Mirror's Edge review (2009)
By Graham Smith .. Read more.
By Graham Smith..
Read more.
Mirror's Edge™
DICE · Electronic Arts
- Released
- Jan 14, 2009
- Platforms
- Windows
- Last updated
Updates & announcements
- PC GamerOriginal post
- PC Gamer
After years of 'extensive reverse engineering', you can play a janky Mirror's Edge prototype in all its glory
There's nothing else quite like Mirror's Edge . Not even its only sequel, Catalyst, is quite like the first Mirror's Edge. Bold colours, slick parkour, and a cheesy story that's trying a tad too hard, Mirror's Edge has gone on to become a cult classic despite EA shoving it to the
Original postThere's nothing else quite like Mirror's Edge. Not even its only sequel, Catalyst, is quite like the first Mirror's Edge. Bold colours, slick parkour, and a cheesy story that's trying a tad too hard, Mirror's Edge has gone on to become a cult classic despite EA shoving it to the back of the store room...
Read more. - Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Mirror's Edge's iconic art style? Yeah, turns out it was sort of an accident
It's kind of baffling how Mirror's Edge came out almost two full decades ago, and there's hardly a whisper of a game that's managed to match its art direction. The thing is just too clean, too specific, there's a purpose to every detail. It feels like the future distilled into di
Original postIt's kind of baffling how Mirror's Edge came out almost two full decades ago, and there's hardly a whisper of a game that's managed to match its art direction. The thing is just too clean, too specific, there's a purpose to every detail. It feels like the future distilled into digital form, though no one really followed suit in the years since, opting for drab, lifeless realism instead. Except, as it turns out, that's almost what Mirror's Edge looked like too.
- PC Gamer
Three Battlefield games—but not Mirror's Edge!—are being removed from sale forever
Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 are going away forever: Electronic Arts has announced that their online services are being shut down in December, and as a result they will be removed from sale from all digital storefronts on April 28... Read more.
Original postBattlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 are going away forever: Electronic Arts has announced that their online services are being shut down in December, and as a result they will be removed from sale from all digital storefronts on April 28...
Read more. - VG247
UPDATE: EA to pull Battlefield 1943, Bad Company 1 & 2 - and not Mirror's Edge - from digital storefronts in April
UPDATE: EA has since told fans that Mirror's Edge will not be delisted from the PlayStation store. This is after EA said that the game would be removed from digital storefronts, alongside Battlefield 1942, Bad Company, and Bad Company 2. EA explains that the mention of Mirror's E
Original postUPDATE: EA has since told fans that Mirror's Edge will not be delisted from the PlayStation store. This is after EA said that the game would be removed from digital storefronts, alongside Battlefield 1942, Bad Company, and Bad Company 2. EA explains that the mention of Mirror's Edge in that announcement was an error, and that it has no plans to remove Mirror's Edge from digital storefronts.
EA will soon pull four older DICE games from digital storefronts.
According to EA, Battlefield 1943, Bad Company, Bad Company 2, and Mirror’s Edge will be removed from sale on April 28.
- VG247
Creator of Mirror's Edge's rad achievements list believes that achievements are bad, actually
Former Mirror’s Edge achievement creator Fredrik Thylander has posted on Twitter that he believes achievements and trophies have been bad for gaming, despite his history of creating some pretty swell achievement lists in the past. His initial tweet reads as follows: “Unpopular op
Original postFormer Mirror’s Edge achievement creator Fredrik Thylander has posted on Twitter that he believes achievements and trophies have been bad for gaming, despite his history of creating some pretty swell achievement lists in the past.
His initial tweet reads as follows: “Unpopular opinion: achievements/trophies have been bad for gaming. It narrows games down, it disrupts and diverts attention, and it eats resources that could have made the game better.” In replies, he elaborated that, “games should have the reward mechanisms most suited for them, and the one-size-fits-all mandate from platform holders to make reward systems that benefit the platform makes games worse.”
Hot take or not, it’s a compelling argument! We’ve all played games where achievements feel slapped on as a second thought. They can seem included just because they have to be, farmed for meaningless points rather than adding anything substantial to the experience of actually playing the game.
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun
EA shutting down Mirror's Edge online services in January
A few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s
Original postA few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s launch on PC. It’ll presumably affect the dystopian parkour game’s online leaderboards, and downloadable Ghosts of other players.
- VG247
Check out this gorgeous Mirror's Edge inspired Unreal Engine 5 project
If you’re an old and jaded Mirror’s Edge fan, 3d environment artist Thomas Ripoll may be creating something that’ll put a big grin on your face. Built with the shiny new Unreal Engine 5 , Thomas has released screenshots of their own project onto Twitter, and it looks like they na
Original postIf you’re an old and jaded Mirror’s Edge fan, 3d environment artist Thomas Ripoll may be creating something that’ll put a big grin on your face. Built with the shiny new Unreal Engine 5, Thomas has released screenshots of their own project onto Twitter, and it looks like they nailed it.
Linked above is the tweet containing multiple screenshots of this early project, all of which features that awesome mix of minimalism and modernism with clean primary colours pasted all over a sea of bright white urban sprawl. Everything in the images above is self-made and immediately fits the Mirror’s Edge aesthetic.
According to the creator, they’d like to have something playable in this loving recreation of the Mirror’s Edge style, although with no coding experience a dedicated parkour movement system may be outside of their ability for now. Nonetheless, even running around these environments would be lush and would no doubt cause a wave of nostalgia to rush in.
