The first Mirror’s Edge game featured combat, but it was hardly the focus of the game. Protagonist Faith’s parkour skills ensured that if you played the game “properly,” you never needed to brawl with, or shoot at, your enemies. Successfully evading them by wallrunning and leaping from building to building was the biggest draw of the game, and it’s what caused it to gain such a loyal cult fanbase that led to it receiving an unlikely sequel. However, developer DICE has stated that it’s putting much more work into the combat in Mirror’s Edge 2, which has led me to become a little concerned that it’s focusing upon a component of the game that its fans don’t really care about.
In an interview with CVG, studio head Karl Magnus Troedsson said: “What I can say is that if the last game focused on first-person movement, it was definitely shown in the movie here that the DICE team will be focusing on first-person combat as well, to really nail and refine that.
“We’ve shown the combat and movement now, but there’s so much more to talk about. What I can say is, this is not just going to be the same game as the last one.”
The combat in the original Mirror’s Edge was the subject of some criticism, but confronting enemies was never the point: avoiding them using Faith’s freerunning abilities was the hook of the game, and Troedsson saying that DICE is focusing upon conbat should lead us to assume that there will be some mandatory fighting sections in Mirror’s Edge 2, something which fans of the original game are unlikely to accept with open arms.
