Mirror’s Edge is an upcoming first-person action-adventure being developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE), well known for their hit battlefield franchise including their more recent title Battlefield: Bad Company.

Mirror’s Edge is set is a “dystopian” world where people have given up some of their basic freedoms like freedom of speech in exchange for a safer society, all communication is monitored unless you use a ‘runner’ who physically transports your communication around the city. In Mirror’s Edge you play one of these ‘runners’ by the name of Faith, with the game consisting of free running and parkour type stunts all in first person.

The game encourages you to use hand-to-hand combat when confronting enemies but even then you should only fight when necessary, while you can disarm an enemy and use their weapon, it will drastically slow you down and reduce your ability to jump, leap and just generally be a ‘badass’.

Recently they demo’d the introductory roof level to the press and announced the release date of November 11 this year, we’ve embedded the video below and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s got an awesome visual style, it looks challenging, and if you are prone to motion sickness they have added a static dot to the middle of the screen to prevent nausia (as there is no hud).

You can learn more about the gameplay and backstory present in Mirrors Edge in the producer video embedded below.

While the game sounds really interesting, there are just a few issues that I have with it.

There is no health bar (the color just desaturates when dropping health) which sounds fine for a normal game, but with a lot of the environments having quite bland colors it my become difficult to tell when health is dropping, so I hope it isn’t a binary “run along” or “you’re hurt, get behind something”.

With there being a static beginning and end, they’re really going to have to broaden the opportunities when it comes to the route you want to take, the AI at this stage seems rather stupid (the guard just stands there as faith runs towards him), so with predictable AI and limited routes I can see it becoming a quick one-time playthrough which I definately don’t want.

What I want to see is a flexible route and maybe a time attack mode, so you can see how quickly you can get through a level, go ahead and facilitate speed runs and let you compare against friends.

Obviously I haven’t played the game yet so these are just requests based on the limited amount of media I have seen, but I really want this game to succeed because it seems so fresh.