- PC Gamer
Mirror's Edge is still the undisputed queen of parkour
You don’t often think about running in games, do you? Hold W to go forwards, maybe tap shift if you’re really hoofing it. Then there’s Mirror’s Edge, a game so committed to putting you in the free-running shoes of leading lady Faith Connors that you can practically feel the soles
Original postYou don’t often think about running in games, do you? Hold W to go forwards, maybe tap shift if you’re really hoofing it. Then there’s Mirror’s Edge, a game so committed to putting you in the free-running shoes of leading lady Faith Connors that you can practically feel the soles wearing out with each jump, slide, and wallrun. Parkour might not be as cool now as it was in 2008, but over a decade later, Faith is still running circles around the competition...
Read more. - Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has begun
Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs u
Original postGet your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has begun
Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs u
Original postGet your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.
- PCGamesN
Holy cow AGDQ 2021 starts this weekend
2020 is almost over. I know, yes, I'm also having a hard time believing it, but here we are, and the traditional marker of the new year is upon us: the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrunning marathon. AGDQ 2021 kicks off this Sunday, and while I know that sounds completely
Original post2020 is almost over. I know, yes, I'm also having a hard time believing it, but here we are, and the traditional marker of the new year is upon us: the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrunning marathon. AGDQ 2021 kicks off this Sunday, and while I know that sounds completely absurd at this point in time, there's a whole schedule to prove it and everything.
AGDQ 2021 starts on January 3 at 9:00 PST / 12:00 EST / 17:00 GMT, though a 30-minute pre-show will begin just before that time. The show proper kicks off with an inbounds run of the parkour classic, Mirror's Edge, and the day continues with PC games including Just Cause 3, Dragon Age: Origins, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
There are plenty of other notable titles throughout the week, including Hades, Left 4 Dead 2, and the original Warcraft 3. The show comes to a close on Saturday, January 9 with a gotta catch 'em all run of Pokémon Blue and an all dungeons run of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
RELATED LINKS:
The best parkour games on PC
A team of speedrunners think they've set an unbeatable Mirror's Edge record
See a Mirror's Edge map painstakingly recreated in Call of Duty 4 - Eurogamer
A brief history of cyberpunk games
The long-awaited release of Cyberpunk 2077 brings to an end years of feverish anticipation for those who have been itching to roam the streets of Night City, but it's only the latest example of gaming's fixation with the trappings of the cyberpunk genre. It's perhaps inevitable t
Original postThe long-awaited release of Cyberpunk 2077 brings to an end years of feverish anticipation for those who have been itching to roam the streets of Night City, but it's only the latest example of gaming's fixation with the trappings of the cyberpunk genre.
It's perhaps inevitable that gaming and cyberpunk are so closely entwined, given that both were birthed in the technological boom of the 1950s and gained mainstream pop culture presence around the same time in the late 70s and early 80s. The hard part is working out how to separate the games that cherry-picked aspects of the cyberpunk aesthetic - of which there are literally hundreds - from those that are, or at least attempted to be, genuine examples of cyberpunk fiction. For that, we need to nail down the genre's key tropes; namely a dystopian outlook on the near-future, an interest in alternate digital realities, drug or technology assisted human modification, and a cultural milieu in which corporate interests have long since outranked the quaint notion of elected government.
Things got started pretty early, with adaptations of 1980s cyberpunk movies for 8-bit home computers like the ZX Spectrum. The Blade Runner game, rather cunningly, was licensed from the eerie synth score by Vangelis rather than the more costly movie despite asking you to fly your "Spinner" craft over Los Angeles, locating errant replicants then chasing them down in simple foot chases. An amusing distraction, but one that failed to grapple with the themes of cyberpunk in any meaningful way.
- Developer post
Steam Trading Cards Added to Mirror's Edge
On June 10th, as part of the celebration of EA content (Including Mirror's Edge Catalyst) coming back to Steam, we enabled Steam trading cards for the original Mirror's Edge.
Original postOn June 10th, as part of the celebration of EA content (Including Mirror's Edge Catalyst) coming back to Steam, we enabled Steam trading cards for the original Mirror's Edge.
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun
The best platform games on PC
The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best
Original postThe biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.
- Eurogamer
Five of the Best: Zip wires
Five of the Best is a weekly series about things you don't notice when you're playing a game because you've got more pressing things to do such as saving the world. Things like hands, potions, crowds, dinosaurs - we've covered an eclectic bunch so far (and there's a Five of the B
Original postFive of the Best is a weekly series about things you don't notice when you're playing a game because you've got more pressing things to do such as saving the world. Things like hands, potions, crowds, dinosaurs - we've covered an eclectic bunch so far (and there's a Five of the Best archive where they're all compiled).
But these incidentals, they're essential, and you'll find they're lodged deep in your brain. So much so that if I were to say "best maps in video games - go!" I bet you'd be able to rattle off a handful without too much trouble. And that's what I want you to do: get involved, because Five of the Best is as much about you celebrating your favourites as me celebrating mine.
So here goes, prepare yourself: "Best zip wires in video games - go!"
- PC Gamer
Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 3
This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US . This is the final part. You can read part one here , and part two here . Authoritarian regimes often pick train stations a
Original postThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. This is the final part. You can read part one here, and part two here.
Authoritarian regimes often pick train stations as the place to present an idealised face to the world—a sort of dictator’s Instagram account. A station in a capital city is a point of entrance, a shiny front door to a society. It’s a confined space where message can be easily controlled.
No expense was spared on Moscow’s famous metro system, with enough marble and chandeliers to suggest an underground ballroom. At the height of the Soviet Union, photographs of Stalin were hung from its walls.
The street facade of the central station in Pyongyang, meanwhile, has the appearance of a shrine—thanks to the portraits of the two Kim Jongs at the foot of its clocktower. On their flanks, a long colonnade props up a row of letters, “Long live the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong-un! Long live the glorious Workers’ Party of Korea!”
