Why everyone should try it, some will find it maddening, and in the end it’s all worth it.

Games can be satisfying in several different ways. Sometimes it’s immersive storytelling, being taken on a journey. Grand, exciting, surprising games, the best of which make up my all-time favorites like Bioshock or Shadow of the Colossus. Sometimes it’s more of a Die Hard impulse, more of a roller coaster than an epic, and I just like some fucking explosions. Gears of War, Call of Duty, Resident Evil, or God of War all stimulate the part of my brain that craves pure thrills. A lot of games fall under that column, so they’re easier to come by and therefore the sort I’ve played the most of. Some tread a space between the two (GTA 4), some live outside convention and carve out new spaces (Braid, Rez), some are just a fun simple challenge to wrap your brain around for a bit (the puzzle/arcade genre).

But modern consoles have also enabled games whose appeal could be called concrete, in that they make it possible for ordinary people to do things via controller they’d have to train a lifetime for in real life. At a certain point sports and racing sims entered this realm, as they grew to demand a real understanding of and command over the mechanics involved. For people who love the NFL or sports cars, but would never get to coach the Cowboys or drive an Aston Martin, these are ideal. By introducing a plastic instrument, Guitar Hero did this with performing music; by using the joysticks to control your board in a new way, Skate delivered a much more concrete experience than Tony Hawk’s super-extreme combo-building. The goal of these games is a mastery of skills more than a progression from beginning to end. Any story serves as a framework around which to provide greater challenges to hone your talent. Particularly in the last two examples, there’s a specific chain of events laid out before you, and the satisfaction is in training yourself to finally nail it. Even better is when you’ve mastered the principles to the point where you can nail something the first time through, and feel like you’ve really become a top notch rocker, skater, driver, etc.

That’s basically a long way of getting to both the best and most annoying part of Mirror’s Edge at the same time — the reason everyone should absolutely try it, and some will also find it maddening. It’s a concrete realization of something truly thrilling, unlike anything you’ve ever played, with a few hitches that can make or break your time with the game.

……….

If you have yet to play Mirror’s Edge, it’s a game of what the French call parkour, the art of movement. To the rest of us, that means running really fast and jumping over, across, and off of things in seemingly impossible ways. Hyper-modern rooftops, tunnels, hallways, warehouses, and other sparse spaces make up the levels through which you move as quickly and efficiently as possible. The kicker is that you do it all in first person, meaning the sense of motion and space comes straight to your eyeballs, not by watching where your character lines up with each obstacle. Once you learn the basic controls and start to get a sense of how to move through the world, you vault, slide, leap, tumble and sprint through your urban playground,  allowing you to cover huge distances and scale up or drop down from enormous heights at top speed. Getting into a flow of fluid motion leads to some of the most exhilarating gaming moments in any game this year.

However, it does take some practice to be able to do this gracefully, and that becomes the deciding factor in how much you’ll love or hate this game. At first, red-tinted objects guide your path as you work out the right timing for each jump. In the early levels, these are more frequent and obvious in pointing out the proper steps to follow. The frustration comes later, not because it’s hard to learn what you’re supposed to do, but because it’s not always as easy to learn how to do it just right.

It’s here where your mileage may vary. If by the time you get to tougher levels you’ve had one of those sublime stretches, where you’re hitting all the right jumps on instinct and feel like an acrobatic god of speed, that feeling turns into a drug. You’re willing to put up with some frustration to chase that dragon. If you haven’t yet found that flow and experienced that euphoria, you’ll just see the promise of that rush receding farther into the distance with every botched attempt, and feel like the game is broken.

That’s where I feel like my experience with Skate is the best comparison. There were times where I’d decided on a line through the environment, and spent hours trying to do with my hands what I’d decided in my head. Because I’d essentially set my own goal, and could see what it was I needed to do, the time it took to reach that goal didn’t bother me the way a really aggravating Bionic Commando level did. It’s more like practice than continued failure; a lot of frustration leading up to an ultimately satisfying moment. Fortunately, Skate let you prolong that sensation by allowing you to record, edit and share a replay. You could revel in the high you’d achieved beyond the moment of completion. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t provide for this, so that moment is fleeting and you have to start chasing the next high right away, making the drug metaphor even more apt.

