Friday, October 31, 2008
Demo Impressions: Mirror's Edge
I was happy with the demo, but one thing that irks me to no end in first person games cropped up: When a scripted story event happens in your normal view, the game suspends your control of your character and forces your view to where they want you to look. Someone called this "eyejacking" once, and I think the term is appropriate for something so intrusive, so annoying, and so unfair. When Valve wants you to look in a particular direction, they design their geometry so that you are encouraged to look in that direction, though you are at all times free not to. It takes a whole helluva lot more time to construct things that way, but it also never, ever, ever robs you of your own "free will" to look where you like. Here though, you have no choice. I felt like I was back playing Haze during those portions.
Otherwise though, I was pleased. Playing well is rewarded with a smooth play experience--a lot like an evolved Dragon's Lair where you have to hit a linear series of points, but leaving how you hit those points up to you. I was pretty pissed that you couldn't skip first-person story sequences, though. In training, I had to keep playing the bit where you bound off of a wall to hang on another surface then pull yourself up onto it over again because I was landing on the surface I was to hang from. Even though I was ending up in the same place, the game wanted me to hang, so I awarded a "FAILED" message and forced to watch the other runner go through the exact same sequence before I could go in. There were a couple of other segments where I had to watch that stuff--I halfway expected a valkyrie to come down and lift my dead carcass off of the screen before the next retry. I'm hoping that the finished game will allow you to skipping scenes like these, but considering the fact that several triggers or events need to happen in-engine for other things to play well, I'm not expecting it.
I did like it, though!
Otherwise though, I was pleased. Playing well is rewarded with a smooth play experience--a lot like an evolved Dragon's Lair where you have to hit a linear series of points, but leaving how you hit those points up to you. I was pretty pissed that you couldn't skip first-person story sequences, though. In training, I had to keep playing the bit where you bound off of a wall to hang on another surface then pull yourself up onto it over again because I was landing on the surface I was to hang from. Even though I was ending up in the same place, the game wanted me to hang, so I awarded a "FAILED" message and forced to watch the other runner go through the exact same sequence before I could go in. There were a couple of other segments where I had to watch that stuff--I halfway expected a valkyrie to come down and lift my dead carcass off of the screen before the next retry. I'm hoping that the finished game will allow you to skipping scenes like these, but considering the fact that several triggers or events need to happen in-engine for other things to play well, I'm not expecting it.
I did like it, though!
Labels: action, demo impressions, first-person, mirror's edge
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