On a demo interest and cheap sale price, I decided to pick up Mirror’s Edge recently. What can I say about this game that hasn’t already been said? Well, I can say that I hated over half of it and more often than not, I wanted to fling the disc out of the windows. I don’t think that’s been said yet. It’s time to go into detail why I wanted to hold a knife’s edge to the throats of its creators.

A little history about the game: it’s a skinny lady, named Faith, doing parkour tricks and stunts while avoiding guards. There is a story in there somewhere but I could give a rat’s ass about it, I honestly gave it one cut-scene and it instantly lost my interest. The cut-scenes are presented in a cartoon-like format that looks exactly similar to Esurance commercials. The meat of the game is the fast flowing, parkour aspect that does a decent job of making the game somewhat enjoyable. They could have Jason Vorhees chasing Faith the entire game and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. I did like the speed of the game and even though it’s present in total first person mode, it’s not like a first person shooter or RPG. The game did flow, overall, nicely.

The worst aspect, I’d say, is the gameplay mechanics. Aside from using the analog sticks to look around and maneuver, you’ll be using all the controllers top buttons (triggers, bumpers, L1, R2, etc) to execute your moves. It’s not overly complicated but it takes some time to get used to performing the button combinations. Early on, it’s easy to perform the simple tricks and get where you need to go but later the combination of buttons just get confusing. You’ll get moving pretty fast with some simple jumps and grabs but it goes downhill when you need to look around for your next area. Sometimes the game will throw you a bone and highlight, in a red color, where you should go but that’s not always the case. You’ll need to take a few looks, figure out the combination of buttons to get there, and attempt to continue onward. Did I forget to mention there are guards constantly chasing you? Armed with automatic weapons? Who ready to kill you with a few blasts of bullets? Yeah so figure your areas out quick or be ready to watch the “loading from last checkpoint” screen quite often. Learn your jump – wallrun – turn – jump – wallrun – jump – grab – swing – jump to ledge combinations early on. I would say the combinations are much like quick time events in other games, except you have no idea what buttons to hit.

The game isn’t horrible, just flawed. It really has a lot of potential to be good but just falls flat (semi-pun intended) on many levels. Its visuals are very good and realistic; I do feel like I’m running through an actual building. As I said earlier, I did enjoy the speed and how fast paced the game is but it doesn’t save anything about it. I didn’t connect to any of the characters, the story was less than mediocre, not much replay value (the speed runs and time trials aren’t worth it) and it was very short. In a nutshell, the game is worth a play but I would suggest renting it or only purchasing at a bargain price.