Mirror's Edge takes the simple premise of sticking you in the shoes of a parkour runner in a near future cityscape and amps it up to make you feel like a true badass. You play as Faith, one of an elite group of agents known as "Runners" who roam the city's rooftops relaying data and important packets to clients while escaping the eyes of the authoritarian police. One day, Faith gets a message over the coms that her sister, a policewoman ironically, is in some big trouble. After a daring run along the rooftops to find her, you discover her sitting by the body of a revolutionary mayoral candidate, claiming she didn't do it and was set up. Seconds later and cops (aka "Blues") are swarming the place trying to hunt you down while your sister stays behind to distract them. After that, it's a chase to discover the true killer and their purpose before your sister ends up dead too.
Honestly, it's a weak plot. They set it up, throw in some "twists" that really either don't make much sense or are so obvious you wonder why it's a twist, and end with a very odd set up for a sequel. Thankfully, the plot takes enough of a back seat to the main game that you won't care about its apparent lack of depth.
Where Mirror's Edge absolutely excels is in its speed. When things are flowing, and you're stringing together wall jumps, slides, climbing, and soaring through the air to catch a ladder, the adrenaline gets pumping and there's quite literally nothing like it that I've ever played. It's when it slows down that things start to get less interesting, or rather, a bit more messy. For some ungodly reason the developers of this game decided that as a freerunner with little more than some sweat pants and a tank top on it was a good idea to pit you against legions of police and SWAT teams that are increasingly harder to kill with better and better weapons for knocking you back to a checkpoint. Not only that, but they decided that as this weakling runner your best way to defeat them isn't to find the best route around them, instead it's to plow through them with melee attacks, disarming them, and using their own weapons against them. AND when you pick up a weapon, you actually become more encumbered and lose agility and speed. I would be absolutely fine with this game if it actually took its core runner mechanics seriously and gave me the option of blurring past opponents, but instead every couple levels I was literally forced to kill every single enemy before I could advance. This becomes especially difficult (read: impossible on NORMAL) if you try to go for the "don't shoot anyone" trophy, especially since your melee moves are sometimes hard to connect, and if you want to disarm later enemies it's necessary to use your bullet-time view to slow things down enough to press your "disarm" button at the right time, which, sadly enough, can only be recharged through running.
So let's say you end up in a common situation in Mirror's Edge, where you're faced with roughly 6 enemies to deal with. You expend your runner's vision to disarm and disable the first baddie, and empty that gun to take down two more guys. If you've survived up to this point (which can be very hard to do) the only option you're left with now is to either grab a dropped gun and try to take down the rest, or survive the onslaught of bullet fire and melee someone to death while avoiding getting knocked back, which usually does enough damage and takes enough time to recover from that if it happens, you're dead. For me, it's one thing if I die 20 times trying to find the best route through the rooftops or stringing together the right moves to make a difficult jump, it's quite another if I die 20 times going through the exact same fight over and over again because one enemy pushed me while another shot at me. It's stupid, it's out of place, and it takes away from...
The complete majesty of the running. When starting out you're given a helpful tool known as "runner vision", which paints useful points as red among the starkly white landscape. These essentially help you get a feel for where it's safe to jump off from or where you can climb to get to that very high roof. As such, it makes things speedy, exhilarating, and free-flowing, allowing you to almost effortlessly traverse the city scape (though not without a fair share of falling to your death, accompanied by a sickening "splat"). These beginning sections are where the game really shines, when you don't lose momentum. It allows you to see just how great this game could've been (and how great the sequel, learning from these mistakes, could be). However, as you progress, the runner vision is more and more gradually taken away until you're left with things only showing red when you're literally on top of them, or not showing at all. While this forces you to take everything you've seen and learned and apply it, which I certainly appreciate, it also takes away the smoothness of the game until basically you're just running on trial and error to see how best to handle a level. This is especially problematic concerning that there are a couple ways to approach each section, and checkpoints will often set you somewhere completely different from where you had gone before you died.
This is all, of course, not to mention the amazing visuals. The art and color styles are very cool to travel through, though the cinematics weirdly enough look much worse than the actual game with their clunky, oddly proportioned characters. It was a relief to see the final little cutscene as an in-game moment, since it looked like what the rest of the cutscenes should have been.
So to recap: visuals good, combat bad, running good, but awesome when it's easy. It's well worth your time if you own a PS3 and find it in a bargain bin, but more for the glimpse of what the sequel will hopefully be like than for the single player campaign. There are also time trials, which boil down Mirror's Edge to its running component, that I haven't tried yet, but which I'm sure are much more fun than getting mowed down by assault rifles repeatedly.
Mirror's Edge gets a 7/10.
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