Mirror's Edge Review: A Wild Streak of Brave New Gaming

It's a first-person shooter minus the shooter, a bold new direction from the creators of the bestselling Battlefield series that turns the genre on its head.

The big risk with Swedish developer Digital Illusion's wildly brave Mirror's Edge (Xbox 360, PS3) is that it'll be misunderstood. It's a platformer that flaunts its gleaming rooftop playgrounds entirely in first-person. It's a first-person shooter, but only because the bullet fired into soaring spaces is you. Streaks of dashing and leaping require precision body tactics, but from a body that's largely unseen. Color-splashed levels splay like architectural equations with precarious solutions but offer only fleeting directional cues. Guns can be karate-chopped from the arms of enemies, but those guns slow you down and cramp your technique. Combat is possible, but death comes swiftly, so it's better avoided. The entire experience is an accumulation of paradoxes, an amalgam of existing genres, but which plays like none of them.

If that gives you pause, it should. We've gotten too comfortable fitting games into broad, meaningless slots, the way a bookstore divides and conquers with a bunch of empty, consoling placards. House of Leaves is horror, never literature. Watchmen is marooned in graphic novels. File The Handmaid's Tale in science fiction at your peril. (Don't get me started on music and movies.) So while it's probably safe to call Mirror's Edge an "action game," it's about as helpful as calling ballet "a physical activity set to music." Which brings me to the part where I tell you a little bit about something called parkour, occasionally referred to as l'art du déplacement, or "the art of movement," a real world activity that's at the heart of what makes this game so unique.

Parkour, according to its founder David Belle, involves moving through an environment as swiftly and efficiently as possible using only your body's innate abilities. Imagine a nondescript urban area with concrete barriers and steel pylons and interposing stairways flanked by metal railings and brick walls. Now imagine it's not just a collection of mundane objects, but an obstacle course, something to be traversed in the straightest, fastest vector possible, where hurdles are transformed into exploitable possibilities and not mere impediments to be avoided. Distance viewed not "as the crow flies," but as James O'Barr's The Crow would navigate it. Elevate that a few dozen stories to the level of dizzying skyscraper rooftops snarled with steaming tubes and chain link fences and metal air ducts, then seal it in a hyper-clean, gaze-searing glare, and voila, EA's Mirror's Edge.

If that sounds intriguing, let's start with why the game's narrative isn't. Did we need another prosaic near-future tale about the price of security slapping around the usual suspects (transparency, privacy, freedom)? I guess so. Figuratively and literally rising above it all, a cabal of info-couriers who wear stylish tracksuits and fingerless gloves deliver insurgent dispatches across rooftops like olympic postal employees. You're one of them, initially framed for a crime you didn't commit, drawn into a conspiracy involving your sister. The characterizations never crack what makes any of the personalities tick, though, and the bend in the tale when it comes is mundane and implausible. Producer Nick Channon may "want you to connect" with the protagonist, but the story never offers you any reason to.

That's okay, because what's left -- which is to say the other ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the game -- is an exhilarating kinetic puzzler in which you chamber your body like a bullet and fire it through gauntlets of architectural obstacles. That means bursting over ledges headlong, desperately scanning for a place to land, or dangling precariously off the edge of some sky-high construction crane before pulling yourself up just barely to safety. It's about staring across huge spaces and seeing your goal as some distant speck of next-to-nothing and exclaiming "You mean I have to get from here to that?" Just forget the plot, because Mirror's Edge is all about doing, not deep thinking.

It's also about running away from things. Digital Illusions understands something that's primordial: Being chased by something you can't see is far more terrifying than hunting something you can. It's tag, except you're never it, and the guys who are have bullets.

At first your opponents can only stand and shoot or clump after you in plodding herds. That's intentional, of course, since you're finding your feet, and feeling for the world's contours and limits. Eventually, though, they'll match you leap for leap, and follow you off the edges of anything, so that no retreat is safe, and no pinpoint respite inviolable. That these guys don't show up until the end is kind of a downer in a game you can beat (as I did) in a single sitting, but they're exhilarating while they last, and one of several reasons you'll want to replay chapters individually and look for new routes to top personal best times or upstage others' scores online.