Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

At times, Mirror’s Edge seems to be a game, yearning for a genre classification.  Sometimes, it looks to be a FPS shooter, and at others it almost feels like a racing game.  In the end, it will probably stick out as a shrewdly concocted puzzle game surrounded by the trappings of a stylistic world and fancy footwork.  And while it can be frustrating, Mirror’s Edge will keep you coming back to your controller to breathe in more of this unique and beautiful world.

At first glance of that opening paragraph, you might be confused, and rightly so, as Mirror’s Edge is probably in a category of its own.  When you first start up the game, you will find yourself in a training simulation and everything seems pretty simple, and it is, but when you move into the opening act of the game, everything changes on you, and for some it might be a bit too much to take in. 

Mirror’s Edge has players moving in the shoes of Faith, a runner that ferries information outside the highly monitored world that she lives in.  Information is a key commodity, and as it is in the real world of today, some things need to be transported outside the normal channels to ensure prying eyes stay out.  Government has their own ideas about this kind of “outside the lines” mode of moving data outside monitored streams, making you an enemy of the state.  Things only get worse when your sister is framed for murdering someone that had information that would free a secret to the world about the government and their methods.  You are then set on the path to follow the leads and infiltrate secure locations to get to the bottom of why your sister was framed, and to secure her release. 

The story is run of the mill and generic at times, but in the end, the story is not what really drives Mirror’s Edge.  The look of the world and how you interact with it is the story of the day with Mirror’s Edge and it becomes one of the more unique gaming experiences out there.

Starting out with the first level of Mirror’s Edge, you look out on to a city that looks as if it has been covered with a bottle of bleach, only that the person pouring the bottle missed a few spots.  Bright oranges, blues and reds along with other colors pepper the skyline and you traverse through its perilous heights.  While there are tons of colors, and obstacles, nothing really stands out in the way of details.  This may have been by design, to portray a sense of conformity, but it just makes the world feel a bit empty.  That goes for other details like people, or vehicles, as the world is almost devoid of both, barring the occasional parking garage or corporate police that are chasing you down.  Even with all of those complaints, the game is visually stunning, and carries a unique look and feel that with some fine tuning it could be perfect.  Cut scenes are handled with a different art style than the actual game engine, and are really well done, with a mix between anime and cell shading.  I almost found myself wishing the game had a DVD of animation with it, because it was very slick in its production values.

While some will find themselves getting lost in the look of the world, Mirror’s Edge comes down to movement and flow, with Faith always looking to keep herself running and a consistent pace.  As you look to your objective, you are presented with an array of ways to get to your goal, and Faith has an impressive inventory of moves to help you complete the task at hand.  Whether it is a jumping from a building into a rolling landing and then sliding under a gate, or wall running into a jump over a fence, the acrobatics of Faith are smooth and highly impressive.  Little details like wobbling when you get too close to an edge or hands frantically grasping the edge of a building at the end of a jump, it is an exciting thrill to pull off a combination of moves so you continue moving at top speed.  If you start to slow down, and lose your momentum, you will fall to your death, or worse, allow the enemy to catch up with you.  It is all about reading the environments at you move along, keeping your flow.  Mirror’s Edge does give hints as to where to go by shading items in the color of red to represent Faith’s runner vision.  It is meant as a guide to help you see things that will keep you going at full speed, but they are not the definitive way to get there, and half the reward is finding new ways to get to the end objective at a faster pace.

With this searching for quicker ways to finish the level, you start to realize that Mirror’s Edge at its heart is a puzzle game, rather than a first person shooter or even a racing simulator.  It shares more with Portal than any other game out there, as you have a start and an end point, and you need to figure out the way to get there.  Minimalist hints are there, but you will never have a map to reference.  You can push a button to see the general direction you need to go, but beyond that, the player is left up to their devices to figure out the puzzle to get to the end of the level.  Once I started to think in terms of a puzzle game, rather than trying to race around, Mirror’s Edge started to become an extremely enjoyable game.

There are moments where combat is part of the game, but you can normally find a path that will allow you to avoid the enemies, or you can take them on, as long as you realize that you are a 110 pound person, and not a hulking, bullet absorbing main character.  You will die from two to three bullet hits, or melee strikes.  It is better to avoid combat when possible, but again, using the environment will allow for some great acrobatic combat maneuvers.  Weapons are available for you to use when you take them from an enemy, but the performance of the weapons is passable at best.  Also, weapons tend to slow you down and while the enemy seems to have endless ammo, the guns you use will run out at the end of the clip in the gun currently.

With all the good things that Mirror’s Edge has going for it, a couple of things really hold it back, starting with the insane difficulty.  Mark my words that when you play Mirror’s Edge, you can take the time it should take you to finish the game, and add 50% more time to it, due to the amount of times you fail and die during the game.  Missed jumps, ill-timed rolls, and trying to take on the enemy head on will have you collapsing or plummeting to your doom on a regular basis.  The game pulls no punches, and does not assist you in any way while you perform your acts of aerial wonder.  Dying ends up being as much a part of the game, as playing it, and for some, this will be a turn off.  There were points where the autosave points were sadistic in nature, leaving you before a long complex section.  These points should have been found in testing, and it is a shame that a game of this originality will suffer due to the difficulty.  It almost feels that the difficulty is trying to make up for the fact that the game is probably a 6-7 hour game at most, and feels like more should have been there.  There are speed runs and you can download ghost runners from the EA servers to see how to improve on your times, but that is fun only for so long.

At the end of the day, you will find that Mirror’s Edge has a lot to offer, with a very different style of gameplay.  Mix in some top notch visuals, and you start to get an impressive taste of what could be one of the better games out on the market.  But with a steep learning curve and maddening difficulty, the game falls a bit short from greatness.  Mirror’s Edge gets a 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.