Why does dystpoia have to be grey? Why do there have to be overcast skies, trash and rain puddles to show you that society is bad? Mirror's Edge rejected those answers. It gives you a police state with fresh paint, with exquitiste design instead of grime, and tells you, EVEN IF IT'S NOT GREY, IT'S STILL BAD. Even if it doesn't look despressing, it's still oppressive! And I'll always love it for that.
It's wild to me, how much this game does with so little. Its graphical resources are next to zero, and its audio not much more, and YET! And YET it's unsettling and scary. The era of computer games this is emulating is from before my time, I'm very much a child of the nineties, used to fancy 16-bit graphics, so I do not speak out of a sense of nostalgia. It's just a good game.
Stomp your way through a city in which every building can be pounded into rubble, and probably will be during the next frantic firefight. Raze it all. Laugh at the little people scurrying about. You are the war god. You are a BIG ROBOT.
I had vague memories of playing this game as a tiny, tiny child, but over time I'd partially forgotten it, and assumed it was a hallucinaton. But this game was actually real?!
I'm giving this game, a first persons shooter, a single star. The reason is extremely simple. The guns aren't fun to fire. This is the one thing an FPS should have. And they fucked it. You have to hit people in the head 4 times with a deagle to make them go down, and there's no such thing as stagger, so during that time they'll also be hitting you. The game attempts to do things no other FPS does, but that doesn't matter if you can't do the basic premise of the FPS right in your FPS.
