GC 2008: Mirror's Edge Updated Hands-On

Mirror's Edge wants you to drop that weapon. Oh sure, when you're facing an enemy with a loaded shotgun in your hands, you're perfectly welcome to fire away and send the bad guy flying. But after you've spent some time in the Mirror's Edge world, your first instinct will be to drop that weapon as quickly as possible and continue on your way. And that's seems to be just the way the developers at DICE want it.

We had a chance to play the game here at Leipzig and came away extremely impressed with the result. As developers put it, they're looking to put the "person" back in the first-person action game; in the case of Mirror's Edge, that person is Faith, an acrobatic runner who delivers messages to those living on the outskirts of the tightly monitored society that is the gameworld. DICE developers are quick to point out that this is not a delivery game. In fact, only in the game's prologue--which serves as a tutorial of sorts to the game's simple and elegant controls--do you even actually deliver a package. The rest of the time, you're merely dealing the pain to your enemies...or avoiding them altogether.

We'd seen the prologue level before, but this time out, we got to try a new level that takes place underground in a sewer system. Before you recoil in horror (another sewer level in a video game?), trust us, this is unlike any sewer you've ever explored. Modeled after the massive underground sewer system in Tokyo built to assist in case of a tsunami, this is a huge underground structure with a series of massive pillars that makes it look like a futuristic version of the Mines of Moria from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

It's up to Faith to get from the bottom of the sewer level up to the top, and you'll make the most of her skillful acrobatic abilities to do so. By this time in the game, you'll have spent a good deal of time learning how to maneuver Faith throughout the world, and you'll need to use a few advanced techniques to get her to her destination. One handy trick is used straightaway: You're required to reach a ladder that's just out of jumping reach. To grab it, you'll have to first jump off a nearby wall by pressing the L1 button, then immediately turn 180 degrees with a press of the R1 button before latching onto the ladder.

Other cool tricks include using hanging pipes, such as trapeze bars, to swing from one to the next with multiple presses of the L1 button. Momentum plays a big role in Faith's ability to move from spot to spot; one trick you can use to make sure you've always got speed on your side is to use the L2 button. Similar to how the L1 button controls Faith's various "up" moves (jumping, wall running, climbing), the L2 button is for her "down" moves and can include such things as ground slides or rolls. For example, if you press the L2 button when coming down off a huge jump just before landing, you'll roll through the landing, keeping your speed up as you prepare for your next death-defying stunt.

As we made our way up the pillars of the sewer level, we eventually ran into the police force that was looking to take Faith down. And by "take her down" we mean, in this case, "shoot her with sniper rifles until she dies." You first encounter enemies that are stationed far across the sewer on the opposite wall, and it's relatively easy to dodge their bullets. Eventually you come to a gun-wielding enemy, whom you can disarm in a number of ways. First, you can do it in real time; as you close in on the enemy, his gun will briefly turn red. At this moment, you can disarm him by pressing the triangle button. Alternately, you can choose to punch your way out of trouble by pressing the R2 button.

If you want to get really fancy, you can use the so-called runner vision, which briefly slows down the action so you can take out an enemy with little trouble. You earn runner vision by performing successive moves, and you access it by pressing the square button. The effect lasts for about four or five seconds, which is plenty of time to take down a single enemy. As we found our playing the game, your best bet when encountering multiple enemies is to split them up and take them on one-by-one; anytime Faith is encountering multiple enemies, it's going to be tough for her to come out in one piece.

Should you choose to pick up a weapon and blast your way past a bad guy, you'll be surprised how quickly you'll discard your weapon. That's because Mirror's Edge is not a shooter, and it comes by that basic concept in an honest way. If Faith is armed, she's weighed down and can't perform her amazing skyscraper-hopping moves. Because the point of the game is to keep moving, you rarely, if ever, feel bad about having to toss your weapon. After all, the fun of being Faith is in moving, not necessarily wasting baddies.

It's that sense of sensible immersion into a fantastical world that holds the real fascination for us with Mirror's Edge. We're happy that the relatively austere color palette of the prologue--with its bright sci-fi whites and reds--is broken up with the relatively murky, dark look of the underground level. Undoubtedly, it's one of the most compelling games we've seen in a while, and we can't wait to see what Faith has in store for us next.