There’s nothing so audacious in Ryding Park, a subway station far beneath the rooftops of The City in Mirror’s Edge. There’s an intimidating order to its symmetry, yes—and a patterned configuration of thin bulbs in the roof offers strange light, like that from the heat element of an oven. But the chairs are orange plastic, and the blue and white tiles of the platform suggest a swimming pool. The evidence of a surveillance state comes instead from the advertising—for gated estates, and secure, reliable phone connections. “With our network,” reads the CityEar advertisement, “you are never alone.”
Trains rattle past at breakneck speeds, shaking the whole structure, but I’m done with running. It’s here, in a couple of hours from now, that I’ll make my stand.
When we last left Faith, she’d emerged from the sewers to triumphantly blast away at riot cops with their own shotguns—but been forced by some gated level design to leave all those weapons behind. Even now, with mastery over the game’s disarm techniques, it feels as if I’m at the mercy of an invisible quartermaster who doles out the game’s firearms only when they see fit, before locking them away again once the fight is done.
The wrestler
As I jog through dry canals to reach the old runner training grounds, snipers stand high above on unreachable bridges. Ducking in and out of alcoves to dodge their sights feels like an indignity—when can I get my hands on one of those rifles and finally face down the city’s security forces? The only weapon around these parts is Jacknife, a former runner who’s found a permanent home among the city’s criminal element. As expected, he knows something about the death of mayoral candidate Robert Pope, the killing for which Faith’s sister has been framed. He sends us after Travis ‘Ropeburn’ Burfield, a former wrestler turned head of a shipping firm. Pope had been Ropeburn’s employer, and it’s implied the latter may have wanted to depose him.
“Look,” my handler Merc warns, “I saw Ropeburn wrestle once. Broke some poor bastard’s arm, then headbutted the ref. He won’t be a talker, he’ll be a fighter.” In other words, this guy has been living by a self-imposed code of violence long before I got here. Using the bright yellow sign of Z Burfield International Shipping as a distant beacon, I make my way over to meet him.
A thing about server farms—they’re well- ventilated. I break into Ropeburn’s, then follow the shaft all the way to his office, just in time to overhear a conspiratorial phone call. The man’s broad shoulders betray a thug in a suit. Through the grate I have a clear view of his desk where a handgun enjoys pride of place—as if it were a conference phone or mug of coffee.
Once Ropeburn leaves, I waste no time. This is the first time the game has handed me a weapon without a fight, and I’m not going to turn it down. A magazine called ‘Nature’ lies discarded beside it, and it occurs to me that FPS developer DICE is reverting to its own.
Sure enough, I’ve triggered a silent alarm somewhere. The lifts have halted, and the Blues are swarming in. Blundering into the building’s lobby, I make a beeline for the tall fountain centrepiece and start climbing. Once at the peak, I open up a new path onto a third-floor corridor by firing through a glass pane—once to break, and again to shatter. Experience has left me acutely aware of how few bullets I can carry, and jealous of my enemies—who have the luxury of refilling their guns endlessly, according to the rules of ’90s action movies.
I let the encroaching cops handle the rest of the windows, saving my shells for them. The shotgun’s weight issue is a thing of the past—with the pistol, I can leap across large gaps with impunity, as if I were carrying nothing at all. My remaining ammo takes care of an unarmoured cop on a high mezzanine, and I disarm the next, even managing to take down one of the SWAT squaddies on the bottom floor. I get so carried away, in fact, I completely fail to notice I’ve taken a wrong turn and have to repeat part of the jungle gym again, but I don’t mind. I’m getting the hang of this.
On my way out of the building, I develop a pattern of cockily smacking my soles into the faces of SWAT teams just as they pound through each door, before relieving them of their weapons. Breach and clear this, you overdressed Siege wannabes. Their assault rifles, though, still click impotently—the bullets deemed off-limits by our invisible quartermaster.
I have a feeling that’s about to change, though. It’s helicopter o’clock, and although I can’t kick the chopper in the gonads, I can fight the SWAT men it’s dropping off. In fact, the game’s telling me to hurt them, painting them as targets in red silhouette— where until now their black uniforms have been a prompt to run.
Engaging in a well-oiled disarm procedure, I turn the nearest machine gun on its owners and fire. Either The City’s rifle manufacturer has recalled a faulty batch, or the game’s arbitrarily deigned to start letting me use them. The bullets emerge with a strange, snippy sound, as if fired through the plastic tube of a pneumatic delivery system. I wonder whether these oddly un-bassy weapons are designed to sit comfortably in the middle of the sound mix—they’re not even allowed to dominate the audio, let alone the game at large.
Living on the edge
After the battle’s done, I fire the rifle into the sky, and it takes two or three seconds for the clip to empty. After hours of bullets in the single digits, it feels less Point Break cool, more astonishingly wasteful.
The tone of the game is slowly changing, as my route back to the runners’ hideout demonstrates. For those who think Mirror’s Edge is pacifist, I present Exhibit Shotgun Cop Spawned At The End of a Long Piece of Scaffolding Before A Long, Long Drop.
Ropeburn talked about meeting an associate in a partially-constructed building on Renold’s Street—and so a short while later, here we are, and so is Ropeburn’s heli. His name evokes not so much wrestling as the nasty kid at school who gave everyone Chinese burns, merely to while away his lunch break. It fits. In fact, this place gives off the vibe of school after the bell rings—all flimsy ceiling panels and eerie silence.
When I get to the roof, Ropeburn pulls the same move on me I’ve been pulling on the cops—grabbing my shoulders the moment I walk through the door. What I’ve never done, though, is lift someone bodily and hurl them across a rooftop. “Did he send ya? You can both go to hell,” he screams. “No one threatens me!”
