Many sections of the intended game place you in closed room encounters with cops that are difficult to escape without neutralizing all the enemies, as you frequently need to climb something slowly, or slowly open a door, giving them a big opportunity to gun you down in an instant.Ĭombat with normal cops is not well designed.
Mirrors edge chapters how to#
While Mirror’s Edge is beautiful to explore, the intended experience doesn’t really offer interesting choices as to how to complete it, and it doesn’t have much of an outlet for developing skill with the game.
Now that I’ve played the game as much as I have, I can identify the location of most any screenshot I’m seen, and I can play through and explore levels in my head, including much of the out of bounds areas. When I first began racing Mirror’s Edge with a friend, I’d spend most of my time in runs not knowing where to go next, until I practiced enough in my off time to remember the route. And it’s paced this way as well, giving you more straightforward chase sections, with slower contemplative climbing sections interspersed to break up the action.
Mirrors edge chapters series#
In this way it’s less of a traditional platformer, and more of a series of platforming puzzles. The game is beautiful with a timeless art style, but actually figuring out where to go can be extremely difficult. Everywhere looks like the same white concrete with single color walls. The environments are incredibly dense and reuse a lot of assets. To the uninitiated, Mirror’s Edge can be extremely difficult to navigate. Most of the challenge in Mirror’s Edge as its intended is figuring out where to go, and how to get there before the cops burst in and gunned you down. You’re supposed to only be able to accelerate by running forwards. You’re supposed to climb things and play all the environmental animations attached to scaling everything. You’re supposed to follow a set path forwards. This ruleset generally bars many common universal tricks across the game, and have incredibly limiting rules for every chapter that help illustrate exactly how simple the intended routes are supposed to be. Speedrunners have constructed a list of rules for “true glitchless%” that are incredibly limiting but true to the intended spirit of the game. The game was more or less constructed to have one or two true routes through the level, and optimization was about picking the shortest line to travel, rather than anything you did along the way. Playing Mirror’s Edge the way it’s supposed to be intended, the number of routes through the level are highly limited. I think that what makes games interesting or fun is when they have interesting choices connected to differing skill challenges, which give better or worse results with regards to your skillful input. I’ll be doing this largely because I don’t think the intended game of Mirror’s Edge is particularly interesting or fun. In this review, I’ll be reviewing the speedgame of Mirror’s Edge, not the “casual” or “canonical” or “intended” version of the game. What’s possible in the speedgame sometimes can influence the “casual” game (what speedrunners call the more default ruleset), but it’s very situational per-game. For that reason my blog doesn’t tend to focus on the “speedgame” for a piece of software, but rather the “canonical” game that represents more of the lowest-common-denominator idea of what the public thinks the game is, which is usually something closer to what the developers intended than anything else.
Mirrors edge chapters software#
Speedrunners are playing their own game with the software relative to everyone else. With this in mind, the game isn’t necessarily the software you play with, but rather how you choose to use it, and different players can play different games with the same software. On this blog, I define a game as a “contract” that the player agrees to play under, either a contract with themselves or other players, as in a multiplayer or co-op game. I also had a massive amount of fun learning the various techniques involved in the game, from the easy to the hard, and refining my run. My best time was about 55 minutes, which isn’t that impressive, but in the process of learning to speedrun it, I learned a lot about what makes an interesting speedgame. Mirror’s Edge is one of my most-played games because I used to speedrun it. Photos courtesy of Dead End Thrills and gifs courtesy of CabalCrow from my discord. I’m going to try to review every game in my 5×5, available on the About & Best Posts page.