The last year saw a trio of games released that focused on exploration, climbing and free running as a core feature. Crackdown, Assassins Creed and Uncharted all placed you in the third person position and had you climbing and jumping. Mirrors Edge is going to go a step further by making free running and exploration the entire focus of the title with a storyline tagged on to justify all the sliding and jumping. I don’t mean the “tagged on” part as an insult but merely that sometimes how you play a game is far more important than why you are playing it.
You are a runner (leet footed courier) called Faith that is about as agile as you could imagine without seeming to have superpowers. Faith’s sister is imprisoned by the totalitarian rulers of the city and Faiths goals other than simply acting as a extreme gofer will include missions and errands to help save her sibling.
We were not shown a lot of climbing but more jumping and straddling spaces using the environment where Momentum seemed to be the key to successful movements. Faith can slide or jump, so in essence she can go two ways to bypass a given obstacle, up or down. This choice is made by using the left trigger and bumper, trigger for down and bumper for up. As I mentioned momentum is key to movement and when you start running the initial speed is not as fast a a full speed sprint, stopping from a full paced run will also take space.
Some of the parkour movements that were demonstrated were the slide and the pummel horse vault, I spied a successful wall run across a gap (Ninja Style) impressive leaps that terminated in roll’s to break the fall and continue lateral speed. While in a stairwell Tom tried to make Faith jump into a wall at the top of one flight of stairs to then wall jump back up the direction she came from to skip the stair climb adjacent, his timing was off and as a result Faith fell flat on her back, do this in the wrong space and you will find yourself dead. I do not know at this point if Mirrors Edge will feature vertical exploration and climbing to the extreme featured in CrackdownÂ*as the roots of the game lie in a more realistic realm of human ability, you can however climb pipes and wall jump/climb given the right timing and momentum.
The city has a very clean look to go along with the feel of a Utopian society very much concerned with the outward appearance of order and purity. At first the cleanliness of the buildings and reflectivity of all the shiny panes of glass and white buildings was off putting, it seemed like there were textures missing and that it lacked the feeling of a city that is inhabited. The theme of the society dominated by order shows through by doing this as do the key environmental factors that you need to utilize to get around, bright red poles and walls featuring blue and yellow paint to highlight a path of ascent. All combined the visual clarity and the clean lines of all the buildings is rather striking, and despite my initial impression I think it really only took a few moments of gameplay to convince me of how good it looks.Â*
A bullet-time feature is implemented to allow the accurate timing of jumps and maneuvers. I’ll wait to judge wether this is a good idea when I can actually get my hands on a controller for myself. The one thing that was clear when in slow-mo was the impact of every footstep as the camera moved along side to side and up and down in synch with the natural motion of the head of the runner. I am also still not 100% convinced the tempo and flow of the running is fast enough, this might be something that will be different for each person and their style of play, but with every heavy landing I cringed a little hoping that there is something in place already to counter this and keep the fun flowing freely.
The last nagging little thing is the desperate desire to beleive that they have made the right choice going with a first person view. Faith can use the weapons of dissarmed enemies however carrying a rifle or even a pistol will severly hamper her mobility, making it all the more confusing as to why the first person perspective was chose. There is a hint of genius given that the majority of the game plays out at heights that would render a normal person helpless with fear a restricted perspective can only help but induce the feeling of height and danger.
Other than these concerns what I saw had me ready to try more and with the time that is still left in development it can only get better. Please let this be as fun as Crackdown.

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