Pushing Play

Remember the first thirty minutes of Casino Royale where James Bond is chasing that African dude who does all that crazy jumping sh*t?  Ok, cool. Now remember how you wish you could do all that crazy jumping sh*t without actually sweating? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mirror’s Edge.

By the way if you thought that scene in Casino Royale wasn’t cool then I hate you. Ok, “hate” is a strong word, I “dislike you with a passion”. No, that’s too soft, I hate you.

You play as (sadly not African) Faith in a world run by nosy control freaks and the only way to get packages across town is to use French ninjutsu, also known as “parkour” (aka “free running), from a first-person perspective.  The controls do take a bit of getting used to since most of the action takes place on the shoulder buttons. The L1 button makes Faith jump, L2 makes her slide beneath objects and R2 is her melee attack. The triangle button does a sweet disarm maneuver. “Think of the controller as an ‘extension’ of yourself rather than just a controller” the exhibitor advised me. I did, and it worked. You’ll understand what I mean when you get your hands on the game. All you need to know is that the controls work fine and good timing skills are required.

About a two minutes into the demo I got a huge nerd boner, and not just any nerd boner. This boner was different. Special. It’s the boner I get when a game makes me feel like such a total badass even though public bathrooms scare the crap out of me. I think this happened after I scaled a huge gap between two buildings, performed a perfectly timed forward roll to decrease leg shock, slid under a pipe, disarmed some noob policeman, threw away his gun, jumped over a flight of stairs, and then served the noob policeman’s friend a knee sandwich. That’s when I knew this game kicks metric tons of ass. Putting what should be a third-person action/adventure game into a first-person perspective just makes it that much more immersive.

The graphics aren’t mind-bending but have a clean Ikea-like artstyle that looks gorgeous. Objects in the environment that help you progress through the stage are colored red but somehow don’t throw off the level art. I am worried about the enemy AI as they do seem a bit too easy to take down. Hopefully the storyline has a few plot twists here and there so the whole jumping thing doesn’t get stale. Wait, can it get stale?

This might just be my most anticipated title of the year.

-Chu Boi