Where to begin? Let's see... Like Faith Connors, the lithe, kick-ass, courier you control in Electronic Art's hyper runner, MIRROR'S EDGE, I'm having a tough time getting a proper foot hold. My brain keeps bouncing between extremes, alternately praising and lamenting the title, gaining ground, ready to run, ready to write, and then plummeting back to square one.

MIRROR'S EDGE is something special...MIRROR'S EDGE sucks...MIRROR'S EDGE is ground breaking...MIRROR'S EDGE is nauseating...MIRROR'S EDGE is beautiful...MIRROR'S EDGE is frustrating...MIRROR'S EDGE is all of these things and more and I truly don't know if I love it or hate it.

What I can say is that the game is a deeply flawed masterpiece of ingenious design, breathtaking visuals and half awesome, half broken gameplay. Okay, there, now that I've got my footing, let's review this sucker.

MIRROR'S EDGE is a bold step forward for the FPS (first-person shooter), a genre that has been done to death. Like the 2-D platformers of old (SUPER MARIO, SONIC), the FPS has dominated the 3-D gaming landscape, and like those 2-D jump this, climb that, collect this, formulas, the only thing that really distinguishes the over abundance of FPSs from one another is story and varying mechanics or differentiating gimmicks. At their core, they are all about pointing a weapon and blasting away at a 3-D shooting gallery. No complaints here. I love shooting galleries, and so long as they keep filling them with interesting monsters and horrific zombies and slimy aliens and bleeding soldiers and cool guns, I'll keep blasting away, but ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the times are a changing and MIRROR'S EDGE, while far from perfect, is, if anything, an important title in the evolution of the FPS.

By dropping the S from FPS, developers, DICE, have shifted the focus away from those stalwart shooting galleries and focused their attention on precise movement and wild ass chases. When reading about the game I figured this was a bad idea. Most FPSs move fine - the word efficient comes to mind - but they don't excel at movement like 3rd person adventure games ala THE PRINCE OF PERSIA or NINJA GAIDEN. Given the forced perspective and the inability to manipulate a character from all angles like in 3rd person, how can a FPS even compare? Ever the Complacent Consumer, I didn't think I was missing anything. A FPS is a FPS, not a wall running action title. So what if this FPS jumps clunky? Or that one forgoes spatial details like rendering your avatar's feet? As long as the guns shoot nice and things blow up good, all is right with the world. Well, thanks to MIRROR'S EDGE, I now expect much, much more from those lazy, shooting galleries.

I never realized how well the first person perspective could work with a fast paced running, jumping, climbing, rolling action platformer. DICE has done an excellent job of rendering perspective, momentum, height, scale and balls out speed. The movement works incredibly well and at times MIRROR'S EDGE feels like a racing game without the car. Jumping from building to building is every bit as dizzying as you'd expect and pulling off a flawless run, sliding under a low hanging pipe, running along a wall, climbing a rain spout, knocking out a guard, zip lining down a wire, freefalling into a rolling landing and bouncing back onto your feet to do it all again is a fresh, new gaming experience. Though I have some problems with the game (more on this later), I've never played anything like it and if you're an avid (or casual) gamer you owe it to yourself to give MIRROR'S EDGE a try. It changes the way we are used to playing games.

The story is a nifty little piece of neo-noir. The unnamed city at the heart of MIRROR'S EDGE is controlled by a totalitarian regime that controls its citizenry via continual surveillance and the mediation of information. Faith Connors, a "Runner," a parkour trained messenger that delivers messages from resistance group to resistance group, aides the growing rebellion and hopes to put an end to the fascist rule. She runs along the rooftops, leaping, sliding, scaling the city with cat like grace, avoiding the fuzz and sticking it to the man with her punky shock of black hair, killer running shoes and hipper than thou Eurasian cool. When her sister Kate is framed for the death of a liberal minded mayoral candidate, things take a personal turn and Faith winds up embroiled in a murder mystery.

Visually, MIRROR'S EDGE is a masterwork of design and style. Cool blues, hot whites, striking reds - the landscape looks like a work of glossy minimalist art. It pops amazing on my 62" HD TV. If you ever come over to my house for a party, I'm likely to pop the disc in just to show off how damn good it makes my TV look.

While for the most part the game is a techno explosion of bright reds, oranges and whites, I was surprised by the cut scenes that advanced the game between chapters. Usually, developers go all out with CGI, giving their cut scenes the look of a big budget Hollywood movie. Not here. The cut scenes look like they were made using Flash. At first I didn't like them - I thought they looked liked those weird Esurance commercials with their 2-D, spandex clad super heroine. But over the course of the game I came to appreciate them and I get what DICE was trying to do. The cut scenes capture that noir feel with their shadowy, angular, comic book style and though they evoke a completely different tone than the futuro-clean-HD-white of the gameplay segments, they are striking.

So let's see... Genre busting innovation? Check. Solid story? Check. Incredible art design? Check. This is the part where I tell you to run, don't walk, and pick this game up, right? Not so fast.

As much as I admire MIRROR'S EDGE and as important as it is to the future of gaming, it has some deal breaking hiccups. While the movement is stellar, combat is absolutely abysmal. Faith's best defense is evasion, but there are moments where she has no choice but to engage in fisticuffs. You can disarm guards and knock them out, which works well. Some of the coolest moments involve running at full speed and taking a guard out with a well placed punch without breaking stride. You also have the option to pick up dropped guns, which should be a blast, but works horribly. The aiming is jerky and each gun has extremely limited ammo (two or three shots before they are empty and unusable). These boons are designed to make you opt for evasive maneuvers rather than firefights - this isn't a shooting game, it's a running game - and I understand the design choice, but if you can't use a gun for long and when you can use it, it works horribly, why even bother putting it in? I don't know why DICE even bothered with such wonky gunplay. It seems to me like they should have either spent a little more time refining things or just cut it out all together. In a game that is all about moment and speed, these (rather frequent) encounters bog things down big time.

Okay, so I can deal with crappy gunplay. Hell, you don't even have to use a gun and I am probably just being curmudgeonly (but still, if you are going to include guns they should work). Strike two? Repetition. Ugh. The most insidious of game killers. While the murder mystery carries things along, you are often doing the same old same old from chapter to chapter. Run, climb, dodge, slide. Repeat. For the fist few hours I was in love with the way the game moved. Still am, but kick ass gameplay is more than perfect movement, there has to be cool, varied stuff to do.

Strike three? Level design. The city is beautiful and the levels seem gargantuan and interesting, but the game is extremely liner, requiring Faith to follow prescribed paths through the city. There is no deviation and it fools you for the first few hours while the control scheme and visuals are wowing you, but once you get into the flow of the game you begin to realize how much of a game it is. The story, while interesting, is no BIOSHOCK or HALF LIFE, and the action, while impressive, screams for variety - perhaps a number of ways to reach the same point? Why not put all of that gorgeous cityscape to use?!

So then, my advice to you dear reader: MIRROR'S EDGE is definitely worth a look, but I suggest renting it or buying it used from Gamestop (where you can play it for the seven day period and then return it and exchange it for DEAD SPACE ;-). Major props to EA for taking another risk (DEAD SPACE being the first) and giving us something different. It's nice to see them step out of their comfort zone and do something innovative rather than continuing on, business as usual, recycling annual sports games and savaging movie licenses. Hopefully they'll work out the kinks and make MIRROR'S EDGE 2 the game its predecessor aspired to be.