This is Sam’s least favorite level in the game. That’s partly because he had to record it far too many times, but also because it’s just poorly designed.

One thing you’ll notice in this level, more than any other, is that Sam was stopping and looking around frequently. Sometimes it was to look for which platform he had to get to. Sometimes it was to get his bearings or to redo a failed jump. However, every time is a damning statement on why this level sucks.

On top of that, you’ll also notice several times where after failing a jump, he had a redo a decent amount of climbing in order to get to a point where he could try again.

And then we get to a sniper battle and subsequent duels. I can’t fathom why they were in the game. They actively discourage movement by forcing you to stand behind cover to break line-of-sight. Because Celeste has trained her sights on you, this is actively worse than the subway section from earlier.

I just don’t understand. This game was so good at the start, and I wish I knew exactly what went wrong.

Welcome to the start of the worst half of Mirror’s Edge:

Almost on queue, the footage desync while Sam is recording, meaning he had to record this awful segment several times. Even still, he ultimately could not get any footage where the audio and video were synced.

So if Sam sounds particular bitter about this second-half of Mirror’s Edge, now you know why.

Another day, another discussion on the decline of Mirror’s Edge.

As I said at the start, Sam and I really love this game. However, there’s no denying that it gets visibly, appreciably worse with each level.

I would like to have a conversation with the people who worked on this game just to know what happened as the development went on. It could be that pressure from on high forced them to include more stereotypically “shooty” segments. It could be that the game was rushed. It could be that they were trying to see what works and what doesn’t work given this core concept of free-running. It could be any combination of those three and/or something else entirely.

But we’ll probably never know that. And that bums me out.

In this episode, we take a moment to talk about Mirror’s Edge’s approach to platforming.

The subway section best emphasizes why Mirror’s Edge’s first-person platforming works, by taking away a lot of what makes it work.

When this game is at its best, precision isn’t a huge issue. It’s much more about looking around and quickly making a decision about which path to take. It’s not about timing, it’s about identifying and executing on an opportunity.

This subway section directly contrasts that. There’s no high-speed decision making going on. You’re not being directly chased by cops hot on your tail. It’s about waiting for something to go past so that you can get across to the next segment of the level.

I can’t really fault DICE for doing this, though. On the whole, Mirror’s Edge is and was an extremely experimental game. It’s doubtful that anyone would have even been able to figure this stuff out without first having Mirror’s Edge as a point of reference. For that reason, I can’t honestly be too mad about it.

In this episode, we beat up a former wrestler and jump off a crane.

This is still a decent level, but it’s not hard to notice that it’s not quite as good as the first few levels in the game. As Mirror’s Edge goes on, the overall quality of each level, in terms of their design, starts to noticeably drop.

Despite that, we’re still on the top good side of the curve in this portion of the game. It doesn’t get really bad until another 2-3 missions from this point. Once they begin to introduce more and more precision platforming and combat, the game deteriorates.

Yet still, even when this game starts to suck, it is so unique that I can’t help but to recommend it.

In this episode, we get down and dirty in the cleanest, most pristine sewers on Earth.

It feels weird to criticize this game for anything involving its story content. I say that mostly because it clearly wasn’t a major focus of the game. It’s not accident that the cutscenes are all less than 5 minutes. Like I said in the episode, it’s a well-documented fact that Rhianna Pratchett was hired after all the levels in the game were made.

There’s also the fact that this game was made in the late 2000s, back when storytelling in games was just starting to be a thing that people began taking seriously. It was probably assumed that Mirror’s Edge didn’t need much of a story, so long as the game played well enough.

In that way, I can’t blame it for being a product of its time. While indeed unique among its contemporaries, even today, it still has signs of being developed in the era where “Call of Duty” was a phrase that wasn’t nearly as divisive.

That said, I would have loved it if the game did a bit more to tell players about the world and the people in it.

You may be surprised at how gushy we are about Mirror’s Edge, given that our previous was… basically the exact opposite of that. We do delve into some heavy criticism, especially in the later half of the game. However, it’s so easy to praise Mirror’s Edge because it does so many things right.

We spoke a lot in this episode about how important it is that Mirror’s Edge does everything it can to avoid causing motion sickness. This article talks a little about how the developers tried to combat motion sickness. I find the science behind many of these tricks fascinating, and I can’t imagine how many nauseous testers/interns they must have went through to reduce the percentage of ill players to a minimum.

