As I usually do when I buy a new game, I'm posting my impressions here. ME(PC) was officially released on the 13th, but for some reason, none of the stores I've visited seemed to have any copies, nor did most of them seem particularly optimistic about receiving a shipment. Anyways, I finally managed to get my hands on one earlier this afternoon.

Now, if you bother reading my posts at all in this forum, then you'll know that I'm not particularly fond of EA. Their recent catalogue has been a series of shallow disappointments. For some reason, though, I felt like giving EA one more chance; After all, something as awesome looking and as original as Mirror's Edge can't possibly go wrong, right? I was pretty sure this would be the last EA-published game I would buy in many, many years, or possibly ever. But if this one managed to impress me, then I might reconsider that position.

So you've got your mediocre-looking asian chick with the annoying tattoo on the cover, but you probably already knew that. The box makes a point of mentioning that it contains a "bonus music CD" of some of the worst music you'll ever hear. Now, maybe it's just me, but I get rather annoyed when I end up paying for shit I don't want. The cost of printing that disk could've gone towards shaving 5 bucks off the retail price. Or at least, give me something I do want, like a bonus DVD with porn.

I start installing the game when I notice that it's taking a freakishly long time, and that my DVD drive is making odd noises. I recognized those sounds from splinter cell's shitty securom protection making my optical drive cry, and ultimately crashing (Yes, this game, unsurprisingly, contains some invasive DRM and a limited number (5) of installs). Indeed, this one ended up crashing too. It took three attempts at installing and a little over an hour before I could get the game working at all. Note to self; use steam next time.

So I finally get to start playing. I go through the infamous tutorial, which, really wasn't half as bad as everyone was making it out to be. Atmosphere is something this game achieves remarkably well. The graphics are pretty (U3 always is). It never really takes you out of first person view or force you to watch long and tedious cutscenes (which happens to be my biggest pet peeve), so that'll get it some free w00t points from me. Most of your objectives are given through radio transmissions. No major interruptions, and the little storytelling there is was snuggly fit in the loading screens. That means, in a general sense, the game flows pretty well. Sound design is especially good. You can hear appropriate gasps, breathing or impact sounds fitting whatever you're doing in-game. The control scheme is simple and intuitive, everything runs smooth, no problem there.

The first of my problems started after I noticed that I was missing ledges I couldn't see because the gratuitous amount of post-processing was blurring them out into an annoying and unnessessary bloom. After a while it got so annoying that I ended up turning the game's graphics settings down to minimum, which, ironically, made everything look better and more readable. Another minor graphics related issue worth mentioning is that the PhysX physics emulation (which is somewhat of a selling point for the PC version) makes my otherwise flawless framerate slow down to a crawl at 1-2 FPS. I haven't had any problems with physics emulation in any other U3 based game in the past. Oh well, disabled that too.

On to the gameplay itself: In case you're not familiar with the concept, ME is supposedly based around the idea of having you jump from rooftop to rooftop, performing acrobatic moves in the process and attempting to preserve momentum. It's a fairly refreshing and original idea. Now, when the game actually lets you do this, it's a whole lot of fun. The problem is, it rarely ever does. You get to do your best spiderman impression for a good 30 seconds at a time before you're forced into annoying and poorly designed jumping puzzles or an atrocious combat system that amounts to little more than a bunch of random and unreliable quick time events.

Speaking of the combat; The game was advertised as discouraging the use of guns, focusing instead on disarming enemies or simply avoiding them. This was supposed to be another one of the game's "selling points". In reality, the melee system is incredibly clumsy, and most of the time, you'll just prefer picking up guns and shooting. In fact, most of the combat situations are designed in such a way as to discourage running away. Whenever you try something original, the game will find some way to punish you for it. A lot of these sequences even force you to take down enemies, preventing your progress until you do so.

(it should be noted that this can be avoided altogether by playing the "race" mode... except that all the maps appear to be initially locked out until, I would imagine, you've been forced to suffer through them at least once)

Now, back to the roof-jumping part, supposedly the good part of ME; that has some serious issues as well. The game provides you with some guidance by highlighting certain objects in red, a little gimmick they call "runner-vision". This works for the most part, but occasionally you'll run across 'false cues' where the game is explicitly or inexplicitly telling you to do something that will ultimately make you fall to your death - over and over again. You'll try to grab pipes only to have your character's hands go right through them. Even more confusing is that often, critical objects that should be highlighted aren't, causing you to hesitate and die (again). It seems almost like a cruel joke where the game efficiently conditions you to respond to the stimulus, then proceeds to torture and torment you with it. Some later parts of the game are soaked in red paint. It's like the designers just gave up and decided "fuck it, let's make everything red!"

To amplify this shittiness tenfold, they don't let you save. Ever. Instead, you'll have to rely on a system of cruel checkpoints; usually placed before frustrating bits, but rarely after, ensuring that you'll go through the frustrating bits as often as possible.

What's incredible in all this is that, despite the fact that you'll probably die every 30 seconds, the actual game, aside from all that random and unpredictable killing of the player, is fairly unchallenging. It almost exclusively relies on random deaths or bad and frustrating design choices to give an impression of difficulty. It ultimately boils down to breezing forward through easy street until you randomly and inexplicably die, then reloading from the last checkpoint and going through the same bit over and over again until the game arbitrarily decides to let you live.

Top all that with a 'meh' storyline, a plot twist you can see coming from a mile away, a mediocre soundtrack and you've got a package not really worth getting. This game gets most of it's points from originality and atmosphere (arguably, the only things it does well), but not much else. I really wanted to like this game. I still think it's a fantastic idea, and I would love to see the concept executed well, but this just isn't it.

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Once bread becomes toast, it can never go back to being bread again.

Last edited by Cpt.Cocaine on Jan-15-2009 at 05:12