Fans of the first-person action game Mirror’s Edge can look forward to brand-new downloadable content in early 2009, Electronic Arts studio DICE announced today, adding that the ship date for the PC version of the game has also been finalized.
The DLC will feature nine races across seven all-new Time Trial maps that eschew guns, police and the city at large in favor of “true aesthetics, agility and flow that will challenge any runner.” The Time Trial mode of Mirror’s Edge challenges players to find the fast way across maps, featuring downloadable leaderboards for online competition that includes “ghost” runners representing players who have achieved the best times across a map.
“The freedom of movement and control in first person has been the most popular aspect of Mirror’s Edge so we decided to distill these down to their purest form for this map pack,” said DICE Senior Producer Owen O’Brien. “We deliberately chose a more abstract aesthetic that is still within our distinctive art style and then focused on flow and gameplay to create an experience and challenge very different from the main game.”
Released in November, Mirror’s Edge earned kudos for its unique approach to first-person action, with brightly-lit environments, a high degree of freedom of movement, significant body awareness and the complete elimination of a HUD. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, response to the game has been generally positive but not overwhelmingly so; one critic of questionable repute praised the game’s experimental nature as well as the fact that it’s one of the few original IPs to be released this year, but nonetheless referred to it as an “eight-hour fecal waterslide” in his final analysis.
The PC version of Mirror’s Edge will ship to North American retailers on January 13, and go out worldwide on January 16. The DLC pack for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, meanwhile, will be available in late January for 800 Microsoft Points or $10, with a free bonus map available to owners of the PS3 version of the game.
