Game Review: Mirror's Edge

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

Mirror's Edge

For: Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

From: Digital Illusions CE/EA

ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, language, violence)

"Mirror's Edge" is the most irritating, disappointing game that ever will knock your socks completely off.

As the iffy story explains, you star as a messenger who, while not much with a gun, sports some seriously impressive free running skills. You can leap rooftops, run along walls, fly over fences and more without ever breaking your stride.

Translating these acrobatics into video game form is tricky enough when a game takes place from a third-person viewpoint, so it's all the more impressive that "Edge" nails it while doing one better and presenting the entire experience in the first person. The game never holds your hand as you string together moves that get you from points A to B, but it so expertly drops you into your character's shoes that it never needs to. It's hard to explain on paper, but "Edge" takes an extremely complicated (and heretofore unseen) control mechanic and just makes it feel perfectly right.

How bewildering, then, that en route to taking gaming to new frontiers, "Edge" forgets some of the cardinal rules that got us to where we already were.

There are moments in which "Edge" appears to offer multiple solutions to a single problem. Overwhelmingly, though, it isn't. Windows that break in other parts of other levels suddenly don't when breaking one would make sense. Poles you can climb elsewhere suddenly become unclimbable, ledges suddenly impossible to grab, objects magically immobile. Your acrobatic talents are tailor-made for riddles with multiple answers, but moments of creative freedom are stiflingly rare, and you're often left to read the game's mind and decipher which solution is the real one. A hint button exists, but it merely points to the exit, which is akin to someone pointing out the center of a hedge maze when you're standing at the outset.

This would be less aggravating if "Edge" didn't disobey its own interface as well. Occasionally, certain objects, walls and doors glow red to lead you in the right direction - but only occasionally. Just as it doesn't make sense why some things don't work sometimes, there exists no apparent science as to why certain key points glow bright red while points of equal importance practically camouflage themselves behind seemingly better solutions that simply don't work.

The sum total of these issues results in a game so thick with trial and error, any attempt at immersion is undermined and continually shattered. That's a serious shame, because during those fleeting moments where "Edge" gets it - particularly during the final leg - it absolutely lives up to its promise. Digital Illusions already has announced plans to take "Edge" down the trilogy route, so here's hoping all this wonderful tech gets a game to match the second time around. This, sadly, isn't even close.

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Copyright 2012 by Mclatchy -Tribune News Service