Mirror's Edge is not worth the hype and wears thin real fast...
1. Graphics and sound
The graphics are hard to describe. Everything is as polished as you'd expect from a game on the Xbox 360, but many of the rooms/items in the game feel so bloody similar. You will enter a room and many of the items in it either look re-painted or the same thing being with the rooms you'll go into. Also many of the objects in this game range in quality. Some, you will notice whether it's just a low-resolution image texture or look flat while others look pretty great. Let's put that aside. The animated cutscenes however, are abysmal. If you haven't already seen in another video of this game, the cutscenes are of cheesy-cartoony-advert kind of bad. The sound acting isn't far behind. The game's dialogue sounds like it was pretty much read by a bunch of robots. The moans and sound effects done by Faith are of an acceptable standard I guess. The one odd thing about this that I never understood is it's concept of realism. You can trip and lose lots of health, but you can get thrown by an enemy in the air and after smacking the concrete with your head, all you can shout is something sounding like "ouch!" or "ow!" -- what the hell is up with that?
2. Story
Umm...the story is pretty much a gimmick. It's something along the lines of a Nike advert (runners) and an anti-some-sort-of-evil-goverment -- something along the lines of "I can change this corrupt government" and eventually the government not being too happy with that, then eventually being a plain revenge-driven goal over your sister. I didn't really care or even payed attention to what it was about as I couldn't wait to just play it.
3. Gameplay, AI...and the rest.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward. The basic layout of the game is pretty much based on that of games like Breakdown (you can see your arms and legs) and Chronicles of Riddick. The fighting mechanics are quite similar to those of Breakdown. Also there's a slow-mo mode that basically slows down time (kind of a Matrix-time thing) when your enemies are attacking you so you can run up to them and beat the hell outta' them or disarm them.
Use of guns as actual weapons in this game is horrible beyond belief. The enemies have a pre-written script of falling in the exact same freaking way when getting gunned down. No satisfying headshots...infact its just the opposite. The game is very unresponsive in this area for some reason. Out of the 3 times you shooting an enemy, only the 3rd time (when the bloody game's waken up) will the enemy actually realise he's supposed to die by now. Same thing with the fighting. Often you will attempt to punch an opponent but somehow end up missing.
The acrobatics are a major pain in the ass. While a game like Prince of Persia gives you a more or less open view of your surrounding so you understand what you have to do, where you have to get to and how you will get there, Mirror's Edge gives you an extremely limited view and while often it may be pretty obvious in working out where to go, it can also be extremely frustrating. You die far too many times from some things like jumping off the edge a tad bit too early or missing the pipe slightly and it has NO FREAKING REWIND FUNCTION! If they can throw in a time machine in an already pretty fictious story, the whole experience would be at least 10 times better. Also the first-person view should be farless restricting in the future, giving people a better chance to feel the trills during the jump (so you can easily see what the risk involved is rather than just staring at your destination during leaps). The final thing I have to add is that they have got to add some sort of multiplayer modes.
Mirror's Edge is a decent combination of a GTA game without the free-roaming ability, Breakdown-style FPS combat and Prince of Persia-ish acrobatics, but due to its issues, major annoyances and somewhat highly monotonous gameplay and level designs, there is no point in picking this title up until it at least hits the bargain bins as its just not worth it, but missing it isn't a sin, even if you are a serious gamer.