Mirror's Edge Review

I was looking forward to Mirror's Edge. I was looking forward to Mirror's Edge more than anything else released in the piss poor year of gaming known as 2008. I was looking forward to Mirror's Edge so much that the cosmos reached out and made it suck. We were promised an admittedly short, but utterly action packed innovative blast of a game which would question our very perception of movement. Shame they forgot to make it fun.

By now you can probably tell that I'm not too fond of Mirror's Edge, well there's one very simple reason for this: Mirror's Edge is NOT a video game! It may look like one, but it isn't. Mirror's Edge is a glorified tech demo.

Everything that was promised, bar the “game” bit, is delivered upon. It's exceptionally interesting to move around as Faith and experiment with different ways of viewing the city, of course it would probably be more interesting if it wasn't obvious that there is a pre-set path through each level with only slight variations upon the route being even vaguely plausible. Also, note my use of the word interesting because that's all this tech demo is. It sure as hell isn't fun. (Note the use of the phrase “tech demo” as a replacement for “game”.) You'd be forgiven for thinking that the city in which Faith resides had been built for free-runners. Nothing within it seems to be built in any logical way. Name one city which has ever had spring boards on the roof of skyscrapers. Apart from New York during the wall street crash.

Story-wise Mirror's Edge follows Faith as she tries desperately to prove her sisters innocence to the government who most probably set her up (if you don't see the immediate and MASSIVE plot hole then you need to leave. Now). The plot is told through the use of appalling animation, doesn't really progress beyond the inevitable ad quite frankly hasn't even been thought about by the game's writer. He probably thought the rest of the team were playing an elaborate practical joke and getting him to write dialogue for a tech demo.

So overall Mirror's Edge pisses me off. It's a tech demo and it could have been so much more, don't buy it, don't even rent it. In fact if you really must play this then you should just play the demo over and over again until you look like a hardened World of Warcraft player, a twat as they're more commonly referred to as.

4/10