IMO, the running is the best part of Mirror's Edge. I wasn't expecting that. I'm not a sports guy; I don't play sports, I don't watch sports, and I definitely don't see the point in sports video games. I don't think sports are bad or stupid, they're just not my cup of tea. The depiction of parkour in Mirror's Edge, however, is well-implemented and a lot of fun. If the whole game stuck to that, it would be a much better game. Where it falls down is its poorly thought-out attempt to introduce combat elements. Faith, the main character (and a solid contender for Sexiest Game Character of 2009, IMO), has melee moves that simultaneously disarm and knock out opponents in one hit, which is great because she's a glass cannon: she can dish it out, but two hits in melee and Faith is down for the count. Exacerbating the issue is the incredibly unforgiving timing required to use Faith's disarm maneuvers: you have a window of considerably less than a second, and if you're early or late you get pistol-whipped (or shotgun-whipped, or submachine gun-whipped, etc.) for your trouble. You can invoke a bullet-time effect to make this easier, but this lasts only moments and has a very long cooldown.

I have to mention the graphics, which are beautiful in both the technical and artistic senses. The unnamed city in which Mirror's Edge is set is depicted in stark colors, with white, red, orange, blue and green being the main components of the palette. The overall effect is ethereal, even dreamlike, an impression reinforced by the city's eerie emptiness. While you can occasionally see pedestrians and civilian vehicles in the distance, the offices, malls, subway stations and other public spaces you move through are invariably devoid of people other than the police, who want to kill you.

Overall I give it a 7/10, and hope that if a sequel is forthcoming, it will either make combat more forgiving or do away with it entirely.

Hmm, thanks for the review. I probably won't buy it anytime soon, then.

pretty much my take on it.

TLDR is nice idea, execution is mediocre. needed a few more tweaks, maybe some more content.

I paid $5 for it during Steam's holiday sale, and even though I haven't finished the game I feel like I've gotten my money's worth. If you can find it in a bargain bin and/or used, I can recommend it unreservedly. From other reviews I've read, though, the whole game is only 6-8 hours long, so I wouldn't pay the current price of $20 for it.

On an unrelated note, what does TLDR stand for? I've seen it elsewhere, as well as tl;dr, and I have no idea what either of them mean.

TL;DR = Too Long ; Didn't Read

Also if you like Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia does a much better job with the whole parkour/combat hybridization.
Mostly due the forgiving nature of the health gauge and lack of guns.

Iirc there's a DLC expansion that focusses entirely on challenging parkour with no combat whatsoever. May be that it's a console-only element, though.

I've enjoyed it. I've payed €5 or €10 for it and didn't regret it. I'd have regretted paying more than €15, but there aren't many games I'm ready to pay that much for anyway. You just have to ignore the story that doesn't make any sense from the beginning (The government tracks all electronic communications, which reduce crime to nothing (?) but forces corporation to use courriers to send sensitive data... But the courriers can get away with using electronic communication systems, even when the police is after them) and progressively get worse.

Even if they're clearly not the focus of the game, I've enjoyed the combat elements too. I didn't have any trouble with disarming, but my main way of disarming was to kick the enemy in the face and take his gun. Using a mouse made the gun combat too easy for a FPS-experienced player so in some situations it was far easier to resort to guns than to switch to full dodge.

I enjoyed Mirror's Edge. Was it flawed? Sure; it violates one of the prime directives of video gaming: it requires a player to jump and run along walls using a first-person perspective without the benefit of a sense of balance or anything else. But it did what it set out to do.

Your character is not supposed to get into combat. At least not intentionally. The whole point of the game was to avoid it as much as possible. I ran like a crazy person when I hit a group of cops. I will agree that the disarm moves were pretty tough to master though I think that was intentional on the game designer's part. They probably didn't want players becoming too comfortable simply snatching guns away and shooting or bopping grunts on the head. But one of the neat unlocks I discovered was the "Itsa me!" where you leap onto a cop from a higher vantage point and kick him in the face.

I think you can hand wave away the government tracking electronic communication/runner radio chatter by assuming the runners used some sort of frequency-hopping thing-a-ma-jig. Faith and company weren't a low-tech operation.

I bought my copy used and that's what I'd recommend.

The problem is, there are points in the game where you HAVE TO engage in combat to finish the level.

So it completely misses its own point at certain parts of the game.

and the combat part sucks. especially if you want to avoid using guns.

trying to time those special attacks is just nuts...

From what I remember the only time you have to engage to finish a level is when Faith goes up against Celeste.

Running along a glass wall and jumping onto a dangling AC unit just barely in your line of sight was harder than that bit.

there are multiple times where your "guide" tells you that you have to fight to progress, tho the mentioned fight is needed to finish a chapter.

The part of combat I really liked was running at bad guys, sliding into them, and kicking them in the nuts. Kicking them in the face was fun too, but didn't hold a candle to the ole' baseball slide 'n nutcracker.

as is my typical problem with FPS games with a close combat element, i found myself initiating the slide either to soon or to late...

I agree that in general video games need more crotch violence.