Game Play: Mirror's Edge Demo

With NaNo about, I don't have much time for either blogging or gaming, but I thought I'd get a quick note about EA's much anticipated Mirror's Edge based on the brief demo that came out recently.

In short - I found the tutorial portion of the demo to be incredibly frustrating. It's a toss up for me, actually, which was more of a pain in the ass - "balancing" on the stupid pipe or executing the run, turn, kick as specifically as the computer wanted. In the first example, the mechanic just seems insanely poorly tuned - for someone as capable and balanced as Faith seems to be, to fail repeatedly at the task felt like a break in immersion and a ridiculously tedious exercise. In the latter, I kept managing to make it to the point I was going for - only to have the game pull me back because I didn't get there in the prescribed arc or something.

Some redemption kicks in when the story starts up and absolutely - the art design and use of first person perspective is unique and engaging. It's just that that jumping mechanic means that the game is in part at least a first person platformer and brings in some of the weight that genre implies.

I'll have to wait for a full review on this one to see if the "jumping, exploring and fighting" parts outweigh the "stupid balance beam, missed timing and potential jumping puzzles" parts, because as it is I'm not too sure.