why i hate everything

Anybody remember this captivating game trailer from a while back? A modern city populated with tall white and glass skyscrapers. A first person view of someone running, jumping over fences, sliding under obstacles, even disarming a big brother-esque police force. The parkour action was accompanied by a beautiful song that slowly faded into a climactic reveal of the main character, an Asian girl named Faith.

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I absolutely had to get this game. It had a look and feel- and more importantly, game mechanics- that I had never seen before. And for that alone developers DICE deserve complete credit. This is a great idea and a pretty good game and I would easily recommend playing it. Unfortunately, as with anything that builds up such impractical expectations, all I am left with is a bitter aftertaste. Aside from what was accomplished and what I enjoyed, I am going to use lost potential as an excuse to break down the biggest failures of Mirror’s Edge.

Let’s start at the beginning, with the story introduction:

The near future. In a city trying to forget its past. Crime is nearly gone. Surveillance is pervasive. The old marks of civil violence, of strife, are now covered over or memorialized. Most people are content, ignorant, and docile. Few even remember the “bad” old days anymore.

Except Faith, a young girl.

Wait wait wait. There was a decent build up there. But you are going to tell me that no one remembers the past except a little girl who probably didn’t live through it? Umm, ok.

So here is the main character, Faith- a runner, a courier of information in a corporate age of control. Every time she tries to hop along the rooftops she is pursued by police. I’ve got to say, it gets old being up there and having my buddy come on the radio and say, “There’s Blue incoming!” yet again. I have an idea – how about Faith tries to be inconspicious and just takes a taxi to her next objective?

Overall, the story is horrible and disjointed. The levels have no meaningful connectivity in between them and the cutscenes often don’t move the plot forward. Playing Mirror’s Edge feels like you are just doing the same thing over and over again. I swear this actually happens:

Okay, maybe story is not this game’s strong point (it’s not). Let’s move on.

Early on in my play experience I noticed that music was conspicuously absent. This was potentially one of the best features of Mirror’s Edge with the title track garnering internet hype and a separate soundtrack on sale. Where did all the music go during the levels? This was a missed opportunity for sure.

The jumping mechanics feel nice but they are not quite there yet. Like everything else in Mirror’s Edge, there is an obvious lack of polish. Landing from jumps will often result in you sliding off a ledge. It is usually hard to tell where you are supposed to go. The load times are excessive even after watching cutscenes. There are collectables scattered throughout the levels that have no purpose or reason for you to bother with. Judging distances of jumps is difficult and often only solved by trial and error, meaning you will fall to your death and pray there was a well placed autosave checkpoint.

On that note at least, falling to your death is very cool. The whole screen blurs out and shakes savagely while the noise of wind rushing past your face drowns out anything else, and then black. There are moments when you stop short of falling off a ledge and look down as the sound of rocks trickling down hammers home how close to death you are. Vaulting fences, touching walls, and slamming through doors are all genuine experiences with style. If this game sounds schizophrenic in its implementation, that’s because it is.

There are very few in-engine cut scenes that DICE tries to blend into the game but it is not a seamless transition. It is quite jerky and there is a white flash when the switch happens. This isn’t the biggest sin of a game engine, but there is a miniboss fight with quicktime events that blends back and forth between the game and the in-game scenes. Who’s idea was it to cut back and forth like that with choppy transitions and try to play it off as if it wasn’t horrendous? The controls were useless in the non-interactive portions and many times I died because my input wasn’t detected during a switch.

But, ladies and gentlemen, these gripes are nothing compared to the biggest control issue of the game: the Trip button.

No joke, using this button will more often result in failure than success. If you are merely running forward and you push this, you will spin around backwards and fall on your ass. If you are in a gunfight and try to press L2 to shoot but press L1 instead, you will turn your back on your attacker and get shot in the back of the head and die. The only reason this button exists is to perform a wall jump – you would think there is a better, perhaps more context sensitive way to perform this maneuver than always having a ‘Trip unless you are wall running’ button.

