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

Managing barrages of half-blind hurdles and tumbling drops from zip lines while keeping out of harm's way, all in first-person, takes some acclimatizing. It's the same old view with a radically different hand-eye ratio. First-person shooters have taught us that in-body motion is all forwards and backwards and side-to-side, but here you're potentially traveling in any direction, and often stringing together dozens of course adjustments in the space of as many seconds.

Mirror's Edge adapts its controls to the task by channeling all you can do -- mostly jumps and spins and tumbles -- into just three or four button-presses, asking simply that you point your view in the direction you want to go and spring forward. It's a simple and elegant setup that's remarkably intuitive. Getting enough speed under your legs requires squaring the distances between things instead of mashing buttons or triggering power-ups. Jumps depend on launch speed and angle of attack. Slides too. Turn vaults aka "half turns" take only three button presses (leap, turn, leap) but require delicate timing as you run up walls and flip your head around before peeling off at a reverse angle.

Since the geometry of each area (and not a bunch of button combos or flashy moves) determines its difficulty, you'll see a gradual uptick in complexity as each chapter ticks by. You'll start in areas that have easy to spot routes aided by optional visual cues that paint useful objects a shade of fire hydrant red, but finish with incredibly tricky head-scratchers. One in particular -- a combat-free ascent up a gloriously sunlit atrium near the end -- is among the finest, most memorable sequences in any game I've played in years.

Occasionally you'll flip around to the wrong side of something, but the game won't let you flip back, so you can either dangle forever, or let go and die. It happens rarely, but it's evidence that even if the controls feel remarkably fine-tuned, sometimes the environments aren't.

It certainly helps that the physics are forgiving when it comes to leaps and touchdowns. You're not exactly wearing magnetic boots, but your stopping distance is such that simply landing on girders or narrow planks is usually enough to zero your velocity. This lets you focus more on aiming than whether your momentum's going to send you teetering into oblivion. It part of a design framework that understands when to reinforce real-world physics as well as when to bend them.

Individual moves are relatively easy to execute, but the challenge is stringing several together, say wall-running, turning mid-run and leaping to another platform, then turning again and flipping the view to spring up to the next level. Much of the time it's difficult to get a sense for how much space you've traversed because you're sprinting all out. Sometimes it's enough to get to the end of a crazy run and pause to look back and marvel at how far or high up you've come.

Special objects can sometimes propel you further, and others you'll interact with automatically. You only have to pull up or down when you grab a target ladder or ledge -- the game holds on for you. The trickier bits involve aiming for those pipes and not skewing left or right, or clearing vast spaces between platforms at completely different heights. But even when you're chewing cement, it takes only a couples seconds to reload and try again. Checkpoints bookmark your progress at multiple points in a chapter, so you re-spawn pretty much where you died, and never at the start of a protracted sequence.

I'd recommend ignoring the few pistols and machine guns and sniper rifles the game periodically teases, but if you're trigger-itchy they're certainly available. So is hand-to-hand melee with enemies if you're so inclined. The game clearly prefers that you run around enemies using your parkour savvy, but allows you a few basic jabs and jump or slide kicks as well as the option to disarm an opponent by tapping a button at the right moment in a timed sequence. Carrying guns slows you down and makes you clumsy, and pointing and aiming has none of the tactical subtlety found in most shooters, but then this is a game that can't rightly be called one anyway.

Mirror's Edge is at it's best when there's nothing onscreen but you and a world of objects and architectural ideas to scramble across. That architecture enables a stunningly original and often heartbreakingly beautiful world, filled with colors that leap out like splashes of brilliance in a blizzard of dazzle: chartreuse yellow, persimmon orange, emerald green, an entire scintillating city bleached blinding white. You'll want to slow up when the game lets you and take some of that in. There's a lot to see here that's its own reward. Nothing you've played until this game looks quite like it.

And then you'll want to thank EA -- a publisher whose reputation hews "safe and familiar" with games that have names typically followed by an incremental number -- for supporting the game's existence. It's precisely what the industry needs. More of this. More that leads.

Finis coronat opus, "the ends justify the means," is splashed on the walls and discovered scrolling on elevator screens as you explore the strangely beautiful interior of the city's tallest building in the game's final beats, home to the story's central sinister powers. It's an apt enough expression for the neo-Orwellian riff. Reverse it and you have a tag line for the game itself.