3.5/5 ★ – daneh's review of Mirror's Edge.

Mirror's Edge is definitely unique and it's honestly the kind of game I would've dreamt of as a little kid. Parkour on top of roofs while dodging bullets while doing life-threatening tricks? Shit man. That sounds awesome. And in execution, the game does manage to capture a lot of that feeling! Most of the times, the controls feel smooth and jumping from place to place feels snappy yet fluid at the same time. But unfortunately, sometimes I really feel the level design isn't doing the movement many favors. I feel like the level design can be divided into three main sections: Rooftop traversal, Indoors navigation, and combat sections. I'll just rip the band-aid off and say the combat is easily the worst part of the whole game, it's clunky, unnecessary, feels broken at times, and just really annoying. It's not exactly difficult either, it's more of a thing where you die a couple times and immediately figure out how to cheese it. Melee combat is weak and limited, but using guns is horribly annoying since your character slows down to a crawl when wielding a 3 pound object. Anyways, with that out of my chest, there's left discussing rooftop traversal and indoors navigation. Going with the former first, I think this is the most enjoyable part of the game, jumping from building to building never got old to me, although that might be because this is probably the smallest part of the game. Then there's the indoors navigation which can also be fun at times and can even have some of the best parts in the game, but it definitely feels cluttered at times and the game does not do a very good job of directing you into the right path, there's such a lack of direction given to you that I spent a lot of my playtime genuinely wondering what was the actual level and where I was supposed to go. I think that's all I have to say gameplay wise. Graphics wise the game looks great for a 2008 game, although the animated cutscenes in-between levels could've probably been done better by a chimpanzee trying out adobe flash for the first time. I'm sorry but they look really bad lol. Speaking of which, the story! It's not great! It manages to be cliche and predictable while simultaneously being a mess, but honestly the story isn't really the reason you'll become interested in the game. I know this review might come off as very critical, but I swear I still really like this game! Sure, it's inherently flawed in a lot of aspects but as I mentioned at the start, it's basically a game I would've dreamed of playing as a little kid, there's no way I could dislike this. The feeling of gathering momentum to climb walls, jump through buildings, use monkey bars to get to higher places, wallrunning to get more distance, it's all really cool to pull off and I think the game succeeds in it's core gameplay goal, even if it fails in the details.