Neil Pooran takes a leap of Faith, over and over and over again

Neil Pooran takes a leap of Faith, over and over and over again

What do you do when the futuristic, pristine metropolis you inhabit is ruled over by an authoritarian, ill-seeing government? Civil disobedience? Move to another city? No, the answer is to start running. For no reason whatsoever.

A fairly barren plot has heroine Faith, a 'runner', vaulting her way across the city's rooftops to escape the law while battling to rescue her sister from the clutches of the apparently evil city authorities. Again, no reason is given for doing so. Played through the eyes of the runner, you vault across the bleached city entirely in a first-person perspective. The intention is that you flow through the city in a series of swift parkour moves rather than break stride by 'stopping and popping' the armed guards in pursuit. The emphasis is on graceful evasion rather than combat, which is probably why firing guns feels like tossing pennies onto a baking tray in more ways than one.

With the focus on jumping, wallrunning and scaling through the indoor and outdoor cityscape, pulling off these acrobatic tricks with the right timing becomes an irritating experience when attempting the same sequence for the umpteenth time.

However, the payoff from nailing a difficult line can be sublime. There is nothing quite as exhilarating as diving off of a 50-storey rooftop into a building opposite, before disarming a guard with a mid-air kick to the groin, all the while dodging bullets from a helicopter's chaingun. Moments such as these, along with the highly-stylised design of the nameless city creates an unsettling atmosphere, ensure Mirror's Edge feels more than just a platform game with a few gimmicks attached.

Developers DICE have answered their challenge of first-person platforming admirably and have certainly breached new ground. However many of the faults of the game stem from these adventurous design decisions. A frustratingly large amount of your time will be spent plummeting to your death and respawning after you constantly miss a crucial jump or fail to spot the right path to take.

Your first run through the game is a brief one, but since you're intended to sprint through the levels at breakneck pace this is perhaps unsurprising. However Mirror's Edge is now
considerably cheaper following the post-Christmas clearouts, a welcome move. The inclusion of time trials and downloadable challenge arenas on the horizon will provide more variety to those of a clock-watching persuasion.

While it's impressive that the intensity of parkour has been successfully translated into a video game, you can't help but feel that Mirror's Edge is just the first, prototypical part of a franchise that needs to evolve a little further.

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