Have you ever been so immersed in a game that you actually get motion sickness and have to leave the room? Me neither, but that happened to two other people as I sat in on four presentations of Mirror’s Edge. That reality alone is enough reason to suspect Mirror’s Edge might be a game far, far different from anything else on the show floor. I had read Play’s cover story and seen the trailer, but nothing could have prepared me for the sense of spectacle that was Mirror’s Edge.
Parkour has been touched on in other games, and was actually a large part of Assassins Creed, but no other interactive experience has so dedicated itself to the aerobatic craft. With arms and legs clearly visible in front of you (why isn’t this in more first person games?), you literally experience every sensation Faith does as she soars under, over, and around every object in her way. Motion blur would have been enough to get the job done, but DICE went above and beyond the call of duty. Angular camera shakes compliment the sensation of jumping and landing and somersaults result in a wonderfully accurate feeling of disorientation. It’s a total sense of immersion, the likes of which floating hands and the non existent feet of other first person games completely fail at capturing.
The means of actually doing all of these moves couldn’t have been more accessible. L1 was used for jumping over objects while L2 was used for sliding under them. The jump button works in tandem with your momentum, so building up speed seemed to be a particularly crucial element of playing the game. Once in the air, R1 is frequently used to complete a 180 degree spin, which functions mostly toward kicking off walls to ascend vertical space. Sixaxis input was present on only one occasion (walking across a board connecting two buildings) but, give the multiconsole format, I doubt we’ll see too many controller tilting sequences. Finally, bullet time can be initiated with the square button to setup a sense of aligned accuracy to particularly lingering sequences of building hopping.
The dev guiding our demo made it clear that these, essentially, are Faith’s moves for the entire game, and it’s up to you to find intuitive ways to use them. An example of this was the encounter with the first building. You could either take the trouble free path of slowly scaling the staircase of smaller buildings to the roof, or, assuming you had enough momentum, you could initiate a three step series of turnaround wall kicks and hope you built enough momentum to grab the edge of the roof. In the end (this was one of the few parts I actually got to play) I couldn’t get it. The move set was right in front of me, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the physics engine to engage the building properly. Woe is me.
While the parkour level from the trailer was the start of the show, two other levels were also being shown. The second level was more of a green hue’d pipe laden playground, complete with a ton of stuff to practice on and a few bad guys walking around. The third one, on the other hand, was clearly meant to showcase the games combat mechanics. Climbing out of a ventilation shaft (of sorts), Faith was instantly surrounded by gun wielding foes. She ran up to one and immediately disarmed him, which granted her use of his weapon. They were careful to point out that there is no ammo pick up, and the Faith can only use the bullets inside the gun when she found it. So, after popping off three shots, she tossed the gun aside and engaged in more crazy acrobatics (including an awesome bullet time slide punch) to neutralize more foes. One gets the impression that guns might not be all that essential in the first place, perhaps even unnecessary in a Metal Gear Solid sense.
Mirror’s Edge isn’t a timed game, but it was clear that building speed and maintaining momentum would be central to perfecting the game’s levels. One can assume this would lead to diverse range of open ended ways to solve the obvious point A to point B quests in a gloriously stylized fashion. Again, Mirrors’ Edge is brilliance through perspective, there is NOTHING like this on the market today, and it was one of the few standout titles at E3 that didn’t have a number after its name. Originality is scarce with next generation, big budget titles, but the risk will almost definitely pay off when Mirrors Edge is released this winter.
