Mirror’s Edge is brave, very brave. As a new IP launching at Christmas – a time when the marketplace is swamped by blockbuster sequels to established franchises - it sits apart from the crowd. Like the gawky kid gripped by a comic book while everyone else plays kill the dill with the pill, Mirror’s Edge is ignorant to the events surrounding it. It is caught up in its own world, where little is old and a lot is new.
It’s a true sci-fi experience, with other-worldly music, a unique colour palette, a futuristic setting and unconventional Parkour-inspired gameplay. All this from a developer who, to date, has been content to carve out a niche in the online war genre through their Battlefield series. This is something new, something fresh and it cannot be ignored. But at the end of the day, is it any fun?
Certainly the style of the narrative is unlikely to be everyone’s cup of tea. Told in part as comic-like cartoon animations high on style and minimal on activity and also as in-game cut-scenes, it tells the story of Faith. In a futuristic utopian society, a Big Brother-on-Crack government maintains low crime and peace though intense security measures and complete lack of citizen privacy.
Those unwilling to live in such a world are scraped to its edge where they look to fight back. With traditional communication methods under high scrutiny, messages are passed between these fringe posses through illegal human runners with talents in parkour – the running ‘sport’ made famous in Madonna’s Jump video clip. As Faith, you are one of these runners and you get caught up in a political shit-storm when your sister is framed for the murder of a politician hoping to bring an end to the Big Brother mentality.
It’s a pretty cool premise, but is perhaps a little too subtly told. It has the flavour of a cult classic – think Solaris and Aeon Flux – rather than something that’ll slam you back into your seat and barely give you time to blink, a la Independence Day or Total Recall.
Given the urgency of the gameplay, we’d have liked to have seen that carried across into the telling of the story, and the mid-chapter comic narrative seems out of the place in that respect. It’s not bad, but as a design decision it will prove less charming to the broader audience than cult enthusiasts, and it isn’t helped by an underwhelming end game. But it has other means of captivate you….