As mentioned in yesterday’s article we had a chance to play through quite a few games at Best Buy’s Gaming Invasion ’08 in Toronto. Almost every major company was on hand to let us sample their wares, a lot of which will be arriving on shelves within mere weeks. While we tried to play as much of the software as was humanly possible, realistically it was only two of us and we decided to spend our time focusing a few games that we haven’t had an opportunity to speak much about yet this year but are hotly anticipating.

Fact: Running is fast

One of the games that made an appearance at the event that we were not expecting at all, and actually wasn’t on the show floor until the second day, was DICE’s Mirror’s Edge. Coming from the studio that made the successful Battlefield WWII shooter, it is a welcome change of pace from the normal first-person style action game. Instead of focusing on headshots and deadly projectiles, Mirror’s Edge is all about the environment and the way in which you navigate it. You take the role of Faith, a messenger in a world that has almost all communications monitored and restricted. Needless to say, it’s a dangerous job, and involves running along the tops of buildings carrying packages from point A to point B.

The demo that was on hand was the same as the same as the trailers that have been shown so far. A magnificent stylized rooftop world highlighted by shocks of red, indicating the best path to go. The gameplay is essentially running, jumping, sliding, ducking and just generally making your way from spot to spot as fast as you can, building momentum the more fluidly you move. Every successful jump or new path discovered is immensely satisfying, and while the controls take a bit of getting used to (L2 being your “down” action, L1 being your “up action” and R2 for the odd occasions when you have to hit something) it does catch on rather quickly and you find yourself moving throughout the landscape at a breakneck speed. The game is visually exciting, as it draw a crowd in asking about it through most of the day, and while the controls are a bit different compared to many action games, it was still easy for just about anyone to pick up and play. It was a relatively short demo, but gave us a good showing of the very tight controls and just how the game is going to work going forward.

The combat is a bit awkward and twitchy, but the animations for take-downs are excellent and brutal. Using a gun isn’t that much fun, and you likely won’t feel like you should or even want to after grabbing one from an enemy. Evading is much more exciting, and the demo isn’t very hard at all so it didn’t serve any frustrations to simply run away from a fire fight. The extent of the paths you could take were pretty interesting, even for the demo. While the game feels very linear the first time through, eventually you can find new and unique paths to go along that take you to the same places in a very different way. We are definitely looking forward to this game, which is set to arrive November 11th of this year.

We’ll have some more impressions later this week of a few more games, a little shorter than this one. There are a lot of games coming out this fall and wallets will stand divided between one of the busiest holiday seasons that I can remember.