Moving on to macro design. Gameplay is a bit one-dimensional – you can only run from cops for so long before it gets old. Sometimes it is hard to tell where you should go under stressful circumstances. The few chase sequences are an ingenious way to solve that problem since you can always see where to go by imitating the target ahead of you. But there are some questionable decisions.

It was touted that you could play the entire game without shooting but that is a load of horseshit. While the idea of disarming a cop and using the remaining clip on other enemies until you need to move on is cool, the fight sequences are not the game’s strong point. Many times you can run away but near the end of the game you are forced into extended battles that you haven’t been prepared for and the aim controls are not very forgiving. If you play this game make sure to start with the Easy setting because that basically makes combat more tolerable without losing all the cool platforming.

The design is also very heavy-handed. There is not more than one way to do anything in Mirror’s Edge and you will find this out very quickly. Sometime you hang from pipes and can turn around to jump back, while other times your are clearly not supposed to turn around and the game doesn’t even bother letting you. It ends up feeling less like you are navigating a world than merely trying to guess what the designers want you to do.

The end of the game really starts falling apart. There is an entire level section that involves you jumping out of a building onto a bunch of others, avoiding snipers, slowly taking them out one by one, and when you finally finish you need to perform a very long jump back in to the building you started in. If you miss this jump and die you need to replay the entire segment over again. Either DICE intentionally tried to make the game harder by placing less frequent autosaves or they were rushing to meet a ship date, but the last couple levels are not fun.

The budget for Mirror’s Edge was not on par with the hype it had built up. The majority of the cut scenes were done in a 2D cartoony style that EA tried to play off as ‘stylish’ but I interpreted as ‘discount’. The hilarious thing is there is this police chief who Faith is in contact with the entire game in these cutscenes and finally, during one of the last levels, I came up face to face with him in the 3D engine. I had no idea who I was looking at because he looked completely different from the cartoon version. I had to listen to a few lines of dialog and ponder a second before I realized what was going on.

In the end, we are left with a game that had a lot going for it but the developers dropped the ball. DICE had a remarkable vision but I blame them for not following through with the promise. EA needs to get credit for funding a more experimental project like this but they should also bear the blame in this mess. To release a game prematurely does not do justice to the idea and they should have known better.

Even with all these failures, Mirror’s Edge will have lasting effects in the years to come. And who knows? With an iconic heroine and a better managed second effort, we just might get a sequel that delivers on more than just potential.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a pretty good game. Its American fantasy animation style makes for some beautiful visuals and a unique setting, which should be noted involved neither a prince nor Persia. The animation and running on walls and climbing, while not inspired, is solid traversal stuff. There’s also a couple cool pieces of tech that the developers experimented with- cloth tech for the character’s clothes and blobby tech that reaches out to the player as he walks by.

Ubisoft Montreal, the developers, put a lot of good into Prince of Persia. They, however, broke the golden rule of game design: A game is not the summation of its parts. They tried to cram everything in and hope it came together without a care for what the final experience was like. Ubisoft has been guilty of this before (see Assassin’s Creed aka. why I didn’t buy Assassin’s Creed 2) and doesn’t understand that making a player repetitively perform the same tasks is not fun.

There are basically two sides to this game:
1) Traversing the level, killing an enemy or two before battling the boss,
and
2) Traversing the level collecting soul power seeds to unlock later levels.

These are both very traditional game mechanics that we are all familiar with. The problem I have with these two parts is that the developers make you go through every level once for the first thing, then populate the level with collectables and make you traverse the very same level again before you can move on.

Mind you, collecting games can be fun. Mario and Sonic had a healthy amount of collecting *mixed in* with the combat. But separating them out to be done at two distinct times over the same level? This is just lazy design. It is basically doubling the length of the game by making you play it twice.

