Demo Impressions: Mirror's Edge

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I'm not big into FPS games, or, really, any type of shooters. But, Mirror's Edge seems different somehow. I played through the demo a couple times this past weekend and actually enjoyed it. The story seemed to grab me right from the start - a city strictly controlled by a para-military organization and runners, like our heroine Faith, working for the average Joe.

The initial game play slowly works you into the complex, fluid movements that Faith can perform. The environments were very clean and detailed. The "runner vision" that Faith has available to her lets you easily see interactive objects such as doors, pipes, planks, etc. Those usually give you a direction to venture to achieve your goal, especially since you need to decide quickly in many situations.

Parts of the control scheme seem a bit clunky, especially trying to turn 180 degrees and jump to another object in quick succession, but, I'm sure, with time and practice things like that will smooth out. It was also kind of difficult, given the first-person perspective, to figure out where to land and how to jump over things such as barbed wire from a distance, like they put you through in the tutorial. After that, however, things get more fun and exciting.

You get to play through a simple mission, once you've gone through the tutorial stage, which has you following another runner around a rooftop training course, copying her actions. The mission begins easily enough with you performing simple actions to get to your destination. However, about half way through, cops are hot on your tail and you have to either evade them (my preferred method) or fight them. At one point, there's way too many to fight, even. There was an area that was a bit difficult, mostly because the way to go wasn't immediately clear and I had to run around quite a bit. In those situations the "runner vision" really could use some better intuitiveness (is that a word?). In fact, "runner vision" shouldn't only show interactive objects, but should show a variety of objects that Faith would concentrate on when trying to find the way out of a situation - open doors or fences, fences that require you to leap over or climb under, and the like. Given that there's quite the clutter on some of those rooftops, you can't always see the quickest way out and have to explore a bit, to your own detriment.

Overall, though, I'll definitely be giving this a rental, just because its different than most games in the FPS genre. I definitely suggest trying out the demo, which is up on the PSN and XBM right now.