Mirror's Edge was one of my first PS3
games, and remains one of my favorites to this date. It's a first
person parkour game, with some hand-to-hand and firearms
based fighting thrown in. Since its main focus is free-running, you
have much greater control over your character's body than in most
other first-person games (which usually focus on shootin'). It
successfully pulls off what so many first-person games do poorly:
running and jumping mechanics that aren't painfully bad and
inaccurate.
It's an amazing game. It's controls
are spectacular; every move you make requires multiple skillful
button presses, and pulling off those moves in order to quickly run
through a level feels amazing. It's hand-to-hand combat and shooting
sequences were fun and different. It's animation of your character
from the first person, both visible (like your hand grabbing a ledge)
and off screen (like what a wall-run or a roll looks like from your
perspective), is near perfect. It's story had a great concept (a
near-future where parkour couriers are one of the only ways to get
free information circulated due to an oppressive government), but
very poor execution. It was the perfect set-up to have you running
various courier missions, but instead quickly degenerates into total
nonsense.
It had three basic game modes. Story
mode, where you play through set levels and see cutscenes from time
to time; speed run mode, where you play the game's story levels while
trying to beat a target time; and time trial mode, where you play a
smaller chunk of a level while trying to beat a target time and run
through all the checkpoints. Speed runs were my favorite. I would go
through the level, planning my route, then have to perform it all
with few mistakes in order to beat the target time. The longest of
these runs is ten minutes, a marathon of shortcuts and correctly
timed leaps and bounds. Great stuff.
The Pure Time Trials DLC, however,
consists of 9 new levels for my least favorite mode of Mirror's Edge,
the time trials. I had plenty of fun with the main game's time trial
levels, but earning the fast times necessary to get your star level
up (and earn the accompanying trophy) always eluded me. Watching
videos of these time trial levels online, you can see that Mirror's
Edge inspires the kind of speed-running nonsense of abusing game
mechanics and level designs that you see from time to time if you
search for speed runs in other random games. The game even seems to
encourage it, especially based on some of the trophies that come with
this DLC, which have you pulling off tricky maneuvers well outside
the scope of what you would need to complete the story and the speed
runs. Some people are obviously very interested in this sort of
thing, but practicing the same jump hundreds of times so that I can
just barely kick off a wall and shave half a second off my time was
not for me. Speed runs had you planning out a route through a level
and then executing with little room for mistakes. Time trials are
more about saving every possible millisecond by planning out each
step and turn to the pixel. While I had fun reaching the one and two
star ratings in the time trial levels (you can earn one to three
stars, depending on how fast you are), I had no desire to put in the
hours and hours it would take me to get to two and three stars on all
the levels (I got three three-star ratings, thirteen two-star
ratings, and seven one-star ratings in the main game).
I put off getting the Pure Time Trials
for a long time because they were just more of my least favorite part
of the game, but luckily, I went into them thinking I would just have
fun getting the one star ratings as I got myself a few extra hours of
the Mirror's Edge action I hadn't had in a few years. And that's
exactly how my experience went. I also had a shadier agenda; using
the DLC to complete the hardest part of the platinum trophy, getting
my star level up to 50 by getting nine extra stars (one from each of
the easiest target times in each of the new levels). I wondered if I
was just buying it to finally get that platinum trophy I always
drooled over, but I justified it to myself by saying I would have a
few hours of fun with it as well, so it was ok. I can sleep at night
with that, especially since I had a blast with these new levels.
The Pure Time Trials levels are
drastically different visually from the rest of the game. Mirror's
Edge was famous for awhile for it's almost photo-realistic urban
environments. The Pure Time Trials, by contrast are very abstract.
Each level is floating a mile or two above an ocean surrounded by an
endless horizon. Blocks and planes of glass are suspended in mid-air,
yet will support your weight. Huge stones with a beautiful chalky
texture are everywhere, as are colored blocks with patterns similar
to the runner tattoos you see in the story mode. The effect is very
beautiful, especially the ocean far below you and the myriads of
floating blocks up in the sky that some levels have. A few stages
also have a surreal effect where if you stand on a pane of glass you
can see a translucent city far below your feet. It was a great idea
to go with this abstract aesthetic for these new levels (although I
love the city environs of the main game too).
