Limbo - Review. Also Mirror's Edge

So mostly I've been catching up on my pile of games and trying to get a steady schedule of painting progress on my Finnish Jakaari Kompania (note: mine look like shit compared to these).  I've got most of the base colors done on the first combat platoon, and the second platoon has arrived in the mail and is patiently waiting for the weather to cool down so I can bear to sit at the table and trim some flash off of the models. I've found that the amount of time I can stand to sit and paint is approximately the length of one album, so I've been just throwing something on and having a listen most every night this past week while I get these dudes ready for some action this holiday season.  In the meantime, I played two games. They were Limbo and Mirror's Edge.  One of those games is A LOT better than the other one.

Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge effectively sums up everything that's wrong with the games industry and the game playing public.  Basically, Dice made a game that is down-right transcendent at times, and somewhat frustrating the rest of the time. The end result was a unique first-person platformer that sold pretty poorly and was destined to be the only entry in the series until fairly recently. I have to admit I am guilty of not voting with my wallet this time around. I recall playing the demo and seeing the potential there, but for some reason I didn't wind up picking up a copy until just a few months ago at $20. I'm sure I'm not the only one.  Anyway, maybe it says something about how pampered we are by easy modern games, but apparently people didn't like how you could expect to die every 15-30 seconds playing this game (which is humorous considering how well received the next game I'm going to talk about was).  If you can get past the frustration of getting riddled with bullets at each enemy encounter and missing a fair number of jumps, what you're left with is a wonderful looking game that manages to be satisfying and fun in spite of all of its flaws.  The story was some pretty brainless hippie bullshit, but luckily it doesn't get in the way that much.

Limbo


I took the opportunity to pick up limbo on the disc based XBLA triple pack that was on sale at Best Buy recently for $10, so I guess I paid about $3.33 for it.  I sort of feel sorry for the suckers who paid $15 for this on XBLA when it came out (not sure what the price is now) and can understand the outrage at the same PSN pricing. Limbo is a perfect example of all style and no substance.  What you get is a lot of "creepy", lethal black and white environments to platform and solve basic physics based puzzles on for about 3 hours.  What you don't get is any coherent narrative whatsoever, or any reason to give a rat's ass about the little boy who is traversing these areas.  The game was also intentionally designed on the premise that you should die unexpectedly and with nearly no chance to avoid failure at every puzzle, which seems like a cheap and lazy design choice.  Rather than expecting that the player might succeed through skill or smarts, the game requires them to have additional knowledge that it is not presenting up front, and this leads to feeling like you're being cheated at every turn. I had a hard time understanding what people liked about this game.  The gameplay itself was too simple to really be fun, and though I did get stuck on some of the puzzles for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I don't think it was terribly challenging.  The game got a lot of praise for its aesthetics which are fine, but really they came up with a decent looking style and did very little with it, making maybe 2 or 3 unique looking environments in the whole game.  Luckily Trials HD was on the same disc, and that game is pretty RAD.