There are few sights in this game I know better than Ropeburn lifting Faith up by her throat, pulling her close enough to see the grin spread across his yellow teeth, and then throwing her over a ledge. I’ve had to endure it many times. When Mirror’s Edge first embraces combat, it does so in the most frustrating form possible—an instafail boss fight. Luckily, I only have to wrench the pole from his hand once.
I send Ropeburn tumbling off the side of the building, where he hangs and reveals his secrets—he did hire someone to kill Pope, and was planning to meet them at the mall tomorrow. But as Faith goes to pull him back up, a sniper on the adjacent roof shoots him dead.
On the way out heavy SWAT reinforcements force me down, through the empty subway under repair, to Ryding Park. I’ve come to think of an orange palette as Mirror’s Edge’s code for violence. A gleaming tangerine tunnel takes me down into the station, like a subconscious activation switch.
Ryding Park is “closed for reconstruction” and it does feel as if Mirror’s Edge is rebuilding itself before my eyes, as a game where force is a real option. Down here, where the passing trains raise the underground rumble to a roar, the armoury is finally opened.
First come the street cops with their pistols, which I promptly relieve them of, dodging between the cover offered by information boards and ticket booths. Then the SWAT arrive, shattering the glass over my head with heavy machine guns. My turning circle slows under the weight of their weapons. But by misusing the spin move—designed to allow you to switch directions during a climb—I can swivel quickly to face enemies. It’s an intense firefight, and I stick with it longer after Merc and the game tell me it’s time to move on, eventually succumbing to the reinforcements swarming down the steps, who outnumber my bullets.
With headshots, I can take out two or three of the SWAT already on the platform with pistols, conserving assault rifle ammo for the next wave. I leave one alive longer than the rest. His death will trigger reinforcements, and I need time to lug machine guns up the platform to the far end, hoarding them in a farcical pile of black metal.
It’s still a grossly imbalanced battle. Hiding behind a shuttered coffee stand, I let the reinforcements come to me, luring them down the platform in ones and twos. At short range I can take them down in quick bursts, saving bullets, but in every instance I’m only a quick burst from death myself.
The final cop hangs back, so I emerge from cover and engage Matrix-like ‘reaction time’ as I open fire. He falls in slow motion, and the clattering screech of the soundtrack gives way instantly to a low hum.
I decide to count the dead, but the bodies have already disappeared. In The City, imperfections are covered up and hidden away. It’s fitting that this aberration of a fight scene should be scrubbed from the records as soon as it’s over, leaving only the sheen of blue and white tiles.
Officially, this is a parkour game. But I now know it can be something far stranger. Ryding Park is where I get off—the terminus at which I finally feel I’ve conquered Mirror’s Edge as a combat proposition.
- PC Gamer
Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 2
This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US . You can read part one here , and part three is due on Friday. There’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker just outside York wh
Original postThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part one here, and part three is due on Friday.
There’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker just outside York where the walls are painted in calming tones—designed to help its occupants keep their heads as they carried out essential logistics in the days and weeks after a hypothetical strike.
It seems like wishful thinking to hope that a nice shade of paint might make the difference against the weight of the world’s end. Then again, colour associations are strong and laden with meaning. When I think of Mirror’s Edge, I tend to remember the gleaming whites and deep blues—the aspects of its palette I associate with serenity and freedom under an open sky. Now that I’m playing through it again as a killer, I’m noticing a whole other part of the colour wheel—the angry oranges and block reds that kick in with greater frequency as I punch my way through to the middle of the campaign.
As Faith, I’m a runner who lives in the gaps left by The City’s surveillance society, making highways of its roofspaces and maintenance shafts. But the cop gauntlet of our last instalment made it clear that something has changed—power in The City is shifting, and Faith’s outsider status is in flux.
In fact, right now I’m about as inside as it’s possible to be, in the offices of Robert Pope & Associates. Pope is a mayoral candidate running on an anti-surveillance platform, which might be why his building is full of frosted glass windows, as opposed to the transparent panes found everywhere else. I’m on the 26th floor, Marketing. The carpets are thin and the walls are adorned with TVs, in places nobody would stop to watch them.
Fighting with my family
I’m here because police chatter suggests Faith’s sister Kate—a cop—has been involved in a violent incident. Sure enough, we find her in Pope’s corner office. The would-be mayor sits at his desk overlooking the whole city, but he’s not enjoying the view. Blood pours from his head, and Kate stands over him. Apparently this sort of thing runs in the family. Kate says she’s been set up, and a piece of paper on Pope’s desk points to an “Icarus”, but there’s nothing to be done about it right now. Sis is going to jail, and I need to get out of here. As I make my way out, SWAT boots fl atten the carpet thinner still. “You are surrounded,” a voice bellows. “Do not attempt to exit the building.” My new philosophy dictates a third way, however: before I leave, I have to try and fight them.
A dozen militarised policemen have the entire floor covered with assault rifl es. If I’m going to stand a chance of beating them, I have to get at their weapons. Thankfully, the infl uence of The Matrix lies heavy over Mirror’s Edge, like an oversized trench coat. Running generates ‘reaction time’—and when I press X, I can cash it in for a few seconds of slo-mo. That’ll make it far easier to exploit the tiny window of opportunity I get to grab a gun at close range before it makes contact with my face.
After several attempts, I perfect the combo—sliding beneath the bullets of the nearest cop, straightening up to receive a rifl e butt to the chin, then wrenching the weapon away at the last possible moment. I turn the gun triumphantly on its owners, and—click. Click, click, click. Nothing happens. Other people’s bullets fill the air. My slo-mo is spent, I can’t arm myself, and there’s absolutely no way I can confiscate 11 more rifl es in a row. It’s time to turn to my third rule and run. Luckily this is an office built to impress—lots of light, and lots of openings. I slip through an indoor window into Accounting, and take the mezzanine floor up to the vents. The cops fill those with light, too, opening new holes in the metal beneath my feet. It’s a hurried retreat—my escape is accompanied by a soundtrack of dinging lifts, the thud of doors barged open, and once I make it to the building’s exterior, the wop- wop-wop of a helicopter’s propeller.