Here's a quick refresher on the
controls, since I like to put the controls in all my reviews. The
analog sticks control movement and looking, ala virtually every
modern 1st person console game. Circle will make you
quickly look toward your next checkpoint. L1 is jump, climb, vault,
wall run, etc. Basically if you ever want to your body to go up, you
press L1. L2 is slide, duck, and roll. If you want your body to go
down, you press L2. I've always loved the way those two buttons are
used. Very elegant. R1 makes you quickly turn around. And you can
still use R2 to attack and triangle to attempt a disarm, but you
won't be needing to. And just for the sake of completeness, you can
normally press square to slow down time and cross to interact with
objects, but neither of these are used in time trials, so you won't
be pressing them in this DLC (or at least you shouldn't be).
The nine levels included here
encourage/require the use of advanced techniques that you should
already know if you've played a lot of the main game including the
trickier types of wall running. Nothing too bad though. As you play,
however, you'll notice plenty of shortcuts set up for the really
advanced players who are willing to put in the practice necessary to
pull off near hack-like maneuvers to achieve world record times.
Kudos to those people, I admire their videos, but I am not one of
them.
A few standout levels for me include
Velocity, which has you running on curved glass walls with nothing
but space below you, and the paired levels, Actino and Actino Rise.
The first Actino has you approaching a tower, and the second has you
climbing that tower. Put them together, and you have a level about as
long as one of the shorter speed run levels. Of course you can't play
them together, because they are time trials. Humbug. The tower you
climb in Actino Rise is breathtakingly tall. Watching the level intro
where the camera pans through the environment made me feel like I was
watching one of those Imax films where they throw the camera off the
grand canyon. After climbing to the top, if you look down at where
you started, it's crazy to think that you actually went through all
that space to get there. Of course, you should be running and
trying to beat your time, not taking in the scenery. This level is
the best use of height I have seen in a game. Avoid it if you have
vertigo.
The music, if you would call it that,
is very low key. It's mostly almost like faraway humming or slow
drumming sounds. They are so low and subtle that you hear every sound
effect and every exerted breath that main character Faith takes. It's
a nice choice to let the sound effects take precedence over what
music is there, and it works very nicely.
There are six trophies in this game.
Four of them are for doing advanced combo maneuvers. I got two of
them, but after many tries, I gave up on the other two for the same
reasons I don't try to get three star runs. And I swear I did the
U-turn one after a million tires, but it didn't pop! The other two are for getting even
higher star ratings; 75 and 90(!). These are lofty goals that will
take countless hours to achieve, and I wasn't the least bit
interested in them.
Overall, I would have preferred new
story style levels to speed-run through, as that is what I really
love about Mirror's Edge. But I did enjoy the new look and the new
challenge of going through this DLC. I just don't recommend knocking
yourself out to get those world-record times unless you are really
into that sort of thing. If you are, enjoy, I think you'll have a lot
of fun with this.
The original Mirror's Edge is a Tier 2
Great Game for me. It did something new and did it very well. Taken
by itself, the Pure Time Trials fit into the Great Game, Tier 3
category for me. If you take the two together, the game stays in Tier
2, it's just a few hours longer. The new levels were fun, but the
whole way that Time Trials are set up seems kind of broken, or at
least very much not for me. Cutting every corner possible to get the
best time is a favorite past time for me in Wipeout HD or the speed
runs of this game, but the Time Trials don't click with me. It may be
that because they are such short chunks of the levels, the only
possible way to make up time is to practically count pixels. Contrast
that with speed runs or timed races in Wipeout HD, where you're in it
for the long haul and need a general plan of action to execute. It's
a subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference for me. If you
are into time trials, I'm sure this DLC pack is a sublime addition to
the game, but for me, it's just a few hours of extra fun added to the
already great Mirror's Edge experience.
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