Mirror's Edge

The new game from Electronic Arts and Dice gets high marks for style, but its heroine is a stereotype we've seen too many times before

by Chris Buffa

Electronics Arts and Dice, developer behind the Battlefield franchise, go for style points with Mirror's Edge, an upcoming first person adventure that relies more on fisticuffs and quick wit over machine guns. In it, you play as a runner, a special courier that delivers documents under "the man's" nose. To do this, you must scale buildings, leap across great distances and make plenty of daring escapes while being pursued by armed men in black. It's all very attractive, particularly the way the sun glistens off glass-covered skyscrapers. Yet despite the game's glossy exterior and intriguing concept, it remains to be seen whether the game has blockbuster potential.

If anything, Mirror's Edge has a neat concept that sets it apart from the standard issue first person game. The whole idea of free running, especially when it involves making dangerous jumps hundreds of feet in the air intrigues us, especially since all this happens from the character's eyes, and you get to chain moves together, building combos by jumping over things and sliding underneath them. You'll plunge down staircases, duck under pipes and tumble down angled glass, all the while bad guys unload their weapons and order you to stop.

It all looks quite exhilarating, but it suffers from three issues. First, its heroine Faith, aside from having a cheesy name is your stereotypical Asian sex goddess, the one with the stylish haircut and tattoos. She's hot, no question, but we can't help but feel like we've seen her in dozens of other games, and we groaned when EA went over her background. A survivor? A fighter? Jaded outcast? Parents died when she was young? Grew up on the streets? Stop us if you've heard this one before.

The second problem is with the visuals. Yes, Mirror's Edge features a sprawling metropolis with plenty of buildings to explore, but during a demo, EA treated us to a few bland looking corridors and we grew sleepy, simply because a sterile hallway will always be a sterile hallway. Exploring the insides of buildings reminds us of our old corporate jobs.

The final issue revolves around the gameplay. To help you figure out where to go next, the developers highlight objects red, so while you're on a rooftop searching for your next location, you'll see something like a pipe start to glow, the clue that tells you to haul ass and jump. But during the sloppy demonstration, desperately searching for these magical red objects comes at the expense of getting shot in the back, and the person playing the game nearly died a few times en route to his destination. Logic denotes that Faith should be able to duck behind objects for cover while scanning her surroundings, but until we play the game, we envision dying more times than necessary.

To be fair, the game's still very early and both EA and Dice have a lot of work to do, so for all we know, Mirror's Edge could surprise us. For now, we're very skeptical whether both parties can pull this off, but we do look forward to seeing this game much later in its development.

Provided by GameDAILY—Your daily dose of gaming