After an eternity of fire escape chicanery, I drop down into an enclosed urban garden. In the stark colour scheme, even the plants are painted an artificial white, like a reverse Alice in Wonderland. I take the nearest door into the City Eye news station, and spot three SWAT cops standing at the far end of a corridor. I can’t use their rifl es, but I do prefer these odds. The chopper’s guns can’t hit me here, and nobody else is following. The corridor glistens with red paint. I veer right, pushing Faith’s light frame over a chain link fence into the parallel maintenance area. Here I can close the gap between me and the cops without eating all their bullets.
I slide-kick the cop at the rear, transferring all my momentum into his legs and taking his weapon when he doubles over. The chamber’s empty, so I turn tail and zigzag back down the corridor, pinging between the walls to keep safe. Even playing the game in this counter- intuitive fashion, speed is my armour.
With each small success comes a dose of panic. I’m far from mastery, and with that first downed cop comes the mounting pressure to pull it off again, and again, until the encounter’s over. So it happens that I don’t kick the second cop in the head as intended, but push the wrong buttons and spin around in mid-air, falling flat on my arse.
Faith in action
While the scene reloads, I start looking up YouTube videos with names like “Mirror’s Edge All Disarms”. I feel like Neo, uploading martial arts directly into my brain. Suddenly, I know how to expose an enemy’s back by chaining a wall-run into a kick, granting me a moment free from gunfire to disarm them. To make it happen, though, I have to unlearn Titanfall 2.
In Respawn’s game you can push leisurely off a wall like a swimmer, redirecting yourself as needed. But in Mirror’s Edge you ricochet like a bullet. Your point of entrance determines your angle of exit, and that kick has to happen near-instantly if it’s going to connect.
Once I get it right, the second cop falls this way. The third I meet unexpectedly in a doorway as we both hurtle around the corner in opposite directions. Startled, I smack him so hard he ragdolls into the wall opposite. His jelly-limbs wobble gently under his shoulderpads. If it’s any consolation to him, I’m shaking too.
On comms, Merc is still troubled by Pope’s death, but in my journey he’s just one body among many. Following my handler’s directions, I stride out across the hideous yellow-and-bonsai-tree decor of the journalists’ office, where news of Pope’s murder already rings from every screen, and pick up speed as I head out to Centurion Plaza. Which doesn’t sound authoritarian at all.
“Blues ahead of you,” Merc warns. “One at a time, remember what I told you.” These are street cops, much less armoured than their SWAT equivalents, and the game wants me to take them out. I jog to meet the first, and he brings his pistol down towards my head. I duck out the way, hitting the prompt at the right time to use his own momentum against him, twisting an arm up behind his head. I’d read him his rights, but I’m not sure they have those here anymore.
This gun has bullets in it. I wave it around the plaza and power up the wide steps of the train station—a grand facade celebrating this society with concrete brutalism and bright orange flags. This is my first opportunity to bring firepower to bear against the SWAT, however piddly. I take clumsy potshots at those I can see standing at a roadblock, and watch one fall before making my escape. For the first time since starting this playthrough I feel powerful, and at least somewhat in control.
Sniping in the sewers
My next assignment sends me down a gaping storm drain, which looks like the Sarlacc’s pit after a deep clean. I’m looking for an old runner acquaintance named Jacknife, who might know more about Icarus than we do, which isn’t hard.
Down here the colour switches to a damp shade of seaweed, the pace slows for challenging jumps, and a low rumble provides ambience—the constant bass note of vast underground spaces. “Keep going,” warns Merc. “Don’t think those Blues won’t come down here.”
Sure enough, a sniper team has set up ahead. Their sights bob gently on a green sea of gangways as I climb, promising serious hardware if I can only reach it. Eventually, by leaping between tall concrete pillars, I get close enough to disarm a marksman—but make the mistake of kicking him in the chest as I hop over a gap. He stumbles, and I plunge straight downward, making a soggy surface far soggier. Momentum really is life and death in Mirror’s Edge.
On the second try, with the help of slo-mo and a rain-slick wall, I yank the weapon from his grip. It looks huge against the game’s empty HUD, a weighty presence in Faith’s hands. And so it proves. Once I’ve dispatched the snipers positioned on the opposite side of the drain, I make to jump to the next platform, but the rifl e won’t let me. With this albatross pulling me down, I can’t even mount the first springboard. I’ll have to leave it here. Exeunt through the emergency overfl ow gate, pursued by police.
I make my way up the drain to ground level, by pipe and by crane. It’s the only place the game’s platforming rhythm has matched the stuttering, fumbling one I’ve chosen for myself by embracing combat. So when I emerge on the surface and find a riot squad waiting for me, it feels like a natural part of the game’s fl ow.
Armed with shotguns and wearing shoulder pads that suggest their mums have dressed them for roller skating, the riot cops strike less terrifying figures than the SWAT. I can take them. But I’ll need to pick them off—and more importantly, pick the guns from their unconscious bodies.
Finally, something with a kick. There’s no Doom-style boom here—instead the shotgun comes over like a stapler produced by Skrillex. But it sends the riot guys flying backward, and it’s a relief to see somebody other than me getting some serious air for once.
Afterwards, though, lugging the gun around reduces Faith to a goofy plod. And my very next move requires a four part jump across parked lorries over a barbed wire fence. Then I realise: that’s no coincidence. Like the platform in the storm drain, this sequence is designed to disarm me, just as I’ve been disarming cops all over town.
