The Good: Some pieces of the game provide an exhilarating, adrenaline rush.
The Bad: Some parts don’t, and the resulting grind of jump-miss-die-reload can be very tiring.
The Ugly: Could be a real problem for those prone to motion sickness, and maybe even those not so prone to it.

NOT a keeper.

I’m trying something a little new with this game review, and that’s giving you the reader an idea of just how much I enjoyed playing a game by whether or not I keep it on my hard drive after the review is complete. I’m not keeping Mirror’s Edge – the gameplay is too limited and the multiplayer is not interesting enough. Just for a little contrast, I’m still playing Fallout 3. I kept Command & Conquer 3, but deleted Red Alert 3. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is still on my drive, Pure is not. And so it goes.

I think more than any other game in recent memory, Mirror’s Edge had the possibility of achieving videogame greatness. It had a workable premise, a stylish look all its own, a phenomenal physics engine, and an edge-of-your-seat thrill like nothing I’ve ever played. It is however hamstrung by uneven gameplay, alternating between the unbridled excitement of leaping off a thirty-story building, angling for an air conditioner on the building next door, to standing in an elevator reading headlines as they crawl past on a video screen; from taking a zip line into a warehouse while gunmen shoot at you from all sides, to shuffling around in a storage closet trying to find a way to climb utility shelving and get into an open air duct. Yes, if I had to summarize a review of ME in one word, that word would unquestionably be “uneven.”

Welcome to a dystopian future in which the government controls, regulates, taxes, and monitors all information. This gives rise to a market for a form of covert communications involving runners, people who physically take messages from one location to another via whatever means necessary. You would think then a game involving some sort of sandbox world, the ability to take or refuse messenger jobs around the city for pay would be a natural. ME is not that game. In ME the whole runner idea is almost abandoned at the outset when you (a runner named Faith) go to deliver a message and instead end up at the scene of a murder, your sister framed for the crime. All your running from that point onwards, guided by a friend on the radio named Merc who offers helpful hints (like “the cops are after you” – this, while you’re dodging gunfire), is to locate the real killer and uncover a dark conspiracy. Perhaps if that plotline had been woven into the sandbox world, that would have been cool. ME is not that game either. And as plots go the conspiracy thing is a little thin, resulting in a single-player game that can be completed easily in less than 5 hours (maybe much less depending on how nauseous you get). Once you’ve completed the campaign, the only thing to do online is race. Perfectionists, people who have played the maps over and over and have memorized every pallet and fence are going to be much better at this game, but isn’t that true of all games more or less? A leaderboard helpfully shows the winners, displaying race times so fast it almost seems like it’s not worth trying.

If I had to make a comparison, I’d called ME a first person view Prince of Persia. Many of that game’s mechanics – wall running, wall climbing, shuffling along ledges, swinging from horizontal bars – are all carried along here, only all from a first person viewpoint. Don’t underestimate the power of that view. Running to the edge of a building and jumping off is a thrilling leap of faith (no pun intended). Landing and performing a somersault is almost enough to make you lose your lunch. Banging around in a closet because you can’t quite do what you need to do because the jumps are a little tricky is frustrating. Some pieces of the levels are well designed, using the color red as a visual cue to let you know the direction you should be going in. Only sometimes that visual cue is hidden, or perhaps just missing, or you don’t have a clear path to get to that place. In that case you can hold down the ‘alt’ key and the camera will look in the direction you want to go. Only sometimes it looks towards your ultimate goal and not the intermediate one to help you get there, and sometimes it looks into a wall or other solid object in the way. The point I’m trying to get across is that some of the levels are very natural, allowing you to run along, stringing together an incredible ballet of fluid interlocked moves as you leap fences, surf down inclines, slide under pipe chases, and bash open doors, eating up terrain at a furious pace, and sometimes the levels are trial and error, not really telling you where to go or how to get there, resulting in an exasperating repetition of jumping around looking for a clue, occasionally dying and reloading at the last checkpoint. There’s no question that ME could have benefited from stronger level designs.

Unlike PoP, ME is not particularly a game about combat. It is more frequently wise for Faith to run for it than to fight. She’s highly susceptible to bullets, and really incapable of taking on more than one or two attackers at a time. If she can catch a bad guy alone she can disarm him and use his gun, but carrying the gun slows her down and reduces her ability to climb, and they don’t have that much ammunition in them. It’s just not a game meant to have you running around blasting your problems in the head.

The city is rendered in gleaming white skyscrapers with highly modern designs. Once you actually start running around on them, you’ll realize that most of them seem to be under construction. Pallets of materials, scaffolding, unfinished interior areas, and cranes are commonplace. The color palette used throughout the game is sharp and primary in bright blues, greens, yellows, and reds. The engine underneath it all is a thing of wonder allowing you to slide, roll, climb, and swing your way to your goals. I’d like to make a comment here on the voice work, but there was something wrong with how the game dealt with my sound card. It was only after I finished the game that I learned that turning off hardware acceleration could have solved the problem, and I’m not going through it again just to judge the voicework. I for the most part relied on the subtitles – they did the job.

I must admit that much of ME was enjoyable (those parts that weren’t frustrating or nauseating), but there’s just not much of a game here. It’s short and uneven. I’m going back to Fallout 3, where I’m just about to finish my first run through it and plan to start again almost immediately. My hope for ME is that someone is going to pick up the concept and the engine and make a great game with it. ME is not that game.