Games ported from console to PC always face an uphill publicity battle by default, simply because they tend to end up so... bad. Any given port might suffer from a terribly converted control scheme, or shoddy graphics, low-detail texture mapping, and tiny map designs. The opposite rarely tends to be true, most likely because it's a lot easier to downgrade a game's feature set to fit inside of a console's limited budget rather than upgrade an existing product to work optimally across a wide variety of system configurations.

In the case of Mirror's Edge, this brings two important questions to mind: "What makes a good PC game?", and "Is there any reason to play it again, if I've already played the console version?" The second question I can answer up-front: No, there probably isn't a reason, unless you really enjoyed the singleplayer experience and want to see the fancy new "PhysX" effects exclusive to the PC version in action (and don't mind the fact that a patch had to be released immediately after the game came out to resolve stability issues with this very feature). There's no real new content or extended playability that isn't also present in the game's console-based counterpart, and from a raw gameplay standpoint, you'll be playing through exactly the same game.

With that out of the way, there's still more than enough appeal here to interest newcomers, with the most important and hotly-debated topic being that of the control system. Mirror's Edge is a game about jumping puzzles - a lot of jumping puzzles. Ordinarily this would be a bad thing as far as FPS titles go (Xen, anyone?), but this particular game's implementation of it is actually quite good. As you jump from rooftop to rooftop, Faith (the player-controlled protagonist in the game) will automatically reach out and grab anything that gives traction, such as ledges, pipes, and ladders.

Using a simple combination of movement, jump, and crouch inputs, you can easily mount and swing your way around almost any obstacle - so long as it fits the game's deceptively linear level design. The nice thing is that the game feels a lot more at home with an atypical mouse and keyboard configuration, as it lets you pull off jumps and maneuvers with a lot more precision and speed. There isn't much of a difference that I see a noticeable difficulty gap between the console and PC versions of the game as far as the primary campaign goes, but I'm expecting that people getting into the special speed-run levels will be a bit faster on the PC version.

I've already stated that there isn't much of a gameplay difference between the console and PC versions of the game, but the graphics are a different story. Perhaps it's just the fidelity difference between playing on a basic 1080p console setup and a dedicated PC box running at 1920x1200 with FSAA, but the game looks simply stunning on PC. Top-notch lighting, animation, and environmental effects provide a startlingly realistic tone to the environment, and it's a surreal experience to stand on top of a building and look down on the people milling about their daily business below, with the game's high-quality audio direction helping to immerse the experience further.