The story of the game revolves around a modern world where all information is monitored and the only way to get anything around privately are through people called runners. You are Faith, one of these select few. Your character gets into beef with the authorities when Faith's sister is framed for the murder of one of the top people in the city. Not the most unique story, but I suppose it suffices. The main story mode isn't very difficult if you decide that you are going to disarm and shoot enemies, but if you're looking for a challenge put the game on the harder difficulty and try to complete the game without shooting any enemies (much, much harder). And I'm going to have to say it; the ending of the game is weak sauce. Compared to other portions of the game, it's so easy my semi-blind grandfather (God bless him) could beat it.
The graphics of the game are nice, but could be better. All the buildings look the same and objects are reused all over the place. The cut scenes are illustrated, giving it a very cool style and diversity from the gameplay graphics. The coolest part of the game is how the environments were crafted so that there are multiple possible routes to take from one place to another. This leads me into the best part of the entire game. The time trials.
Once you've played the time trials, you'll find that they are more fun than the actual story mode. Granted you'll need to beat certain portions of the story chapters to unlock the time trials, but it's worth it. These trials test your ability to run through select parts of each chapter as quickly as possible. Remember that momentum and timing are key, so you can easily find yourself beating your previous time simply because you might have soft-rolled earlier at a certain point, or decided to jump instead of wallrun at another point. The time trials cover all nine levels of the game along with some playground courses from the tutorial lesson. For each course there is a star rating, a quota of time you need to get to get one, two, or three stars (three stars meaning you've practically found the best possible path through the course and execute it with minimal mistakes). Furthermore, your best times for each trial are uploaded and ranked online against the rest of the Mirror's Edge community. Additionally, you can look up the top ranked person for a specific trial and download their ghost to see what types of techniques and paths they used to achieve their time. These time trials are definitely the biggest highlight of the game.
There are also speedruns of the chapters, but we've found them to be more frustrating than anything. Ultimately, they are the same thing as time trials, but instead of being quick one minutes stretches, they traverse entire chapters of the game. They allow for minimal mistakes and have pre-designated times to complete them in, in place of star ratings. Note, playing these are like you're actually playing the story mode, so you'll have to cope with enemies, unlike in the time trials. I don't mean to sound so pessimistic about them, but in all truth, time trials are much more fun. Making a few mistake at the end of one of these speedruns means you'll have to restart the entire chapter, negating the ten minutes of work you've just done.
If you're looking for fun game, you'll find it here. As much as I put down the main story mode, it really isn't terrible. The voice acting of the game is about average, but definitely could use some work. Together, the game's nine chapters will encompass about seven to eight hours of gameplay on your first playthrough, so it's quite short. Max actually beat it in a single sitting. I suppose that simply goes to show how fun it is though, right? Right. The first person shooter genre is a very crowded category, but Mirror's Edge has uniqueness to it with an added appreciation to finesse and timing to make it more of a puzzle pertaining to how you can get from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time. If you're skeptical about this game, rent it and play the time trials... you'll buy it then.
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