I guess there were two things I was hoping for when I sat down to play Mirror's Edge, one being Jet Set Radio Future, and the other being the original Prince of Persia reboot Sands of Time. In both titles moving was a joy: fluid, and well directed. Even if you didn't know exactly where to go when you started moving, if you could read the architecture of the levels, and had the basic control competencies down, you could string move after move together and flow through the environment. The grace and agility of the Prince, in an environment with the scale and affordances of JSRF? In first-person? That's a tantalising prospect.
That prospect didn't survive the first five minutes of play. The visuals are lovely, movement is responsive,the controls are well mapped, and the first-person works, at least to start with. The first-person perspective seemed to have dragged over something I hadn't expected: precision. In retrospect, it seems obvious, but at the time it seemed galling. I could do the moves, but I kept falling to my death. Requiring pixel-perfect platforming in first-person seemed to be a step too far. I persisted with the main game until almost the end of the first chapter, but I was gritting my teeth more and more. And swearing at the screen. I certainly hadn't expected the rage I felt. The protagonist is meant to be an elite free-running courier service. She knows the city. You don't know where you're supposed to go half the time. The runner-vision signposting (objects in the environment go bright red if you should use them to get going) is brilliant, except when the thing you need to use next is out of your field of vision. Inevitably in corridors, with people chasing you. The gameplay felt poisonous: being chased constantly by an armed enemy (you are unarmed) who you can't see chasing you (except when you're doing it wrong), and punished for not having a sense of proprioception that extended into the screen. In first-person no-one can see your feet.
I put the controller down and put the game away. I had a little rant at Tom Armitage in the office. He said I should try the Time Trial mode, and that it was good. I wasn't sure if I believed him, but I gave it a shot.
The Time Trial mode is like Crackdown's rooftop races, in as much as you're following a route marked by waypoints across the rooftops of a city. Time Trial does a couple of things to the game, the most important of which is to invert the chase dynamic. It may just be the clock, but you're the one doing the chasing now.
In taking out all the enemies, Time Trial's other big change is to give the game's requirement for precision a reward. Not only do you have to make the jump, but the better you are, the more time, and distance, you can shave off your route. Time Trial's 3-star time rating system gives you something that encourages practice and replay: can you get your time down enough to get that next star? It also makes it quickly apparent that there must be more than one route through the level. You can plot a route, practice, run it perfectly and still be 30 seconds off the next star rating. It even has a gentle introduction to multiple routes: there are three different races through the training level, the latter ones' routes suggesting shortcuts in the previous races.
Those tweaks were enough to transform my experience of the game, the blind panic and rage which had characterised the main game for me replaced with the sense of agency, focus, and plain exhiliration I'd been hoping for to start with.
And the game keeps giving. Once you've set a qualifying (one-star) time for a race, the next time you run it a ghost of your previous time will run the race with you. If you can see your ghost, you're not as fast. You can also download ghosts of your Xbox Live friends, or of high-ranked other gamers on Live. If someone knows a better route, you can see them taking it, and follow their trail of footsteps. Something which integrates the youtube speedrun video into the game, explicitly legitimising that as a form of route exploration and discovery.
And the bottom line is that Time Trial is fun, addictive, and when I get frustrated it's usually because I need to practice, not because I'm being punished. That simple joy in movement is in there too, when you string a sequence of moves together and fly round the course, but it's cut through with the fierce joy of competition, of hitting that obstacle just so, and of hurling yourself between the rooftops at speeds definitely exceeding R.