Ah, Mirror’s edge. My first review! To preface, Mirror’s Edge came highly recommended to me by a friend of mine who always said it was one of his favorite games. Somewhere in him telling me that, I got the idea that the game was best played without using guns. After getting through most of the game (a little painfully) without guns, he informed me that he’d always played with guns and they made up for most of my complaints about the game. I was already in too deep though, so I had to keep going gun-free.

With that in mind, here’s my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge with no guns.

Mirror’s Edge is one of those games where it feels like a great concept, but they couldn’t quite build a game around it. The high notes are there: when you really get running and pull off a sick series of jumps, slides, wall runs, all surrounded by a beautiful cityscape with bullets whizzing past you, those moments are awesome. To get to them though, you have to struggle past the inconsistent controls, linear level design, and filler puzzles.

For a game about the flow of movement, there’s a lot of time spent doing weirdly slow  jumping puzzles. They aren’t really puzzles, because what Faith does in this game is dictated almost entirely by what angle you’re facing, rather than something like a button press. The number of times Faith didn’t grab the bar or the pipe, or didn’t QUITE land on the ledge when I was sure she would (first person platforming can be rough) was too high for me to maintain my sanity.

And the thing about mirror’s edge is, it’s on rails. You can only climb up SOME of the pipes. The path you end up taking is always one set explicitly for you by the level designer. Sometimes they give you a couple of options, but you’re always following a set path, meaning you must do each puzzle set out before you. There’s little room for self expression in the gameplay; it’s all about learning to execute the series of steps set for you by the designer. That being the case, I often wished I could see more of the level beforehand. It might have been more fun to plan and execute my route if it felt like a goal I’d decided on rather than a series of steps I was stumbling through as I got to them. And if you fail, you better be ready to do the whole level over again from the start.

Quick aside to rant about a little thing for a second! In Mirror’s Edge, the button for ‘roll after a long drop’ is the same as for ‘let go of ledge you’re dangling from’. That’s too bad, because there are a lot of long jumps that you want to roll out of to avoid stumbling. What happened to me countless times was that Faith would be about to land one of those jumps and I wouldn’t be quite sure if she was making the jump completely, or if she’d just grab onto the ledge. If I hit the roll button and she lands it, great. If I jumped short and Faith hits the ledge though, the roll button now drops me to my death and I wish I’d taken the potential stumble instead of having to restart.

The combat I actually enjoyed once I got used to it. It was clunky like the climbing, but there was a simplicity and rhythm to it that I liked. Getting running and slide or jump kicking into a dude before punching his face in was a pretty good gameplay moment. Good thing too, because I had to beat up quite a few of said dudes to finish the game gun-free. At some points I marveled at how poorly the levels were designed for someone not using guns, but I was committed to my Batman rule. Sadly, on the final level, you have to take out this machine guy guy who is enough out in the open that, to melee him, you have to just sprint at him and hope you live long enough to take him out. After a couple hours of trying, I had to lower the difficulty from normal to easy to survive long enough to do it. At that point I just wanted to be done.

Overall, the “run fast and parkour”  elements are fun, and so is the way that your momentum makes your attacks more powerful. Ultimately though, I felt that the game built around those moments did a poor job of supporting them. The jumping puzzles might have been alright if they felt like something I was solving instead of barriers to the fun parts of the game. While pacing is important, the differences between the “run for your life” moments and the “jump into this wall 20 times” moments was a bit much for me. I’d say I spent ⅓ of the game enjoying it and the other ⅔ frustrated, but YMMV. Definitely using guns would have alleviated some of that, but gunplay felt out of place for the character I thought Faith should be. I hear in the second game they removed guns completely, so I’m looking forward to seeing if that served the game better.