I recently won a copy of Mirror's Edge for the PC, so I figured I would give it a try and see how it is. Given the reviews that I had read for the game, I didn't set my hopes very high. While it's not the best game ever, it was pretty good. I am glad that I didn't pay full price for it, though.
Hardware specs:
- Pentium 4 3.0gHz
- ATI Radeon 2400 Pro
- 2GB RAM
At first, I thought that I wouldn't be able to play the game at all, since my PC doesn't meet the minimum requirements for the game. Thankfully, M was gracious enough to allow me to borrow her computer so that I could play through the game. It's a little under three years old, and playing at 1024x768 with most settings at "Medium", the PC couldn't always keep up with the game. If I played for a long time, the game would periodically freeze, and come back a few seconds later (generally at the worst possible time, naturally). I did get a few blue screens, but updating to the latest video drivers fixed that problem. There were still some hangs (generally when loading after dying), and every time that I exited the game it wouldn't properly reset my resolution.
Other than that, I didn't encounter any bugs in the game at all - it was very playable. The graphics were good enough, but I didn't get any of the nifty PhysX effects since I wasn't playing with an NVidia card. In any event, the graphics did their job, and weren't at all distracting.
The premise of the game is that you are Faith, and she is a runner. The idea is to keep your speed up, and then pull off some pretty crazy stunts - leaping between buildings, running along walls, etc. When it works, the gameplay is great fun. Objects in the environment turn red to indicate the direction that you can go, which helps to keep downtime to a minimum (a must in this game). There were still a few spots where I didn't know where to go, but these were few and far between.
In addition to running, there is also combat. From the beginning of the game, it encourages you to not fight the enemies, but rather run away from them. This is generally good advice, since against the tougher enemies you can go down in as little as two hits. While this is a great idea, the problem is that there are some enemies that you must kill before proceeding (generally indicated by a red glow on the mob, and sometimes a voice over from another indicator telling you that you need to fight them). If there is only one enemy around, it's not too hard - you have a variety of movies, including a one hit take down that also disarms your opponent if you time it right.
The problem comes when there are multiple enemies attacking you at once. Since you can die pretty easily, this makes your actions crucial. Your disarm attack is quite involved, and if another enemy is shooting at you while your disarm his friend, you can easily die before the animation is done. This can get quite frustrating, since late in the game it will routinely throw four, five, or more enemies at you at once. While this is doable, it does cause you to replay the same segment many times until you get lucky and kill all of the enemies perfectly without dying.
The story is good enough, but largely forgettable. It did enough to keep you playing, but nothing spectacular.
While the combat has issues, when the game works it is really amazing. When you get moving, and perform all of the movies perfectly, it's great fun and shows exactly what this game is capable of. Since there is going to be a sequel, hopefully they'll improve on the running, and downplay the combat. That would make one amazing game.
