Living on the Edge's Mirror

So I finally finished playing Mirror's Edge on the PS3. and right now I can't really sum up a verdict on it in one word. There's are lots of good parts and points to it but at the same time some bad stuff too. So lets start with the bad?

First thing is, and I mean this is major one, the combat system was VERY weak. My first impressions of this game when I saw the trailer for the first time AND when I played the demo that was released was that it as a game of running and stealth, sorta like Metal Gear Solid. Where combat should be avoided if possible. Though while playing the game, Faith gets trapped in a room with 20 guys that are ALL SWAT and have like ridiculous arsenal against you, and you can't really do what you have to do to escape until to knock them all out or kill them all. So much for being stealth... So why not just disarm all of them you say? Well, for the police and security guards disarming them is actually cool, you do a cool knee to the groin and the guy falls down and you take his gun. The problem comes when you need to deal with the SWAT teams, the timing to disarming them needs to be so precise that its just too painful to do. Using the slow motion thing (whatever it was called) helps but you can only use it like once every 5 minutes. Which is not a great idea when 20 other people are shooting at you.

The second thing I didn't like about it was the fact that the it's very hard for you to gauge how much room you have left before you need to jump. I found myself falling a lot because I jumped too early or because I jumped too late. If I screwed up I needed to redo all the acrobatics that I did to get to the same point to just fall again... very frustrating.

I like the game on the note that it was something unique and something new. The parkour-ing part of the game was really fun I must say. Jumping off rooftops and just the whole free-running idea was very nice. I found that most of the time it was quite easy to navigate around and know exactly where I'm suppose to run to but getting there was entirely up to me. Almost. I say almost because your still use the same areas to get to point A to B but it was up to me to decide which was the fastest route to go.

I also liked the fact that the game put an emphasis on using momentum. Building up momentum was key if you wanted to make a long jump, or... Well, that's pretty much it. I'm not sure if running faster helped me dodge bullets better (maybe?) but I found that once I had the speed, it was very easy to do what I wanted to do in the parkour environment.

So in the end the game was good (using momentum and parkouring). but it had it flaws (combat system and the amount of combat in the game). I thought it'd be more like Eyeshield 21 where I had to run and dodge, but as it turned out the game was almost like half a shooter game.