At last, Mirror’s Edge is letting me at the big guns. But it’s still trying to control where and how I use its weapons, and it remains to be seen whether I can break free.
- PC Gamer
Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 1
This diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US . You can read part two here , and part three is due on Friday. Mirror’s Edge is worse off with guns. That’s the received wi
Original postThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part two here, and part three is due on Friday.
Mirror’s Edge is worse off with guns. That’s the received wisdom, anyway. The theory goes like this: DICE, upon inventing the running simulator, panicked a bit. Any new series is a challenge for a AAA developer—a cacophony of newness, where a sequel builds on past successes. And this game, more than most, was an expensive unknown—one that stripped away the familiar paraphernalia of first-person games. Sticking Colts and SCARs in Mirror’s Edge was a way of anchoring it in something safe. The guns represented reassurance, both for the Battlefield developer and an audience it worried wouldn’t quite get it.
Perhaps the studio was right to be worried—Mirror’s Edge didn’t sell particularly well by EA’s standards. But a core fanbase really, really got into it. They understood it was a game about momentum, and that the guns were antithetical to that goal. They encouraged you to slow down and take aim, breaking the pumping pulse the game offered at its best.
People never really stopped talking about Mirror’s Edge, and when the time came for DICE to have another crack at the series, it seemed to agree with the consensus. For Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, the studio changed almost nothing about the pace or moveset of Mirror’s Edge. But it got rid of the guns. In its place, DICE designed a melee system that would capitalise on momentum. You could gather speed, spring off a wall, and plough all that force into the face of an enforcer. A suite of attacks was built to weaponise your catalogue of slides and spins. The idea was that you would use your enemies’ armoured weight against them, sending them stumbling into your waiting foot for a roundhouse finisher.
In practice, most players weren’t particularly hot on that either. In the wake of Catalyst, combat is still considered the weakest element of Mirror’s Edge. I’m left wondering if we gave up on the guns too soon? What would a combat-heavy run of that first game feel like?
Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind!
I’m going back to The City—to the time before it gained the addendum “of Glass”. I’m going to play through 2009’s Mirror’s Edge and take every possible opportunity to start a scrap. Wherever there’s an option for fl ight, I’ll pick fight first. In each instance, I’ll keep firing until the enemies have all fallen over or the ammo runs dry—whichever comes soonest. Faith might have got us this far, but it’s time to meet Fury.
I’m on a job. The runners in The City exist in the membrane between civilised and criminal society. They’ve opted out of the safe-yet-controlled culture down below, but stay sufficiently distant from real trouble that the police leave them alone. That precarious position limits their career options to, essentially, private postal work. And so today I’m carrying a bag across the rooftops to a comms tower, where another runner, Celeste, will take it to its destination. I’m hoping the package doesn’t have a “this way up” on it—I’m doing a lot of forward rolls.
Something unusual has happened, though. A news helicopter has tipped the cops off about my building- hopping activities. I suppose eventually a surveillance state polices itself. So much for living carefully on the mirror’s edge—looks like I’ll be putting my violent new set of rules to the test imminently.
Sure enough, when I drop through a vent into a high-rise intended as a shortcut, I find four cops waiting for me. Bullets follow my footsteps as I jog awkwardly into cover and survey my options.
The space I’ve just left is a small anteroom, in which the men with guns are no more than ten metres away. But as I turn the corner I find a stairwell, and a tall bank of lockers. I clamber on top, waiting for my pursuers to pass so I can hop down behind them.
If I’m going to pull this playthrough off I’ll need to get used to disarming enemies—and that’s far more easily done when they’re facing the other way.
But no plan survives contact with dystopian reality. Philip K. Dick said that, probably.
When I slip behind the last cop to storm past my hiding place, he turns around at the last second, pushing against my shoulders. His colleagues open fire as I stumble, and I drop to the fl oor. This is no typical DICE shooter—Faith can only catch three or four bullets before taking a long lie down.
On the second attempt, I manage to plunge off the lockers and land on an enemy, Mario style, knocking him out. But when I reach triumphantly for his weapon, nothing happens. I can only see a baton on his waist—but I could’ve sworn he was firing at me just moments ago. Bewildered and blocked in, I run back the way the cops came and stare impotently at the anteroom’s vending machine as red fills my screen. “Digglers doughnuts,” reads the advertising. “Because life is sweet.” My view turns on its side as another bullet enters my back.
After a few more tries, the game crashes to desktop, as if in protest. “You should always try to get away from hostiles,” Mirror’s Edge’s tutorial tells me. The info box shows an image of Faith running towards a SWAT team—and then a big, red arrow bending in a U-turn.
My handler Mercury—like the messenger god, or Merc to his friends—joins in by yelling over the radio. “Wire’s going crazy, get out of there, Faith.” Even the cops physically push me onward, like actors in interactive theatre. This isn’t supposed to be a combat encounter. It’s a prompt for a chase, to propel me through to the next area. Everything in the game is screaming at me to run, and I’m working against its nature.
If I’m going to control the situation, I’ll need more space. I lead the police up the stairwell, looking back every few seconds to make sure they’re still following, like a cat teasing a dog. Using the Mario technique, I’m able to use my height advantage to pounce on the cop at the front of the pack as they round the corner at the top of each staircase. I take out three this way, and shepherd the final officer out onto the rooftop.
Here I can play to my strengths. I sprint down the far end, where my opponent’s bullets become distant annoyances. Then I spin around, ready to charge him like a jousting knight. Until a door crashes open on my flank, and two more cops shoot and shoot and shoot until my light frame is heavy with lead.
