness of mass entertainment I have been taught today."

The lack of anybody actually pursuing you was offensive. It was despicable. It was lazy. It was utterly ill-conceived.

How difficult is it to have the gang of cops ACTUALLY on your tail? It's inexcusable. It's like playing Space Invaders on a blank screen and having to pretend that there's aliens there to blast.

Zero Human Habitation?

Everybody knows, in real-life, that if you're going to recklessly sprint through an office building and dive and stomp all over everybody's cubicles, half the fun is zooming past all the stunned desk-workers and bystanders and knocking all the bumbling secretaries out of your way.

But Mirror's Edge has no bystanders. You run through huge residential complexes, office buildings, shopping malls, train stations, and metropolitan streets, but you never find a single living soul except for a few patrolmen who you knock unconscious.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, you could very satisfyingly rush past pedestrians while you evaded a police helicopter. In GTAIV if the nearby pedestrians were carrying coffee, or papers, or groceries, they'd sometimes drop them in shock. They even spit out their coffee when you jam on the breaks just before backing over them as you pull your car out of a parking space. You could even be a complete jerk and press a button to SHOVE people out of your way as you dash madly down the sidewalk. GTAIV was a severely flawed game but it certainly got that part of things right.

Mirror's Edge, despite intending to be the most kinetic first-person adventure ever developed, never reinforces the thrill with deft touches like that.

Not only are there no people to zoom past, there are no props within the game world that react to you brushing past or zooming around. you can sprint across a desk and jump around an office, but the desk phones, files, chairs, and potted plants will never move an inch out of place. That's a colossal missed opportunity.

(A good use of sound-mapping does contribute to the game world, though. Your footsteps make prominently different sounds depending on whether you're walking on concrete or walking on a thin metallic ventilation shaft, and so on. When you leap over a wide ledge and cling to a pipe like a scared monkey, the gutteral thwappy THPHWUNK of flesh-hands-on-metal is magnificent.)

Underused Moves

Mirror's Edge has a "Press yourself up against a wall", which you can use to slowly cross a narrow ledge with your back to the wall. You also use it to slip yourself through extremely tight cracks in boiler rooms and maintenance tunnels, at a few points during the game. However, at no point can you get into an elevator and press up against the wall to avoid gunfire before the doors close, even though you run into an elevator while people are trying to gun you down on more than one occasion.

It also has a "Run up behind an enemy, then snatch his gun and knock him out in a wild burst of kung fu" move that I never get sick of. But since the game has no real AI/detection engine, there's only about three times in the entire game when you can actually get behind an enemy's back to execute the move. Enemies always know exactly where you are, even if you secretly run behind a parked truck in a remote corner of gigantic pitch-black parking garage. Enemies are always facing you, even when you try to rope-a-dope/loop-de-loop them in a darkened labyrinth. It doesn't matter how slowly, carefully, or quietly you move. The cops all have limitless x-ray vision, or some magical compass oriented toward your body instead of toward magnetic north, or an extraordinarily keen sense of smell.

Getting Personal

I have to get personal now.

At one point in the game, you happen to take a bit of a bad fall through a plate-glass ceiling. You end up about 30 feet down, on your rear and in a daze. Luckily one of your friends was waiting for you to show up, so he comes over to you while you're down on the ground to see if you're OK. The plan is to flee together.

Now a normal person would ask if you're OK, then grab your hand to help you up. Watch a basketball game. It's an unspoken and unwritten rule that NO PLAYER SHOULD RISE FROM A FALL without the direct physical assistance of a teammate. This is LIFE. We help each other. We especially help our friends. First, it's helpful. Great. Secondly, it probably reinforces and nurtures our relationships and our team spirit. So not only is it normal good behavior but it's all-around good practice.

Yet the friend in Mirror's Edge doesn't even touch you while you stand up. He doesn't help you up. He waves his hand in your face, as if to magically revive you, then turns away and motions for you to get up and follow him.

Mirror's Edge already contains TWO first-person hugs, ONE first-person HAND-SHAKE, one case of BEING BEAT UP by a large man in first-person. All those were fun to watch and reflect on, and they're all somewhat unprecedented for a first-person action game. Yet there is no first-person GETTING HELPED UP BY A FRIEND, even though the potential for it is right there slapping us in the face. Weird.

I'm sorry to to have to suggest that the reason for that oversight is that the developers don't have a full enough vision of the world or of human life to know or realize how natural or significant the social act of physical assistance is. I think developers and gamers, on the whole, are insular. I'll continue my sweeping generalization in another post, and just say for the time being that I can't think of any other reason why such an awkward faux-pas between "friends" could get it's way into a finished product.

TO SUM UP

Great game. How could so many-- obvious?-- things go wrong? I've even skipped over most of the Big Problems that reviewer's have already criticized the game for (shortness, poor writing, absurdly weak and sudden conclusion, etc).