2 posts tagged “mirror's edge”

Well, after some looking for clues and fighting config files and whatnots, Mirror's Edge started to run properly. The fun part is, I've no idea what I did that fixed it...but oh well. I spent enough time with it to get to know the world, finish it to know the story, so that I can judge it properly. And my opinion is anything but good.

When the game first starts up, the view is quite breathtaking. Not because it's so HD, but because it's simply spectacular, I mean, sort of like a bird's-eye view of a city almost entirely beneath you... is nice. But when you catch your breath after a few minutes of just looking around, the first thing you'll notice is that your eyes are being pierced. Pierced by excessively overused HDR, and pierced by the lack of colors - white. Almost every building is mostly just white, like you were looking at some scale-model plan of a new city district in an office. Idk about others, but for me it got pretty frustrating quite quickly, like, okay, a sinister purity-of-total-mind-control kinda vibe, but still...? Mainly when paired with the obnoxious use of paintings on ladders and such, I swear I could smell plastic. It's totally idiotic - why on earth does wood have no color??? I couldn't come up with a rational explanation. And btw wooden surfaces and objects: the PC version was being delayed (officially) cuz of the PhysX integration. Well, PhysX or not, there's an AWFUL lot of items that are totally static. Even the corpses just stay where they fell. It might be just me, but hey: Crysis was in 2007, and it could achieve perfect physics without any additional native hardware/software support. Now here's Mirror's Edge, two months late compared to the console versions, and (together with the annoying install/first run issues) we get a few flags and soft plastic curtains - under the cover of "PhysX integration". WTF?! I wish game developers would wake up and stop being such dunderheads when it comes to game engines. ... That, or at least gave less stupid reasons for such delays.

The second shock came to me only after filing these things. Playing, doing things, alright...but where's the data? How do I know if I've enough health or ammo left? How do I know where I am and where I'm supposed to go to? Yes, that's right: the game totally lacks ANY sort of feedback. No HUD at all, and while that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing (anyone remembers Black & White? it's like, we didn't even need it, everything was so self-explanatory), DICE just managed to fuck this up as well. Routes are totally not obvious, and of course if there are alternate ones, shorter or safer, they shouldn't reveal everything, but at least one "normal" should be visible on a goddamn map, but nooooooo, the future's free from any and all GPS satellites and devices. (Which totally contradicts Faith's one request for coordinates - she must have a positioning computer in her brain with all the maps, or a device, but if the latter, why aren't we allowed to use it?) And apparently even any physical form of maps, probably so that the enemies won't get their hands on the full layout of the city, ne? Blargh. -_- And YES, it IS wrong. You can only guess if you have enough Reaction Time to finish a certain move; Runner Vision is simply ridiculous (they have some eye-implants or what?); and the Hint button does not do anything except for turning your moving direction (ie, not only vision) to where you're supposed to go in the middle of, idk, escaping half a dozen commando units (a situation when you ARE likely to need some help about which way you should go), often making you to turn to a wall and get shot dead. Brilliant, really.

Having swallowed all these impossibilities, I focused on Faith's movement. I shouldn't have. Because all I could realize was that Lara knew about 95% (and some more, different ones) of these "tricks" back in Tomb Raider: Legend. The only thing that changed is that this time you see things "from within" instead of "from behind". Which actually leaves some pretty shitty camera handling in certain situations, not being able to properly take a look (even though a real person in the same situation irl could do it) at where you're going to jump, for example. Hanging from edges and arriving to a corner? Well, you might or might not be lucky: a few times you can go around to go on, a few times you can't. Well, brilliant, again. I swear one or two moans when Faith pulls herself up, were actually Lara's in one or more of the Tomb Raider games. :/ So, Faith has a nice hairdo, and apart from that...disappointing. It's like the whole thing is a reconstructed Matrix: u can fight a few ppl, but u better run - mainly when the agents (here commando units) come, cuz they can't be beaten. Blaaargh. -_-

As for the story...well, I'll be honest: there wasn't one part that could strike me as unexpected, and not even the ending seemed to make much sense to me. True, Crysis didn't have an A-class script either, but it could make us forgive/forget that one thing, because it offered so much more in visuals. Mirror's Edge fails both, the only part I actually enjoyed, was the cutscenes (those with Win7 beta better prepare for silence tho, Bink should fix this): the style is a nice blend of paper-figure-look-a-likes and animes. I think Owen O'Brien should take lessons in focusing on any person, mainly if the person in question would be the protagonist. The elements are such clichés they simply fail to put any weight, any character onto that mass of bones and muscles we get to control.

All in all, I don't think Mirror's Edge is worth the money. Not the initial price, for sure, anyway. Get Lara, enter her brain, put her into a full-sized scale model and render the whole thing in Unreal Engine 3. ... Um, no, thanks, not good. Where's the originality, the revolutionary content? Cuz that seemed to be the smoke of it all - but I couldn't find the fire itself.