Though a line of text at the left edge of the screen read “LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE REBUILT,” free running action-adventure Mirror’s Edge looked gorgeous at E3 2008. But how does it play? GameCyte took a flying leap to find out.
The short answer is that the game plays exactly like the first 45 seconds (from 00:24 to 01:09) of the original gameplay trailer shown below — because that precise segment of gameplay is what E3 attendees were able to get their hands on. Go ahead — even if you’ve already seen it a dozen times, give yourself a quick refresher. We’re not going anywhere.
There, that was nice, wasn’t it? Now, if you were to estimate, how many buttons would you say that series of jumps, rolls, slides, swings, chin-ups, wall-runs, and miscellaneous acrobatic feats took to perform? Four? Five? Try two. With the left analog stick controlling all of limber protagonist Faith’s momentum and the right stick her direction of travel and first-person viewpoint, we pressed only two buttons on the provided PS3 controller — L1 and L2 — to do everything you just saw, albeit much more hesitantly at first than EA’s skilled cameraman.
As you might expect, L1 shifts Faith’s center of gravity upwards, causing her to climb, jump, and otherwise try to gain more altitude than normal; and vice versa for L2. Everything else was taken care of automatically based on her momentum and the surrounding obstacles. When landing a jump from a building nearly a full story higher than the next, L2 made Faith tuck into a roll. At speed, crossing a horizontal plane, that same button told Faith to slide. And when I tried something slightly outside the scope of the video, running up that first and second set of solar panels before pressing L1 and L2 in rapid succession, Faith practically vaulted over the fence legs first, shaving precious milliseconds off my time. In order to balance on narrow bridges, the game currently uses the left analog stick, though we confirmed that the PS3 version will have SIXAXIS motion control instead.
Advanced moves can be had in combination with the R1 button, which performs 90-degree turns while wall-running, allowing Faith to leap off — at which point, you could then press R2, the game’s combat button, to deliver a flying jump-kick, or (assuming another handy wall) perform a wall-to-wall leap. Both these moves required a degree of precision we’d not yet obtained with the controller — as we discovered when plummeting to our death for the second time, there’s at least a slight learning curve. R1 also executes a 180° when on level ground, presumably for quick escapes from baddies with ballistic weaponry.
Though the two-button acrobatics system is simpler and feels far less… automated than that of prior parkour parable Assassin‘s Creed, we weren’t quite as impressed with the game’s user-controlled camera as demoed on PS3. For a first-person game relying on complete user immersion, it’s crucial that we can fluidly change our perspective just as we’d move our head in real life, and the slightly jerky reaction I received when manipulating the right analog stick didn’t quite do it for me. I anticipate this will be a non-issue on PC, and freely adjustable sensitivity might balance out the console releases as well, but it occurred to me that if ever a game deserved VR head tracking of some sort, this is the one.
Though the game sounded as good as it looked — the pumping heartbeat, breathing sounds and rooftop gusts of wind always adding, never detracting from the atmosphere — the catchy trailer music was conspicuously absent, and the game’s producer was unwilling or unable to tell us more about where it came from or if we’d hear more, saying merely “we’ll be talking about that later on.” Here’s hoping later is sooner… there’s nothing quite like having two minutes of a song stuck in your head for weeks on end.
One last note — there will be no leveling or upgrading of any kind in Mirror’s Edge. In keeping with the “ordinary person in an extraordinary situation” theme, producer Nick Channon explained that the player will not power up Faith in any way, and she won’t “start jumping further” later in the game. “The only thing you have is your skill, and your imagination,” he said.
Mirror’s Edge is tentatively scheduled for release this winter.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
[...] I don’t impress very easily. I’m not completely cynical, mind you; I can appreciate nice visuals and inventive concepts when I see them. It’s just not very often, these days, that a well-executed game will get [...]
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