Amazon.com: Mirror's Edge: PC: Video Games

42 Reviews

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(10)

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3.2 out of 5 stars (42 customer reviews)

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35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and fun game with no endurance, January 23, 2009

By	Grieger (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

I'll start by saying, I'm not including anything about the SecureROM thing. As much as I hate the reasoning behind it, it hasn't caused me any harm so far so consider it off the table with this review.

Mirror's Edge puts you in the trendy running shoes of a Runner, Faith, who gets sucked into a plot to (essentially) overthrown the government of a city in the not-so-distant future. The Runners are couriers that transport packages from point to point using Parkour (sometimes referred to as Freerunning though there is often debate about the similarities). Parkour is about getting between two points in the most efficient way possible. So, say you're on the rooftop of a building. A sane human would take the elevator down and take another elevator (or stairs) up to the other rooftop to get there. A Parkour runner would find a way (on the fly) to leap to the building.

The game makes it easy for you to get used to this idea by providing you with hints on Easy and Normal difficulties (Hard needs to be unlocked by finishing the game in one of the other difficulties and removes those hints). Also, the maps tend to be laid out in a way that makes it pretty intuitive to figure out where you need to go, though at times you're left scratching your head trying to figure out exactly how to get to that little air duct four stories up. There's another hint function that points you in the direction you're supposed to go but of course that doesn't tell you much about how to get there. To make matters worse, you're often being chased by police or Blues as they're referred to, especially as the game progresses.

The look and feel of the game is beautiful (to me at least). From the menu with it's abstract view of the city and great music to the sites and sounds of the cityscape (even the end sequence has a great panning view of the nighttime city). The city is often painted in brilliant colors which breaks sections of the map up.

Combat is generally avoided but there are times when you have no choice but to fight. This is one of the lowpoints of the game. Not so much because of the combat itself, if you pull off a disarm, it's beautiful. But, because disarming is a Dragon's Lair type of game. You have a very small window during which you have to hit the disarm key at the right time to enable the action...and the time you do it isn't the most intuitive if you'd played shooters. As you get to the later parts of the game, the enemies you go up against get much harder to the point where if you don't have the disarm timing thing down right, you might as well just run and take your chances. It even seems like this was intentional at places because at one stage of a map, I was up against two "easier" cops with guns that enabled me to shoot the "untouchable" cops. Only way to survive that one. Ultimately, it seems like they could've made this a lot better and more fun (given how much time you spend on rooftops I'm surprised there isn't a mechanic that lets you grab and toss people off).

Another issue was the PhysX support. It causes hard freezes (I have a Quad Core 2.4Ghz box with a 8800 GT which should've handled it just fine). A patch came out just recently to address PhysX freezes but that didn't seem to change anything. Once disabled, the game runs fine (you can still notice a quick freeze during the same sequences that froze under PhysX...and they're not even areas where there should be a lot of physics being used).

Yet another issue (though minor) I had was with some of the game mechanics. Towards the end of the game, you're required to turn a lot of valve wheels (your opponents can just spin the damned things, you've got to slowly turn them) and you will often find you've really only got a single path to an objective. Not unusual for a game but a game about "free" running, it seems silly that they couldn't have designed the maps to offer a few options rather than one or two.

The last issue, though, is the clincher. And is the reason I dinged the score for this game. I was able to run through the entire game on Normal difficulty in six hours. The game offers a type of multiplayer which is really you running against other people's ghosts which isn't really much of a multiplayer so overall replayability is severly limited. If this game were sold for $20, I'd be fine with it but at full price ($50), it's ridiculous. And it sucks too since I really want to be able to play more of this game.

All in all, if you're an FPS type who wants to have fun trying something new, this game is definitely for you...if it's discounted to the $30's. Also, if you're not an FPS type and wanted to try something, it's definitely worth trying (at $30-35) especially given the fact that you don't have to tote guns (and in a way are penalized for using guns for any long period of time).

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Loneliness of the First-Person Runner, June 23, 2009

By	Pyanfar Chanur (USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

The biggest difference between Mirror's Edge for the PS3 and the PC is that the PC can support Phys-X. This is a relatively new technology that adds a layer of realism by dropping real-world behavior into the game using complex real physics formulae. Believe me, this makes a big difference: shattering glass, blowing smoke, billowing curtains and more are substantially different. Unfortunately, if you don't bring some hefty hardware to the table, you'll run into serious problems that make the game unplayable. Even substantially powerful machines may still have this issue. Patches have been released to address this issue, but even that success will vary depending on the system and the configuration.

If you are experiencing performance problems, the first thing to do is turn Phys-X support off. Next, disable anti-aliasing: the way the world of Mirror's Edge is designed, AA does not add enough to the experience to make it worthwhile for gameplay to suffer.

Mirror's Edge is the first immersive game experience that can truly capture the high-speed acrobatics of Parkour and fuse it with an action game that, in defiance of years of shooters, actually demands that you think of your own survival first. The beauty of it is that there are times when you start thinking like a Runner and suddenly you're doing combination moves that you figured out an instant before you pulled them off: the acrobatics are fluid and seamless and the environment does a good job of guiding you by sparse colors that light the next object you need in neon red.

This game was originally written for the console. While many console ports are very frustrating on the PC, with Mirror's Edge you get a mixed bag. On the one hand, it seems like the keyboard is more responsive (and faster) than the PS3's controller. Aiming is a thousand times easier when you have the pinpoint precision of a mouse instead of the sluggish jerkiness of a thumb stick. On the other hand, PC gamers know the ropes when it comes to games: performance can drop at any time, and for any reason--and when it does, in a fast-paced action game like Mirror's Edge you are screwed.

When those beautiful moves don't work, it can be very, very frustrating. Sometimes the combination you need to work to get out of somewhere isn't obvious, or worse yet, it's extremely hard. You may land on a surface, only to have Faith keep moving and slide off the other side, unable to backpedal under the impetus of your jump. And of course there are also "duh" moments where the "wall-run" key (space bar) being the same as the "jump" key means if you're not spot-on, Faith does the wrong thing, and away you go into space.

Which is the scary part: knuckle-biting adrenaline moments where you just sealed your doom play out all the way to the crunch of hitting the pavement. Being shot to pieces leaves you with a slow-mo falling sensation that will give you amusement-park vertigo and near-death-experience chills. I put this down to simple "oops" mistakes, but one larger complaint that looms is that you are a skinny twenty-something in a roomful of heavily armored SWAT and police soldiers, some of whom are carrying belt-fed miniguns. You are supposed to get a reward for making it all the way through the game without killing anyone, and I find it extremely unlikely, especially on the last level, that this is possible to do. Even more so, you get a trophy if you can avoid getting shot--I simply do not believe that is possible.

This game has been agony and ecstasy for me, and when I beat it I felt exhilarated. If you are a high-energy gamer who has the patience to try and try again, you will find yourself rewarded. If not, you should know ahead of time that there's no cathartic blasting your way out of trouble in this game. Mirror's Edge marks the beginning of a new genre: the First-Person Runner.

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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cheap Price: But won't run, July 21, 2009

By	Moroni Marten (Utah) - See all my reviews

Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars

Purchased the game from amazon.com. Installed as per instructions. When I go to play, I get a message that the game cannot access the internet to verify ownership. I disabled all firewall and anti-virus and UAC; yet, I am still unable to connect. Game will not play without this verification.

After 90 minutes of troubleshooting, I give up.

Worthless