Mirrors Edge – Time Trial Map Pack

 

So, last night I forked out 800 Microsoft Points on the new Time Trial Map Pack for Mirrors Edge. I’m not all for paying money for new maps for games, that always feels a bit cheap and unfair on the poor gamers out there so I tend to stick to basic maps unless their free but I must admit I loved Mirrors Edge but felt the game was too short and not very free runny (sounds unhealthy) so when I heard there would be a map pack which would take you outside the city I thought this was awesome. So yeah, I downloaded it and booted it up…my opinion?

Ehm…I’m quite let down. For a collection of maps that take you outside the ridged city and place you into a free running playground the routs though the maps are horridly linier. The challenge isn’t so much in finding new quicker ways from A to B but instead more about for starters working out the ONLY way from A to B then trying to time your jumps and turns perfect. It felt more like a race track with dust on the while lines that show where to go than a collection of expansive free running maps. It would have been nice if they gave us a little more for our money too. I mean the maps are pretty, but considering their just a collection of geometric shapes over an ocean they couldn’t have taken a whole lotta work (a statement I would not have made if there was more than 1 way though each map). Maybe if they had thrown in a 1 on 1 race game I wouldn’t have felt quite so cheated, I mean running against ghosts isn’t bad, teaches you the speedy way to follow the rout and some times they are almost vital to find out how you complete a track without dying, but I’d love to take the game online against a friend and race though a track, hitting each other off the sides as we race and so on, that would make it so fun I could forgive the bad free running aspect.

Hell if they’d thrown in a replay option where you could watch in a third person as Faith runs the map so you can see where you went wrong I’d feel a little less cheated. There is a LOT of stuff they could have done, not ground breaking stuff, not high effort stuff, hell stuff we hardly missed in the game, but there's a lot of it they could have stuck in this expansion to lessen the bitter taste it leaves in your mouth.

You may say ‘but Tim, it’s only 800 points!’ but when you consider the cost of the whole Portal game on the Arcade, that seems a lot for very little.

But remember, don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself if you have the money and let me know if you agree or not. I do like to hear other peoples opinions, it might help me see something in this expansion that justifies me spending the money I did to get it :-)