I said earlier that with Mirror’s Edge, DICE had a million potential ways to fail. First-person running and jumping is not an easy thing to do in a video game.

With the demo out, I’m convinced they’ve cleared the major hurdles. The running and jumping is smooth and fantastic. And since the game is all about doing crazy parkour stuff, that bodes well for the final product.

It’s a short demo. You’ve probably seen the same scene in the gameplay videos they put out. One quick tutorial and I was off and running, improvising routes over the cityscape on the fly.

The controls are fairly intuitive. L1 on the PS3 controller does upwards-type movements like jumping and mantling. L2 below it does downwards-type movements like sliding and tuck-rolling. Face buttons don’t seem to come into play, beyond a disarm button mapped to triangle. I guess they mean for you to keep your thumb on the stick to control the camera.

The only thing that didn’t work for me is the sixaxis controls. In theory, you can tilt the controller left and right to correct your balance, jerk it up to disarm a foe or tilt it down to move into a tuck roll from a jump. In practice, only the balancing worked for me. I tried rolling and disarming several times during the tutorial, but finally gave up and just pressed the buttons instead. It’s too bad, because those would both be pretty intuitive things to do by jerking the controller itself around.

No motion sickness, here, though your milage may vary. There’s some nice touches to cement your sense of place in the world, even though you can’t see your character’s body. If you get right up on a wall, Faith will put one or both hands up to touch it.

Overall, it just feels fun. This isn’t something you’ve done in a video game before, I promise.

The jury’s still out on the game itself, of course. This is the section of the game they’ve been using for demonstrations, so it’s probably the one they’ve polished the most. But this definitely has the potential to be an excellent game.

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