My Game Walkthrough: Mirror's Edge

For my walkthrough, I analyzed Mirror's Edge, developed EA Digital Illusions CE, powered by the Unreal Engine 3, and released in November 2008 for the Xbox360 and PS3. The game is a single player, first person-view action/adventure, mostly platformer game with sections of fighting and shooting. The player follows the path of Faith, a member of a system of "runners" who physically carry information through a semi-futuristic city that's been otherwise oppressed and kept under close surveillance by a totalitarian regime. The main strength and novelty of the game in my opinion, was the realistic and unique first-person interface.

The player guides Faith fluidly through the game environments by executing time-sensitive combinations of wall runs, wall tacks, jumps, rolls, slides, and other parkour-style acrobatics; the interactivity with the environments is similar to the Prince of Persia games, where there are many areas to freely interact with in different ways, although there's really only one "right" path to follow. There are no distracting indicators on the screen with the exception of a center reference point (that turns into a crosshairs when holding a firearm), creating a more immersive environment that really allows the player to feel like they themselves are in on the action. While the player can't directly see their character, Faith's presence is represented by glimpses of her arms and legs when she reaches for objects, climbs up on platforms, curls in on herself to roll safely from a high jump, or lashes out to punch an enemy.

The game plays through more like a chaptered story than a series of score or performance-based checkpoints, so there are no extra stats to monitor onscreen. There's not even a health bar, although Faith will grunt and the screen will flash red when she sustains a minor injury. If she's taking fire, the screen will flash red and show blood splatters, eventually dimming to black and white as her health fades and she dies. Most of the challenge in the game comes from timing your moves and manuvers correctly, which is paramount to navigating the environment- if you're too slow, you'll often quickly get shot by the authorities (AKA "blues") and the helicopters that follow you closely during chase sequences. If Faith doesn't have enough momentum, or is angled a little bit off from her target, she won't be able to jump or wall run to a far platform or reach a high-up pipe.

These limitations do help to make the gameplay as realistic and plausible as possible. For example, Faith runs slower and can't jump as high once she's picked up a pistol, can't jump or run at all when she's holding a shotgun, and often needs to shoot to break through thicker glass. With the exception of course of surviving extreme falls and multiple gunshot wounds when she has no armor to speak of, the limitations like the small window for executing moves sometimes gets to be annoying- On a couple occasions, I had to repeat a rather long sequence of platforming, fighting, then platforming again between the automatic save checkpoints in the game because of just one jump or wall run that was extremely hard to make if your timing was off at all. This wouldn't have frustrated me so much if there'd been an additional save checkpoint somewhere in between that action, so that I wouldn't have to start over every time I failed to make the jump, on one occasion, starting over INSIDE an elevator where I'd have to wait for it to reach the ground floor and then open before playing through. I also found it unnecessarily annoying how when I was trying to get my bearings of the surrounding rooftops sometimes, Faith just falls if you get too close to a ledge, she doesn't automatically dangle or recover herself.



Timing also comes into play during some of the mandatory fight sequences, which offers a refreshing challenge to the usual shoot-em-up setup. Since Faith is unarmed herself, you have to find a weapon or steal it from an enemy utilizing slow motion- Usually, enemies will be largely immune to kicking and punching, which might knock them back to give you breathing space for a moment, but won't kill them. The more heavily armored "blues" that chase you out of buildings in escape sequences can't even be deterred with pistol fire, thereby forcing the player to exit the level the way they're supposed to by finding alternate routes out, climbing up fountains, breaking through windows, climbing through ventilation shafts, and racing up stairs and hallways instead of trying to cheat and fight their way out of pursuit.



The audio and graphics were particularly essential to aiding gameplay, as red-colored objects offered a hint as to where to go next, and the "hint" B button usually pointed you in the right direction if you were lost- sometimes however, that just made it more confusing since it would be referring to a general, not an immediate course of action, which was increasingly unhelpful when you were unsure whether you could physically make or a jump or not and it actually pointed you AWAY from the platform you were supposed to reach next. Sound cues also clued you in on the action, since Faith herself is mostly characterized from what you see of her in the cartoon-styled cutscenes, her breathing, occasional cursing, and sound effects when she falls, gets shot, or pulls herself up onto a ledge; sometimes your boss would tell you to get going over the radio or inform you of what to do next, and the music would change from a majestic, thrilling tune to a faster pace when you were being chased or under fire.

While the mostly linear, largely homogeneous clean-looking environments aided the "need for speed", get-in-and-get-out dynamic of the navigation, I still would have liked some more content to enrich them. There weren't really any extra pickups besides bonus packs, and interaction with objects in the environment was limited besides platforming on select surfaces, turning the occasional crank, pressing switches, and opening doors. When using a gun, Faith can only fire at enemies- nothing else is destructible (even fallen enemies' dead bodies). Sometimes little pieces add dimension to the city, like a passing train, pigeons that scatter when you run through them, or scrolling advertisements on the screens in the elevators. For the most part, the city seems to be a ghost town with the exception of a few visible cars and passerby in the streets when you're on building tops.