Imagine a level that is a tower. I climb the tower and kill a couple guys on the way up. At the top, I kill the boss. Then the land is healed and magical light seeds appear everywhere. I go down the tower (a different and faster way than I came up) and collect seeds on the way. Now, at the bottom, I can move on to another level, or I can go BACK UP the tower again to collect the seeds on the way up. So now I repeat the initial level again just so I can obtain a reasonable amount of light seeds. Now I am at the top again with nothing to do there, needing to go back down. I go down, again the way I went down before, without even any seeds to collect this time around. Well, that was a lot more work than i wanted to do. And the most annoying part is that Elika, your sidekick, keeps urging you to hurry up to the temple or something even though the game wants you to go on an Easter egg hunt.

Making the game longer by stuffing filler in doesn’t only make the game less fun, but it means you’ll be playing a less fun experience *longer*. That, sir, is not the way to entertain. You cut the fat, let the players play the good parts, and have them finish the game wanting more. That’s how you sell sequels. And expansion packs, apparently, since you can purchase a few download-only levels from the PlayStation Store.

With the underlying fundamental flaw of Prince of Persia out of the way, there are still other problems. The combat system in the game attempted to be intuitive by assigning a button to ‘magic’, ‘throw’, etc. but in practice came across as a Dragon’s Lair button reaction game. There is a complicated combo list of what buttons can be hit at certain times that I only started to get the hang of at the end of the game. And by that I mean I used the one combo I knew over and over.

All the animated attacks look very cool in combat but the experience didn’t end up as freeform as what I think the developers initially envisioned. Every fight takes place on a raised platform and you can instant kill guys by knocking them over the edge. Imagine my surprise when I fight a boss, and after a cut scene where he says how bad ass he is, I position my attack correctly and knock him off the edge in one hit. It took me about 1/3rd of the way through the game before I found an enemy who wasn’t this easy to kill, and I was thrilled for the challenge.

The theme of the bosses, on the other hand, is very cool. There are some obvious Shadow of the Colossus influences at work here. Most of the game is level traversal and boss fighting, with very few generic fights in between. You almost feel sorry for the bosses when they are killed. Even the concept of using a dark god to bring a girl back to life, at the sake of the land, is copied. But Prince of Persia fails to match the elegance of Shadow on almost all fronts.

You can choose your own path in this game, and I honestly don’t see the strength in that. If there are 4 levels per boss and I can beat them in any order, then there is no feel of progression. Instead of feeling like you are slowly defeating a boss, you simply fight it in 4 identical battles with the same generic evil dialog beforehand. Linearity could have been a strength to this title and allowed the story to be presented much better.

Instead, we are treated to stilted and disconnected dialog. And might I add, horrible dialog at that. The two characters squabble back and forth without making a semblance of a point. Oftentimes when one of them mentions something important the bickering takes over and the subject matter is lost. Sometimes you are treated to lengthy explanations of mundane things to flesh out the world, and other times you have to sit through bad jokes. The game doesn’t even take itself seriously- one time you are fighting a boss and you keep pushing him into a wall to defeat him, and the hero says, “I hope he keeps falling for this.” This breaking down of the fourth wall with chatter became more of an annoyance than anything else. What’s worse, the two main characters follow the hollywood romance model of fighting until they are attracted to each other. So when it comes time for me to save Elika from death, well, I don’t really want to- she likes to argue too much.

In the end, it sounds like I am being much harder on Prince of Persia than I should be. I almost stopped playing it because of its faults, but about 40% through the bosses get more challenging and the necessity for light seed collection goes down. I actually trudged through and beat it, which is more than I can say for a lot of video games these days. It was fun, but it could have been outstanding. Using Shadow of the Colussus as a roadmap was not a bad decision but Ubisoft didn’t have the heart to see that through.

Prince of Persia is like that relationship you had that lasted a couple months and was never incredibly exciting. Sure, you are broken up now and are glad it is over, but at the same time you can appreciate the experience as a pleasant distraction where hopefully you learned some things and got a couple blowjobs.