……….

Since there is no way to stretch out the most rewarding instances, two of the game’s other issues become greater obstacles to your potential enjoyment. This is not a long game, probably because you traverse each level so quickly. But if the game as a whole added a few hours, and more gradually ramped up its challenges, the player would have more time to ramp up his mastery. Providing a longer period to gain proficiency, and then a longer stretch to flex those skills, would have overcome that stumbling block. Instead, by the last level or two when you’re really getting the hang of barreling through the environment with abandon, you’re forced into more fights than you were before, and your opportunities to get into a flow are reduced (or at least it seemed that way in my play-through; perhaps someone even better found a skillful route right around all those douchebags in the server room).

Which brings us to the biggest sticking point: the fighting. Wise observers have suggested this game would be better off without enemies entirely, focusing instead on perfecting your runs — as you can do after finishing the game in Time Trial mode. I wouldn’t go that far, as a few of my favorite scenes had me fleeing a hail of bullets and just barely escaping. Reaching an elevator is satisfying, but watching it close just in time to dimple from a shower of gunfire is much cooler. Even better were the times I was chasing another runner and got to see their gymnastics out ahead while trying to follow in their footsteps. These sequences provided a sense of urgency that propelled me through them with more force than my simple desire to run efficiently, and they’re very exciting if you succeed. The trouble spots are when you’re forced to confront rather than evade.

There are slick ways to deal with armed guards just as there are slick ways to climb buildings, like sliding or jumping kicks and disarming combos. Unfortunately they take much more finesse to pull off as smoothly as the your standard acrobatics. It’s as if in the middle of a fantastic line in Skate, you were forced to grind a merry-go-round and ramp off a moving vehicle; the fact that you’re trying to incorporate a dangerous moving target into your ballet of motion makes it nearly impossible to do gracefully on a first attempt. As a result, you’re motivated to avoid them whenever possible, flipping potential stopping points into amazing narrow escapes as you glide past feeling like an unstoppable force. I wouldn’t give up the excitement of that flight from danger to theoretically make the game more digestible — I’m actually a bit wary that the fully-abstract form the future downloadable expansion seems to be taking might rob the game of some of its visceral value. If the fights had been just a bit more fair and forgiving, or they had provided slightly more visible alternate routes, wonky combat would have been a non-issue. But still, the few times there’s no apparent path through Story Mode that doesn’t involve stopping to fight, be prepared for some exasperation.

……….

Although it may sound like I’ve spent too much time picking apart its faults to recommend this game, I’d say the opposite is true. Any work that drives some people crazy whose opinions I respect, while others are crazy about it means at the very least we’re talking about something legitimately interesting. At the end of the day that’s what I want most out of my games, movies, books, bands, or anything else. There’s certainly a place for the sure-fire hits, the popcorn films or pop bands, and Gears of War 2, which I also can’t wait to play even though I picked Mirror’s Edge first for my November play time. But there’s also a place for being challenged. Whether challenging players to master an occasionally exasperating game, or challenging conventions with a genuinely original style of play, I’m glad games like this are being made. Love it or hate it, we all benefit from games like Mirror’s Edge pushing the bounds of possibility forward.

……….

One other note:

A cadre of other really smart games writers got into a debate about whether this game was being unfairly criticized for its shortcomings, and whether reviewers were downplaying the value of its creative risks. Though I personally loved reading all the different reactions, that seemed more of a debate about the role of criticism than about the game itself, and I resisted the temptation to spend too much time on that here — trying to focus more on what the game did for me and why it was worth putting up with some hitches. Hopefully I succeeded in that, because damn, did I enjoy this game.