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Mirror's Edge

• By Dave Rudden
• February 29, 2008 15:34 PM PST
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We get our first look at Mirror's Edge, which mixes acrobatics and First-Person. It's different, and we're excited!

Despite the constant influx of new first-person titles in today's gaming marketplace, innovation in the genre is sadly lacking. For every title like Portal, there are a dozen sci-fi or wartime shooters. Its characters, too, largely mimic each other--gruff soldiers who move around with the grace of a dumptruck. The last company we expected to create the next great innovative first person title was Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE). While DICE has created some great games in the Battlefield series, the very nature of the series was based in traditional, war-based first-person shooting. Perhaps that's why when the company unveiled Mirror's Edge alongside two new Battlefield properties, we were ignorant to its existence for a moment. Once we got to see the game in motion, however, we became fully aware of what may be the sleeper hit of 2008.

Free running, also known as parkour, has become a bit of a fad in gaming, being included in a handful of games in 2007, Crackdown, Assassin's Creed and TMNT (yeah, really) among them. While it does add an exhilarating layer of interactivity with the environment, the third-person viewpoint keeps the feature from being all it can be. After all, if you can see the characters making the crazy jumps, it really emphasizes the fact that its not you making the moves, rather it's a supercop, time-travelling assassin, or mutant turtle. By taking the parkour aesthetic and applying it to the first person genre, DICE has taken both concepts and made a game that could be one of the most immersive we've ever felt.

The city is gorgeous, vast, and yours for your free-running pleasure.

A Clean Mirror

Not a whole lot is known of the premise of Mirror's Edge besides the fact that you control Faith, a limber, free-running woman who lives in something of a totalitarian state where billboards praising a powerful leader catch your eye. Another reason it catches your eye is because of the relative lack of life in the city. That's not a complaint, mind you. Even though it's not filled with characters (we were on rooftops, mind you), the clean, sterile look of the city really conveyed an eerie, empty beauty that should be a blast to explore. Faith is obviously a dissenter in some form, since she spent almost the entirety of the demo running from heavily-armed police. While they're packed to the gills with ammunition, Faith spent all but about 2 seconds of our time together with a gun in her hand, which she only held to disarm an opponent. Faith's biggest weapon is agility, and believe us when we say she's the acrobatic equivalent of an atomic bomb.

Over the course of about ten minutes, we got to see Faith perform a variety of amazing parkour moves across the rooftops of a skyscraper-laden city. From what we've heard, a majority of them are mapped to the d-pad, which should make the intent of constant movement all the more easy to pull off. Running across a rooftop cluttered with objects, we could easily imagine simply tapping down to slide under a exposed pipe and then up to use an leaning piece of plywood to launch yourself onto an adjacent building. And it's not just vents and pipes in the word of Faith. The demo came to a thrilling conclusion when the hero, on the run from the law, spotted an ally helicopter in the distance. With shots ringing all around the unarmed woman, and enemies closing in on her, she lept from the edge of a building, grabbing its landing struts as it flew her to (temporary) safety.

Who needs guns when you have such awesome acrobatic moves?

We'd Rather Be Dead than Red

With a city comprised of thousands of rooftops, getting lost would normally be a problem. DICE is trying to counteract that problem by calling out destinations with vibrant, red-marked environmental items. See a red ladder on the side of a building? Odds are you should make a running jump at it and hope you can grab ahold of it. A red wire running from one building to another? Traverse it like a balance beam, using the Sixaxis (if applicable) to keep your balance. While the bright reds add a neat visual quirk to the bleached blues and whites of the environment, we were a little disappointed that the correct path was so blatantly colored in. Hopefully in the final version, we'll see more than one way to our final destination. If blatant visual cues are our biggest complaint when we see the final product, we'll gladly take it.

Rolling the DICE

Amidst all of the violence and grittiness you find in first-person games nowadays, Mirror's Edge looks to be a refreshing respite from the norm. We have great faith in the promise of this title, which has instantly shot to the top of a few GP editors' "Most Anticipated" lists. It's due later this year on the PS3, 360, and PC. We'll definitely keep you updated on this title, if only because we're dying to see more of it ourselves.

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