Mirror’s Edge

Life as a postie in the near future is hard work

Platform:  iPhone
Developer:  EA DICE
Publisher:  Electronic Arts

Thanks to a recent clearance sale of iTunes vouchers at Coles, I got around to buying my first actual game on the iPad recently, Mirrors Edge by EA.

For the uninitiated, Mirrors Edge is a game in which you play a courier in a dystopian future which is ruled by a tyrant.  To subvert this tyrant and their regime (okay so I didn’t really pay attention to anyone’s names, sue me) your character must traverse urban landscapes to deliver some messages to, uh, some other guys.

Okay, so the storyline is not the hook here.  What does make the game a very entertaining diversion is the play mechanics.  By making simple swiping gestures across the screen, your character leaps, bounds, dives and barrel rolls through some city landscapes and its all been designed in such a way that you should be able to do this in a fluid motion with few pauses required for changing direction.  What this means is that with a little bit of practise, you can complete levels in what is sort of comparable to a single ‘take’ in an action movie.  The challenge here isn’t really in making to the end of the stage, its more about doing so without tumbling into an obstacle or halting your momentum.

There’s six different environments each with about three different levels within them.  So you can more or less complete everything in about half an hour.  The idea is that you should come back to perform speed runs, trying to beat your previous fastest time.  There’s also a secondary challenge where you have to find a bunch of hidden handbags within each stage (really) but thats about as fun as it sounds.

All in all, I had a pretty good time with Mirrors Edge.  I like the graphics plus the levels are well designed and fun to sprint through.  For one of the first available iPad games, I think thats a pretty reasonable effort.