I’m with most of the other posters here– I don’t want this to be a beat-em-up, I don’t mind running away from guy’s shooting at me, and I appreciate that they let me take several gunshot wounds before I’m brought down, but there are just some things about the world that ought to be brought into the combat. One of those is that if a muscly woman who can make incredible leaps comes sprinting at you and hits you full on with a kick, even if you’re a decently sized man, you’re going to be staggered. If she’s trained in some form of martial arts, she might be able to stun you briefly.

It’s the combination of an extremely free-feeling game (though it’s almost on rails, though the invisible walls are extra invisible in this game, which I appreciate) with gimmicky, extremely phony combat. It reminds me of the Empire Strikes Back Atari game– there was a flashing square on the AT-ATs that you had to shoot with your speeder. That was the only spot where they were vulnerable, so you had to find and shoot just that spot. It worked in that game because the whole thing was just an artificial, 80s arcade-y game. Here, it breaks the immersion and is just frustrating.

Kudos to you on all of your playthroughs, I’m just having such a hard time sustaining focus on it, but wish I could.

Oh! The Gameological Society (gameological.com) made a video of Mirror’s Edge remixed with soundtrack replaced by M83’s Until the Dawn Heals Us; it’s worth a look if you’re a fan of either, both (or neither, I guess :) ). Thanks for the write up! It was nice to see that a fan and competent player of the game shared at least some of my frustrations. Maybe I’ll keep at it.

Example scenario: I’m running down a corridor created by shipping crates and there are three shotgun wielding blues in front of me. I drop kick the first guy and run past his staggering body to his buddy, whom I disarm with a well-applied slow effect. The muzzle of my newly acquired shotgun is then introduced to the face of Blue #3, and I run past into a door, feeling lik a boss.

…or, at least, that’ss what would have happened if I hadn’t been staring at Blue #1 like a star-struck schoolgirl while his buds pummeled me to death. Anyone else see a problem here?

When I see a name like “Fuck Mirror’s Edge” I expect literary sophistication on par with Wodehouse, and yet I underestimated your sheer capacity for wordplay, for understanding the intricacies of the language. “and starts playing”? Shakespeare himself would roll over in his grave with envy.

(And Tom liked the game. Trust him a little more than you, yeah?)

-How is that different than how it is in the game?!

And I now have a twitter account; I will promptly start to never use it. I’m a little bit angry because “SenatorPalpatine” is one too many characters. This is why I don’t have a Digg account, because they expect me to fit a username into fifteen characters. Guess what? IT’S ONE TOO FEW! ‘Sen_Palpatine’ will have to do for twitter. If only SenatorPalpatine was one less letter. If only…

Cheap game? Tell two of your friends that each said something nasty about the other, and convince both that you’re the only one they can trust.

Tom, your <these> tag didn’t show up in my feed reader, but I see it here. When are you going to draw the line at making your website compatible? What about bally foreigners?

Lastly, do you mind if I sound drunk? Impossible to tell, so far.

[b]YES.[/b]

The times I had to use it, it was fine. Except for the fight againest the Parkour Assassion, but thats only because my main combo (punch, punch, ball kick) doesn’t work on that person.

In the drain thingie with the snipers, I messed up the disarm move and thought “well I’ll just redo it” but when I respawned it was on a later checkpoint and the snipers were gone.

Here’s hoping instead of a sequel they do a prequel that actually is just about delivering packages past cops in a timely manner.

I’ve not played this on PC, whats the quality of the port like?

Modern day Thief game with free-running motion, FTW?

If it had flagged Jaz’s comment with “Dude sounds like he’s drunk,” however, I might have concurred.

Actually, the game tells you that the red glow means that you can either fight or run past them, but you do have to go through them in some way.

It is possible in pretty much every situation in Mirror’s Edge to get past without fighting – however, you will die a lot (a lot more than if you were to attempt combat).

I actually didn’t find the combat that bad. I’ve played through the entire game three times (once on each difficulty) and got the achievement for not shooting anybody (I have it on 360) and I actually got quite used to the combat. I didn’t use the disarm moves unless the enemy was facing away from me, making for an easy disarm, and generally if you separate the enemies and take them out one by one you shouldn’t have that much trouble.

That’s not to say it’s well designed; I agree with pretty much everything you say here, but I found the combat part of the game reasonably fun (as well as making the enemies shoot the servers in the last room of the game for me by running round the perimeter and then legging it up the stairs to the roof).

Of course, I’ve just realised that there are three absolutely unavoidable fights, but they’re not of the normal kind against cops with guns. And only one of them is really a fight.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the times Merc tells you to stop and fight, early on, were a response to early playtesters repeatedly trying to get past every enemy. It’s what you naturally feel like doing in this game. Their response to that should have been to make sure that playstyle is feasible, rather than try to talk people out of it. The only times that it’s not seem to be calculated attempts to scupper it.

Mostly agreed about Time Trial, found it a little unexciting and haven’t returned to it.