I've been playing Mirrors Edge on the 360 to alleviate my boredom whilst I wait for my new mouse to arrive, of course my old mouse has decided that the right click is going to start working again- most of the time anyway. I've still got hitman on my list, so I figure I might as well give that another bash before I start trying to play LoL again- if I can handle it.
Anyway, Mirrors Edge- I didn't get that far in before I just got flat out bored of it. The only story element I really ran into was something called "Icarus" some big bad secret something or other. It's right here, when I hear that word that I start to lose interest in the story. The cutscenes are gorgeous & the voice acting is fine and everything. Thing is, I've just got beef with using Icarus as code for any kind of plan or technology or whatever. Human Revolution did it too & it was stupid, but at least not a part of the plot.
For everyone that doesn't know Icarus is a story from Greek mythology about some guy that wanted to escape from Crete by using wings made of feathers and wax, he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, he fell into the ocean and drowned- the end. So in it's most basic form- he failed.
I get why video game devs use this word, it's from Greek mythology so it's inherently cool & it's a story or at least a name everyone has heard of. Thing is, Icarus failed. Not only did he fail, he died- so you're basically condemning your plan to fail or your technology to have some stupid flaw. It's like naming your new super cool water based technology the Titanic.
Mirrors Edge has a very limited colour scheme & most of it is red, white & blue. With objects of interest being red/blue thanks to "runners vision" a visual aid to show you objects of interest like platforms to jump from/onto, this mode is disabled on hard mode- so I dread to think how dull the game would look without runners vision. I suppose DICE tried to do something interesting with the visuals here, and there's merit in that- sadly I feel like it failed.
The game, at least on the 360, is riddled with Half-life 2 circa 2004 mid level loading screens & Mass Effect loading elevators. This makes dying so much of a chore that I'd often give up playing after one death and go play TES: Oblivion instead. The free running & platforming mechanics are pretty good, for the most part they flow well & are fun to use. However, the combat system is so janky that I found myself avoiding combat not because it was safer, but because running away allowed me to not have to use the awful fighting controls. It was certainly refreshing to have a female lead & I do wish I had the will to play more just so I could be exposed to more of Faiths life.
So for me, Mirrors Edge basically sucked. I had fun for an hour or so, but I wasn't interested in the story & the only themes the game really seemed to be portraying were about freedom and dystopias. I've seen that so many times that it honestly didn't hold my interest.
Lets hope Hitman can keep me from trying to game on my PC with an unreliable mouse.
Edit: It totally didn't stop me, It was a ranked game of League of Legends. Logic.
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