In a word - unfinished.
You posses the body of faith - a runner. Apperently government is evil, because it mandged to keep the city clean of criminals. so you are agaisnt government and carry mysteriuos packages that we never see insides of for "shady figures". oh and ruiting against government your mom got killed. thats basically our whole premise. if anything i would say that faith is drug running criminal and she deserves all the cop attention she gets. well the rooftops are extremely clean and shiny, so maybe the government went nazy on cleaning?
The story of game is your sister getting frammed for murdering candidate to government and you try to find out who and why. without giving too much away, all the storyline is chase something somewhere.
The game is small. Xfire counts 4 hours. That is the shortest singlepalyer game i have ever played. Where did the 20 hours singleplayer or your not going to be published times are gone? The enviriment is made only for the purpose of you jumping. apperently everyone lays planks on rooftops to help you jump and whatnot. there is no freedom of movement like assasins creed. its a trict line of actions you must take to get to your destination. and the whole game is runing jumping sliding runing jumping sliding interupted by awkward cutscene form time to time (which is in anime style but thats not why its bad) that usually gives no good information and slows down your pace. the game is a rush, excelt that every 5 minutes you get stopped by a fighting or cutscene need. the dialogue is poor in the cutscenes and out of them (though out of them you are only hearing voice of merc - apeprently your mentor and friend - guiding you though). fight scenes are your typica run of the mill grab a gun and shoot everyone type. o course you cna go meele and disarm them but that is not what i woudl suggest. best option is to run and let them shoot you in the back. at least then you have a higher chance to survive than actually trying to kill them.
which brings us to another point, the gameplay. the actions are very unresponsive, altrough Faith is trying to make sense of what your doing. the worst is combat. you either have to really work it out or just press random buttons and hope your enemy drops dead before you do. both cases - result is the same, fight based on luck. infact bullets do less damage than them hitting you with fist so better keep your distance. the camera is first person view, which is innovative, but very nausea inducing. when you have to run fast and turn around its fine, but whne she starts to roll you totally loose it. You can see Faiths legs and hands a lot of times which is good, your not jut a floating gun anymore, but that doesnt help much in navigation departament. the fact that lower part of walls on buidings are colored and upper are white helps to ind what is what, but usually you press alt (which represents a "tip") and it puts your view into direction you have to go, or you would get lost real fast and fall. and you have to fall, you have to do so many leaps of faith (irony in the name) and jumps before looking/thinking it often ends up you fall once you try other way next time. which isnt a problem with a lot of checkpoints in there. or you can slowly do it while removing all the enemies, but that totally ruins the experience. The game however tells you to run fast, but then forces you to fight. On the departament of parkour tricks they really slacked. thnak god for runners vision makign objects that are usable - red. half the thins i wanted to han on and climb on werent interactive at all. so you follow red items and youll be fine. else - dead, break your next falling 50 storeys.
They have worked a bit on the sound departament. beside the frequent bugs like two girls stnading still talking and tnhe suddenly half of the sentence goes to left channel only, the sound is pretty well done. you can hear Faith breathing, sometimes enve her heart racing. the things falling around, especially liked the shattering glass effect. though whenever helicopter comes thats the only thing you hear. the graphics are blocks. though i havent palyed on highest setting, it was clear the models were very blocky and basically just large cubes mashed together. sure you could say its hard to do openworld enviroment, but this was neither open world nor good eenviroment either. its just couple of rooftops and coridors. the roofs are white, the sun is shining and you end up havign white enviroment with sometimes red objects popping out. and i had my brightness on medium.
The game is also riddled with factual errors like in the middle of the night you are told they do something (dont want to spoil) in an hour, thne suddenly its middle of the day.
To sum it up, you are a runner, and you run, run, run, watch anime, run, run, shoot couple guys, run, run, run, run, the game ends. thats about it. the story is weak, the gameplay could be better and the enemies are annoying. this was experiment. it was a step to a good direction for inovative way of gaming, but it is sitll far form being perfected.
Pros:
its a rush. you start it and you jut want to go more, fast, more, faster untill you find out your done.
during the (short) gametime i played it, the game never crashed. this used to be standart thing, but with new games i notice that not crashing on first playtime is a pro, since so many do.
Cons:
4 hours long. the shortest game i have ever seen.
if your sensitive to light - will elave you blind. there is literaly always 80% white of the screen.
firt perosn camera in parkour - nausea and lost sense of direction.
unresponsive controls, espcially in fights - where you need them most.
unintriging storyline.
cutscenes and most of the fights puts you off the fast pace.
leaps of faith and having no time to look what your doing a lot of time. well that or you have to be controlling mouse so good that it would beat the view of a real person.
Ratings (will follow IGN's model):
Presentation: 7/10 Premise is good but lacks a lot of immersion that drag you in.
Graphics: 5/10 This is not where the game shines. reminds me of games from 2003 and so on. i was never a sucker for graphics, but they could really done it nowadays, especially since it was Dice that done it. they have done better.
Sound: 8/10 this is the strongest part of the game.
Gameplay: 3/10 good experiment, but only experiment. I dont want them to drop the idea, but i want them to improve on the gameplay aspect a lot.
Lasting Appeal: 2/10 This is not something you will be telling your friends that you spend childhood on. a one-time short rush ride it is. and then you realize you spent money on it. like drugs ech.
Overall: 5/10. there is a lot of room for improvement, and i definatelly dont suggest anyone paying money for 4 hours of gameplay. there are much better and cheaper ones out there. Dont buy this one.
P.S. for those wondering what are the yellow numbers in top right corner of my screenshots. Fraps is showing my Frames Per Second there. as you notice it will be quite stable around 24-30. there is no huge spikes of fps whne gonig to a more crowded area like in other games, something that could be atributed to a plus.
Subject: Mirrors Edge 
Sun Feb 20, 2011 5:16 am
