Mirror’s Edge is one awesome game. There is hardly any information out about the game yet and the official homepage is lacking but if you’re interested, there is at least one good fansite (I haven’t checked for others yet) and a few trailers that really make me want to see more (or work for DICE - you decide..).
Check out the trailers:
If you’re interested in some additional thoughts, please continue and read on:
First I have to say that I love the trailers and really really can’t wait to see more. I always wanted to see a game that takes on the Le-Parcour concept and transforms it into fun gameplay - see one of my GID entries, that sadly wasn’t finished, or games like N for example.
What exactly characterizes this Le-Parcour feeling? For me it’s movement-centered fast-paced gameplay that rewards you with fluent animations and a feeling that you _flow _through the level in one progressive move.
From the games I’ve played the Prince of Persia series (beginning with Sands of Time) has managed to convey this feeling quite well. Particularly the escape scenes from the Dahaka are excellent:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy4Mi7LneeU]
Mirror’s Edge reminds me a bit of a mix of Oni (because of the hand-to-hand combat) and Prince of Persia, although it still appears to be very different.
One of the things I like is that it has no HUD whatsoever (or at least a very limited one to avoid motion sickness), which really helps immersion and this minimalistic feature goes hand in hand with the very clean design of the city (look at their choice of colors) and creates a setting that can only be described as stylish.
I think, it’s an important point to make the players feel like they’re playing a work of art and thus try to play it that way: trying to find elegant ways through the level, not brute-force ones.
The city conveys this, too. To return to the choice of colors: notice how everything is held mainly in white and all other colors are full, saturated and warm ones. They are also used in a clear and concise way. There is no mixing of them or gradients. It really sets forth the mood of the game in that part of it.
The use of the ‘Runner vision’ as visual hint is also very non-intrusive and stylized, too. It again fits the general design style. Though I have to say, that I don’t think that those hints are sufficient as visual cues. I’d get totally lost in the level of the last trailer (if it’s not entirely linear and there is only way to traverse the level because you also gotta have dead-ends then - this is probably true for the roof-top level, too) and it’s pretty frustrating if you reach one, since it breaks the flow of the game.
I’d guess adding some arrows, that fade in, would certainly help it, but I’m curious how they are going to fix that anyhow.
Another problem I really wonder about is: what happens if things go wrong?
Nothing’s worse than making one wrong move or time a key press badly and suddenly you have to load your last savegame or quicksave and replay the last 3 minutes, because you have forgotten to save. Especially when it comes to arcade games or platformers that only allow checkpoints, they tend to suffer from this a lot, because it’s not really fun to replay the same parts of level over and over again, even if you agree, that it’s probably just your fault for having two left hands.
The main feature that helped Prince of Persia against becoming terribly annoying was the time rewind power of his dagger - that is: you can rewind the last ten seconds and begin again with whatever you were doing from there on). Mirror’s Edge could suffer from the issue, if they don’t add something similar. Imagine dying, because you didn’t rebalance Faith - that’s the main protagonist in the game BTW - correctly while walking over a bar. Now you gotta wait a few seconds for the game to reload an old save point and start anew. This totally breaks the flow of the game. All motions and actions are stopped and you’re forced to wait. You lose control and that’s bad.
They really need to tackle that issue and I’m curious, how it’s going to be solved in Mirror’s Edge.
They also have to fix the sounds. The current moaning of Faith now and then gets on your nerves after a short time, too - just listen to the trailer again and imagine hearing that sound every minute for a few hours. It’s a pretty scary prospect, isn’t it?
That said, Mirror’s Edge is one of the games that I’ll try to watch actively for new developments and press releases, because it certainly could become a really fun and entertaining game that brings some fresh ideas to the first-person genre.
Cheers,
Black