I would like to give one award for 2008: the Bioshock award for 2008 goes to Mirror’s Edge, a game that failed to live up to its potential. Though, I’d much rather play Bioshock again.

Mirror’s Edge is possibly the greatest failure of 2008, and I must say that I appreciate the attempt. Unfortunately ME fails to live up to its potential so much that it’s a bad game. In ME there is an art gallery with little comments from the developer for each image. The one used for this post had the comment attached to it that read something like: “This is early concept art where she was still holding a gun. We removed the gun because we didn’t want to highlight the combat as a bullet point for the back of the box.”

HA!

I’m paraphrasing of course, I don’t even have the game to go back and check, nor would I want to waste the effort to do so. The reason I bring this up is because somewhere down the line the developers became brainwashed and made the game chock full of combat. Like other acrobatic games—*cough*Prince of Persia: Sands of Time*cough*—the developers had no idea how to design a decent combat engine. ME is even worse than PoP.

I stopped playing ME when I got to my fourth or fifth room in a row where as soon as you open the door you’re being shot at. Instantly there would be anywhere from two to five enemies in a room which open fire with their super-sniper-accuracy-vision and try to prevent you from reaching your objective. The problem is two-fold: the combat sucks so you’re a sitting duck most of the time with death coming on the second hit, and Faith (the main character) has no sense of self preservation at all. So, basically you have to run headfirst into the area, spend one fraction of a second assessing your situation, then acting.

This generally leads to failure over and over again that can only be overcome by trial-and-error testing. Then, once you’ve tried your route for the twentieth time and you manage to eliminate the bad guys you have to figure out how to get into that little hole at the top of the room. One of two things happen now, you either manage to fall to your death trying—because Faith won’t grab onto anything that’s not specifically hit at the right angle. Running face first into a railing that any normal person could grab and get themselves over will turn into vertigo drops of death—or more enemies spawn before you can get there.

Rather than put my blood pressure through the roof, and possibly a controller into my TV, I traded the game back. It was a Christmas gift, but I figured even though I only got a return of about 25% of the purchase cost for a game that came out a month prior it was better than letting the game stay at my house and be a horrible guest. So I got Personal Trainer: MATH for the DS. This game is also pretty disappointing, but a helpful tool so it’s better than Mirror’s Edge.