So I Tried... Mirror's Edge

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time I went for the PC version of Mirror’s Edge.

What I thought it was

A first person platformer that gets brought up every time someone talks about parkour in a videogame. Seriously though, this game is the poster-child for free-running action in videogames and I’ve never met anyone who’s both played it and disliked it. Mirror’s Edge came out in what I lovingly call “The Dark Ages”, or rather the time in my life I played no games whatsoever, but I’ve been meaning to play this one since I bought it about three years ago.

Enjoy your trip

What it actually is

A fantastic reason to turn down the contrast on my monitor. I booted this game and was immediately blinded by the beautiful clean-cut cityscape. After a quick dive into the settings menu to make the white slightly less dazzling and to turn on VSync, I found myself as main character Faith on a rooftop, running. There’s no obvious waypoints telling you where to go, but some objects were highlighted in red hinting that using them would take you where you wanted to go. This really put me into the world, and I felt like I knew where I was going (even when I very clearly didn’t).

Then the “Blues” started shooting at me, a helicopter started chasing me and it all got a little much, so much so that when my phone’s alarm sounded saying I’d played 30 minutes I panicked and jumped off a building.

This is how you get rope burns

Will I keep playing

Yes, I’ll try and finish this before Mirror’s Edge Catalyst comes out. I had a lot of fun jumping around and I can see myself trying to do speed runs of the levels, if the game is short enough for me to remember it all. As I said above, Mirror’s Edge looks fantastic even after seven years of aging, with a very simple colour palette but highly detailed models that makes it rather ageless.