It’s really important that they do, because so much of this game is built on the idea of building and maintaining momentum while traversing the hazards of the environment. Mirror’s Edge is at its best when it lets players move quickly and keep that pace up. These early levels are a testament to that.

After a very long break, we’re finally back. Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to the fourth season of Interactive Friction.

We picked Mirror’s Edge for two big reasons:

  1. We were exhausted by the end of Watch_Dogs, and needed a breather. Mirror’s Edge is a very short game, and we knew we weren’t going to get tired of it while recording.
  2. Both Sam and I adore this game to no end. Even now, the color palate and extremely unique gameplay make it a breath of much-needed fresh air. This meant that any complaints we’d have would sound much more good-natured than they did for Watch_Dogs. Watch_Dogs, especially towards the middle, was far too vitriolic.

Also, since this game divides itself so nicely into chapters, we’ll be doing one chapter per episode. Many of them, especially early on, will be much shorter than the IF you’ve come to expect. Others will be about as long, or longer, depending on what happened. It’ll be interesting to trace than progression over the course of the game.

See you next time. 🙂

You probably though we were done. You probably thought Watch_Dogs destroyed us so completely that we’d never Let’s Play again.

You’re probably an arbitrary strawman I’ve picked out for the sake of drama.
In any case, we’ll be back, starting tomorrow. Sam even made a new trailer to celebrate our revival.
I hope you look forward to watching this next season as much as we look forward to presenting it.

Last time, I talked about my favorite games of the year: A “highlight reel of 2015”, as I called it. Though highlights typically refer to things that stand out in good ways, sometimes that’s not the case. Something might certainly stand out, but for the worst possible reasons.
To celebrate these clunkers, I’m going to go through my other “highlight reel”: That of the games that proved to be massive disappointments this year.

Batman: Arkham Knight

I put Arkham Knight on this list not because it is a particularly bad game, but because it was disappointed me in a number of ways. I did not care for the Batmobile. It feels incongruous to have Batman riding around in a tank, running over mooks “non-lethally”. Puzzles that involved the Batmobile were usually much more tedious than they had to be. I also didn’t like the direction they took the story for this game, giving the foundation they brought from Arkham City. On top of the disturbingly poor PC port and DLC, Warner Bros might have spoiled the well with Arkham Knight.

The Order: 1886

If you’re like me, you might be surprised to learn that The Order: 1886 came out this year. It made the mistake of taking an otherwise brilliant premise and making pure, distilled mediocrity out of it. A game where the Knights of the Round Table survived until the Victorian-era and fight vampires and werewolves should be the most awesome piece of art in the entire world. Instead, it’s an average shooter that constantly interrupts players with QTEs and cutscenes. Worst, most of the cool supernatural stuff is stuck in these cutscenes, leaving players to deal with human opponents. There are about 10 werewolves at the most in the playable sections of the game. The game doesn’t even bother to finish, ending at what most would consider to be Act 2 or a standard 3 act structure. Unless, like me, you’re the curious sort who just has to experience it for yourself, stay as far away from this crap as you possibly can.

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

Final Fantasy Type-0 best demonstrates how different it is to design a game for a portable platform than it is for a home console. A lot of design choices make sense in the context of a PSP or PS Vita game, but don’t work when brought to a less mobile platform. The combat is also really mediocre, and I found myself yawning almost the whole time after the first 4 or 5 hours. Though the game boasts a massive cast of 14 playable party members, there are a maximum of 6 that prove to be at all useful. Most players will, to their detriment, only use about 3 of them. Topping it off with some of the worst English voice acting I have ever heard, Final Fantasy Type-0 was only worth it for the Final Fantasy XV demo.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with transitioning Assassin’s Creed into a 2D game. Where this game goes wrong is that it doesn’t do much with that idea. Everything this game does was done better in 2012’s Mark of the Ninja. Almost all of the mechanics are taken wholesale for Klei’s masterpiece, but without the varied and impressive level design to go with it. I wanted to like China, but I stopped playing halfway through the game because I just wasn’t interested anymore.

And that concludes my list of 2015’s disappointing games. The astute among you have noticed that this list is significantly shorter than my list of good games this year. That says more about 2015 than I ever could directly. Here’s to an excellent year in gaming, and to the hope that 2016 will be even better!
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