Repeating the sequence using the few close quarters moves available to me is gruelling and unsatisfying work—especially knowing that more forceful tools are, for reasons unknown, just out of reach. On the next attempt, though, I manage to take out the entire first squad on the stairs. Thumping trance escape music still plays, but it’s quiet on the roof. This time I’m ready for the door to open, and kick the first cop in the shins. He doubles over in pain. The second opens fire as I retreat, nicking me in the shoulder, and I notice my palms are sweating as if I’m fighting a Dark Souls boss. Every time I stand and face my oppressors, I’m at a terrible disadvantage.
But then, as the first cop falls unconscious, something changes. Amid all the familiar smacks, grunts, and booms, a new noise—the clack of a metal object against a hard surface. A gun. Barging past the goon in my face, I pick up the pistol and let off a few rounds into his chest. It’s an ugly spectacle. There’s no action movie feedback, no ragdoll pinwheeling across the terrain—just a man slumping onto concrete. I swap his loaded gun for my empty one, and run on.
Before long I’ve developed a nasty pattern—shooting a cop dead wherever they rear their masked head, before swapping my weapon for the one they’ve left flush with ammo. There’s no way to know how many bullets I’ve got left: in accordance with the style of the time, Mirror’s Edge rejects UI altogether, leaving the screen empty of distractions. But the pistols tend to click uselessly after just a handful of shots, and there’s no way of storing clips, so I’ll need to find new guns regularly if I’m to stay armed.
I murder my way to the comms tower, where my partner Celeste awaits. “They’re playing rough, Cel,” Faith warns as she hands the bag over. Back in Mirror’s Edge’s day, this is what we referred to as ludonarrative dissonance—the disconnect between a game’s script and the way you play it. If the cops are rough, I’m playing far rougher.
Smashing the mirror
You can learn a lot about a game by breaking it. I’ve played Mirror’s Edge for years, but only by opting out of its constant forward momentum have I started to appreciate how it works. It’s not just the rooftop furniture of the game’s levels that are designed to boost you forward—every successfully landed wall jump or pipe vault adding to your acceleration. The same is true of the script, the soundtrack, and the enemy placement. All of these elements are deployed with careful timing to provide the wind for your sails, a series of convincing reasons to keep running all the way to your endpoint. I’ve every reason to believe that the devs at DICE would make fantastic personal trainers.
As I leap to this level’s final rooftop, I can see how it’s supposed to go. The news chopper, having made its story happen, is here to film it. A SWAT team arrives stage right, intended to funnel me over the lip of building. The helicopter draws level with the roof, its nearest landing skid glowing red—a sure sign, in Mirror’s Edge’s colour- coded world, that it’s part of the path.
“I don’t care how you get off that roof, Faith,” Merc prods. “Just do it.” These Truman Show- esque performers aren’t opponents at all.
They all want me to do the same thing—flee from the SWAT, their bullets raising this moment to dramatic climax as I leap for the rail of the helicopter. Fade to black, next level. But those aren’t my rules. I’m going to have to fight.
The rooftop is designed for a quick escape, not for hiding, but I use the sparse cover offered by fans and pipework to lure the enforcers into open space, darting out for jabs when it’s safest. If I was a playtester, DICE’s designers would be swearing quietly over my shoulder.
Just once I glimpse a flash of red—an opportunity to grab an assault rifle—but I miss my split-second window. Instead I manage to slide-kick and side-swipe my enemies senseless, leaving a strange silence. The news copter still hovers obediently in the air. I’ve given them one hell of a broadcast and with all of us at the mercy of this new playstyle, there’s no telling what’ll come next episode.
- PC Gamer
Time Extend: Mirror's Edge
This article was originally published in issue 288 of Edge in December 2015. That means below you'll find some forward-looking references to Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which we've kept here for context. You can subscribe here for more great features like this. Mirror’s Edge arrived
Original postThis article was originally published in issue 288 of Edge in December 2015. That means below you'll find some forward-looking references to Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which we've kept here for context. You can subscribe here for more great features like this.
Mirror’s Edge arrived in 2008 as a searing white riposte to a just-ended generation of over-brown WWII shooters and firstperson trudging. It was different, and new—different partially because it was new, forming a partnership of opposites with fellow EA newcomer Dead Space. Both were fresh IP, released a month apart in a publisher’s schedule otherwise dominated by licences and sequels, and both were built upon contrasting foundations of meaningful design.
Dead Space, made in California by Visceral Games, encapsulated a grounded American industrialism, a practical celebration of blue-collar capability that informed everything from its violence to its visuals. And Mirror’s Edge, built in Stockholm by DICE, was almost comically Scandinavian, a bright, minimalist vision of sleek architecture and graceful action—part parkour playground, part Ikea dystopia.
Mirror’s Edge is a game about movement. Its heroes are ‘runners’, athletic outlaws who carry off-grid information in a spotless future of oppressive surveillance and security. This is movement as morality; in a society built on passive obedience, speed is rebellion and flawless agility is freedom. It’s a game about energy and creativity, and how these are expressed from the confinements of a perspective and a genre more normally given over to destruction, a window for lining up targets and admiring their ends.
If the game’s setting—known simply as The City—has aged well, it’s because it was always designed for beauty rather than realism. It’s not an as-best-we-can interpretation of reality powered by 2008 hardware, but a geometric impression of totalitarianism, a sanitised vision of brilliant white pierced by urgent primary colours (strident and unambiguous, like diktats) and ironic glass transparency. On the outside, it’s shiny, empty and pointed; on the inside, it’s all stark corridors angling to an overexposed vanishing point. At the centre of it all, a looming point of orientation, is a vast watchtower called the Shard, an imposing, eminently visible testament to the power of observation.
The Shard, which predates its equally sinister real-world counterpart by London Bridge, is a good example of what Mirror’s Edge does well. It is a game of design, in as much as everything it shows us is far more interesting than anything it tries to say. The gap in sophistication between the elegance of The City’s composition and the heavy-handedness of the game’s script (“It’s not the news any more… it’s advertising”) or its clumsy animated cutscenes is extraordinary. Mirror’s Edge creates an environment that tells a better story than the posturing speeches of its try-hard characters ever could.
