Mirror’s Edge

Putting the ‘person back into ‘first-person’

It was a year ago when Rebellion attempted to apply the concept of free running to a third-person template in the average PS2 title Free Running, a game that stumbled in its attempts to translate the dexterity of the sport into an engaging and fluid experience. What’s exciting about DICE’s Mirror’s Edge is that may just get it right. While its parkour-based gameplay is focused less on the aestheticism of free running and more on the quick, efficient movement from point A to point B, the power of the PS3 is just what’s needed to turn the gymnastic activity into an adrenaline-fuelled game. And guess what. It’s all seen from the first-person.

Have Faith
The concept of parkour certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of action that would work from the immediacy of the first-person viewpoint – rather one that would benefit from allowing the player to see their character’s movement (à la Assassin’s Creed). Nevertheless senior producer Owen O’Brien claims that the gameplay and perspective have blended well, “At the start, everybody thought: “Yeah, that sounds cool, but it’s not going to work.” A lot of other people have tried it and failed, and this is why we think we’ve got something that really works now. We believe we’ve got freedom of movement that you haven’t seen in this genre of game before – it’s more like what Prince Of Persia has done, but in first-person.”

Mirror’s Edge takes place across the mountainous rooftops of a hyper-real metropolis, all glass and concrete. The city is tightly controlled by an oppressive authoritarian regime that stringently watches over the city’s populace. As such communications are consistently monitored, and this is where you come in. You play as Faith, a ‘runner’, in that it is her job to transport illicit messages and data on-foot across the maze of skyscrapers. Faith will duck, dip, dive, weave, bound, jump, run and land with an organic energy mimicking that of real life. DICE promise an acutely physical connect between Faith and her surrounding environment. The player will be helped by what O’Brien calls ‘runner vision’; potential paths and objects that Faith can use to propel herself onward are marked by red, giving the player and instinctive sense of how to navigate the perilous rooftop paths without constantly splatting into the tarmac far below.

Keeping the momentum
DICE have been keen to assure us that controls have been kept simple, with context-sensitive ‘up’ and ‘down’ functions assigned. ‘Up’ can mean anything from jumping to wall-running, ‘down’ can be used for power slides under low obstacles and parachute rolls, and the Sixaxis tilting has been rumoured for balancing on beams. The simplicity of the control scheme means that stringing together elegant combos across the urban assault course will be a breeze, and most players should be able to pick it up without dissipating the forward momentum. Combat will also play a large part, although Faith will fare better using acrobatics to her advantage. Snatching a weapon from more powerful enemies and using it against them is a nifty trick, but such an increase in power means a decrease in mobility, an interesting trade-off that players will have to take into consideration.

How neatly the movement will segue into combat remains to be seen, but Mirror’s Edge remains an interesting concept, not least because the imaginative vision may be just what the stagnating FPS genre needs. Jumping, climbing and diving are kind of movement that are usually been avoided in the first-person perspective, so to see them put together to form the very meat and bones of Mirror’s Edge is an exciting prospect to say the least.

An interesting take on a genre that’s very much in need of a facelift. Not convinced? All it takes is a little leap of Faith.