Mirror's Edge (Xbox 360)

Prince of Persia for pacifists.
11/13/2008 8:01 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Mirror's Edge can be exhilarating. As Faith, a practitioner of parkour, players flit across the tops of skyscrapers, vaulting over fences, sliding under ventilation shafts, and leaping across gaping concrete chasms. Come too close to a drop and Faith reels to a stop, looking down into the abyss like James Stewart in "Vertigo." You can practically feel your arms spinning to keep balance. Frankly, it's amazing how well Faith handles. We see the world of Mirror's Edge through Faith's eyes. Only occasionally, when running full out or bashing a cop in the nuts, do her hands come into view. When we pause to look down, we see her legs, feet and shadow as if they were our own.

Imagine trying to dance without awareness of your own body. No sensation. No hint of your torso or limbs in your peripheral vision. Just a set of strings that jerk your limbs like the wooden arms and legs of a marionette. That's how inhabiting Faith in first-person ought to feel -- disjointed and removed. But by some miracle of game design, the controls work. It only takes a moment or two to understand the game's rhythm: when to jump, when to duck, and when to dodge. Then it's off. We tear towards the horizon, darting across rooftops, barreling down hallways.

At full speed Mirror's Edge is a blast -- but slow down to contemplate the scenery and the whole shebang starts to unravel. According to the game's wafer-thin plot, Faith is a courier. But we never really see who her customers are and what, exactly, she's transporting. Faith risks her life for a living, but we never learn what she's risking her life for. Sure, there's a flashback that establishes that her parents were part of some crushed resistance -- one her mother gave her life for. But without names or faces, it's hard to feel for those freedom fighters. If Faith is only in it for the money, we never see how such greed is working out for her. There's not a single Han Solo moment to establish why Faith chose the path of the scoundrel and what that life has bought her. And her Chewbacca, a dispatcher named Mercury, offers little more to which to cling. Merc fills the now-clichéd role of all-knowing buddy. He's the voice in Faith's ear, always telling her where to go and how fast she's got to get there.

On one hand, the game's tendency to gloss over plot is refreshing. We're left to fill in the blanks, especially when it comes to the game's unnamed city. The place is pristine and prosperous. From the rooftops we can see that the berg is orderly, well-appointed and crazily clean. By now urban squalor is the de facto standard for videogame cities. Can you name a virtual metropolis that hasn't been strewn with litter and decorated end-to-end with graffiti? In the near-future utopia of Mirror's Edge, law and order are so pervasive that the Sharpie set is reduced to tagging the inside of air conditioning vents. But the city is empty, except for the police. From the rooftops it's easy to imagine the surrounding buildings packed full of beleaguered souls, like all those unwitting slaves trapped in the Matrix. But when Faith trespasses in these corporate strongholds, the offices are always totally unpopulated. Where are all the people? There's no point in turning every soul into Soylent Green if there's nobody left to eat them.