Mirror's Edge

To be blunt, I really didn't care for this game. I know it earned a lot of criticism when it came out eight and a half years ago, but I'd never really read into the details beyond "shaky control scheme." Oof. It's not so much the control scheme that sucked - although it's a bit weird to use the shoulder buttons to jump and slide and pivot in a first-person parkour platform game, yes - as much as the clunkiness of the gameplay. In a game ostensibly built around speed and wall-climbing and jumping and rolling and, you know, just high-flying action in general, it's important to get your ledge-and-pole detection right. The number of times I went sailing into an abyss because I was off center by what felt like inches - my blood's boiling just thinking about it!

Also - this game was repetitive as hell and not very pretty. Its combat and gunplay were woefully bad, too - there were no melee weapons and the only guns you could find had to come from disarming enemies, which, hey, with your fists, not so easy. At least not as first - I did eventually get the hang of it. Oh, and of all things for a game to fuck up - the brightness was all kinds of fucked up here. Every time I was in a dark corridor - and that's where about a third of this game is spent - I had to pause, enter the menu, and tweak the brightness settings just so I could see where I was going. And then when I'd reemerge outside, the daylight was blinding, and I'd have to knock the brightness settings back down to their defaults. Maybe there was something uniquely fucked up with playing the digital download of the Xbox 360 game on an Xbox One or something. I dunno.

Oh, and the checkpoints. Goddamn. For a game with suck fussy edge detection and so many deaths, this could have really used more frequent checkpoints. It's nothing short of infuriating to play through the same segment of obstacles and ladders ten or fifteen times because this one pole-swing-and-jump is giving you problems. Ugh.

Bottom line, this could have been so much better with a few small tweaks. Sween says there were no guns in the recently released sequel. That's a start. I'm sure the brightness wasn't an issue either. But was it a repetitive bore with problematic edge detection? Sween, enlighten us!