The City’s immaculate coldness invites intrusion and physicality, the way a concrete square attracts skaters or a blank wall invites graffiti artists. The only reason we need for doing the only thing the game asks—to flow across its hard surfaces—is written into the surfaces themselves more profoundly than can be explained in words.
This is also the reason that our hero, Faith, is so much more interesting as an image than as a character. Faith is a perfect fit for fuzzily defined anti-authoritarianism. Primarily, because she’s female, in a gaming world and a generic space dominated by shaven-headed men. Everything potent about Faith can be gleaned at a glance. All she says thereafter—the family drama, the underground society of people whose idea of nonconformism is split-toed shoes—diminishes that initial impact of the lithe placeless somebody running from power to survive. Perhaps that’s why Mirror’s Edge generated such buzz before release: Faith is a soluble meme, an instant hit.
These failures of story and character are not Mirror’s Edge’s only problems. It is a fascinatingly flawed game, whose absences (the paucity of weapons, the empty space of the environment) are often more successful than things positively featured. The decision to limit the scope of the shooting in what consequently can’t really be called a firstperson shooter is particularly key. The defining triumph of Mirror’s Edge might be the recognition that running away from guns is more interesting than marching around clutching one like a metal comforter. This is a reconfiguration of the central kinetic premise of firstperson games: that they’re about moving, aiming and shooting; that we run and jump quickly, but we fire, and fire at, things that move faster. In Mirror’s Edge, we’re the speeding object, and it’s our velocity and precision that matters.
This, even more than for staring at The City, is where the game’s widened field of vision and HUDless appearance come into their own. With the background of The City in place, matched by a rhythmic lo-fi soundtrack, the joy of Mirror’s Edge is in freedom and flow. What replaces the destructive power of other shooters is a more nuanced physical interaction with the world around us, a fleet-footed agility that links ground slides, wall runs, impact rolls and zip wires with an accumulated, vision-blurring momentum. Environments are no longer arenas and killboxes, but puzzles with physical solutions.
There’s an exquisite thrill to sustaining a top-speed run that incorporates the fluid negotiation of various obstacles—hurdling a fence, bouncing between parallel walls with a 180-degree whip turn, nailing a landing and barging through a door. The fluency is compulsive, and the action matches the game’s bleached authoritarian theme: running is an essentially subversive act of escape, of expression, and of not prioritising violence above all else.
But Mirror’s Edge is a flawed game, and these moments of harmonious fluency are fleeting. The freerunning can be brutally frustrating, partly because, while nothing feels better than intuiting a route and the manoeuvres needed to glide through it, there’s an unavoidable degree of trial-and-error to certain areas and arrangements. There is no pleasure in failing, just flow-crushing thuds and clumsy collisions, or Faith-crushing falls from rooftops that end with a rush and a crack. More damningly, even perfect runs entail stop-start traversal that robs the game of its kick. Ladders, pipes, air ducts and heavy landings are all built into pathways and act as bottlenecks for the speed that defines the joy of Mirror’s Edge, a self-defeating approach to design that leaves the game at its exhilarating best only in brief, powerful bursts.
This accounts for the divided opinions that met Mirror’s Edge on release, of course. Now it’s easier to see that, if anything, it didn’t go far enough. The inclusion of a stunted melee attack system and take-it-or-leave-it gunplay added to the rough edges and to the sad feeling, when they were deployed, of having slipped off the elegant intended path and having to clamber awkwardly back on. Better not to have them at all—to make a principle of nonviolence, to further streamline the game’s action and ideas.
This might explain the constant buzz of sequel chatter that has circulated since Mirror’s Edge first appeared. If any game design could benefit from a second shot, surely it is this one—imperfect, but with a strong and clearly articulated philosophy at its core. While fellow EA fresh face Dead Space went on to iterate itself into the kind of mediocrity it initially stood against, Mirror’s Edge simply disappeared. DICE and EA doubled down on Battlefield to fight a much more conventional war with Call Of Duty, and Faith was lost.
For a while, anyway. A new Mirror’s Edge was eventually announced in 2013, and DICE has signalled its intention to address many of the flaws of the original. Faith won’t use guns; her melee attacks are sharp and decisive; and the new open world removes the problem of trial-and-error progression. But while we wait for Faith’s return next year, the ideas of Mirror’s Edge have already resurfaced. During pre-release interviews, Mirror’s Edge senior producer Owen O’Brien said it was hard for him to see how some of the lessons of manoeuvrability learned by the game’s team wouldn’t eventually migrate, in some way, to the studio’s more traditional firstperson shooter, Battlefield. Squarely clunking through warzones just wouldn’t cut it any more after this glimpse at a deft, dancing future.
Seven years later, Battlefield is the only notable FPS not to have incorporated a set of advanced traversal mechanics. Starting with Titanfall in March 2014—which offered wall runs and double-jumps—a new standard of manoeuvrability has seemingly been established, one which also appears in recent Call Of Dutys, Destiny and Halo 5. Sprinting, clambering and various degrees of verticality: the basic relationship with space within the firstperson shooter has been renegotiated, a layer of dexterity and physical articulation added between the aiming and the firing.
This, more than the success or failure of the forthcoming reboot-prequel Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, is the real legacy of DICE’s game of dystopian parkour. It proved that even the most familiar and rigged-for-war perspective in games can be about something other than violence, and that with a focused, intelligent design, wordless agility can say more than a thousand scripted pages. It might be imperfectly executed, but Mirror’s Edge permanently reformulated the way we move in the biggest, loudest games we play.