Mirror's Edge (2008)

Running is probably my favorite form of exercise. There is really nothing else like it. Feeling my feet hit the pavement as the world slows down and the noise washes away. It's therapeutic, especially when I'm not listening to music. I like to take in the sites and the sounds when I run. I love hearing the wind cut through the trees or the sound of a car driving by. It's one of my favorite things to do that oddly makes me relax. Reading another person's review can be relaxing as well. I love seeing why someone loves a game and why it might be their favorite game. Having finished Rated AC’s review for Mirrors Edge, I knew I needed to play this game. I wanted to see what they saw. I wanted to feel the ground of The City beneath my feet. I wanted to hear the sounds of the concrete jungle.

Stepping into Faith’s shoes and seeing The City all these years later was incredible. This game still looks sleek and has a clear design presence that other games would love to have. It's very clearly a high tech surveillance state but it isn't grimy like other cyberpunk adventures. The city is actually relatively clean. Saturated colors add a splash of personality to the game that always just adds that extra bit of personality to rooms as you move through them. I'm sure Mirrors Edge is not the first to do this but I am struggling to think of other games off the top of my head.

Faith herself is really quite a standout character as well. I am going to borrow from AC here and state how she wasn't advertised like other games were at the time. That generation belonged to the military fps shooter. Where it was normally, and mostly to this day, a white man with a gun on the cover. Faith does standout among the titles of that generation. I remember when I first gave the game a try I bounced off of it because it wasn't a drab shooter. I remember thinking that the gun play wasn't good. Even though I thought those things on my initial playthrough, I always remembered Faith Connors as a cool heroine.

Something I would not have noticed if I was playing this game without reading the review is the key subtleties to Faith as a character. Jules de Jongh brings more to her role than I thought. I like how I got to pay attention to how she speaks to people this time around. It made for an astonishing revelation and one that I would not have spotted if I didn't read a review by someone who was clearly passionate for the game and everything about it. I think it is safe to say that I really agree with AC and how they view Faith Connors. That review has made me realize how much I can miss from certain characters in the games that I play.

So how does Faith feel in play? Honestly pretty good for the most part. I'll start with the gripes before going into showering praise. Sometimes it just felt like I was a centimeter away from making the correct ledge grab. It's one of those things that builds up over time. Thankfully the checkpoints are very good so this does alleviate some of that pain. I also want to say that Mirrors Edge is old and for being an older game, it still handles incredibly well. I think once I learned to settle in and treat Faith like a human acting and reacting in movement, the game responded to me in kind. Jumps became easier and mistakes for the most part were few and farther between. After all, Mirrors Edge captured the feeling of running on the streets for me. It gave me that euphoric and therapeutic feeling while I was running from rooftop to rooftop.

There are really only a handful of times that I felt the friction of the game against me and that was when it put me in rooms that I felt like I had to fight my way out of. For example, one of the rooms in chapter 5 or 6 where there are two guards on scaffolding above you. There is a door you need to get to but anytime I tried to just go around them they would either just straight up kill me with gunfire or shoot an explosive barrel and that would be it. It made me change my strategy but by doing so, more issues arose. Anytime I went to disarm the guard I would either die during the animation or die before I could reach them. What made this feel even worse was when I would use the slow down button, see the red flash to disarm and have the game act like I didn't do it. Taking the hit from the guard, only to have Faith do the disarm animation and die during it. To me this is where Mirrors Edge was at its absolute worst. I didn't like feeling like I had to shoot my way out of rooms and to the game's credit there are a lot of times you can just run and move around guards and it feels great. I'm curious if there are no kill runs of this game.

Something else I think I would have missed and taken for granted in the game is the music. Music was done by an artist named Solar Fields and damn did I really appreciate their work on this game. I don't run and listen to music. My friends think I'm crazy but I tend to do this weird thing where I break down that a song is like 4 minutes and if a run takes me 40 minutes to complete, then that means in 10 songs I'll be done. It sucks the life out of a run for me. I know I'll be done with the run when I'm back home and hopping in the shower. I bring all that up to say that electronic music might be what I try on a run in future. The rhythmic repetition thrumming in my ears made me feel like this was what Faith was listening to as I scampered across The City. It was really awesome stuff. I have been flirting more with electronic music and as a genre it is pretty cool but it isn't what I always listen to. Who knows if that will ever change in future.

I think that leads me to the story and overall I don't think it landed as much for me in regards to the characters. There is a small cast and by the end it felt like things wrapped up about as well as I thought they would. I feel like I'm sounding a bit dismissive but basically you are part of an organization called The Runners who work to deliver contraband throughout the city. Essentially they are couriers who deliver information to their clients without interference or censorship from the surveillance state. While I didn't feel too much for the characters outside of Faith and Merc, the story I think has some good and interesting things to say. For starters, whether by accident or on purpose, Mirrors Edge is an ACAB game. Your only opposition is the police who are portrayed as trigger happy lunatics who are open firing on an unarmed person. Right now in Minnesota ICE agents are there and have killed at least two citizens who were both unarmed. Fuck ICE. This game shows police for what they are and that is violent oppressors of the state. They are not here to solve crimes, seek the truth or help a community. They are only here to terrorize and instill fear into a community to keep them in line.

Mirrors Edge also seems to get the idea of people forming networks making change. Not just individuals. Yes Faith Connors does some individualist things for her sister but you aren't the reason that things are changing in the city. Something that was in the beginning of the narrative that I really liked was all of the buzz and circumstance surrounding a mayoral election. In the US, we just had that happen with the NYC mayoral race. It was something that felt like national news and even became a bit of a meme after Mamdani won. I don't know what the future holds about it but if seeing his victory or the people of Chicago and Minneapolis fight off ICE for their fellow citizens has given me anything, it's hope. Hope that people are beginning to talk and be active in communities. Hope that things will change for the better. I think Mirrors Edge understands that and like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, knows that the key to doing this is through community.

Mirrors Edge was a bit of a surprise for me this year. I don't think I would have ever given this game another real shot until I read that review. That's the power of this site and why it can be cool. Playing games that people love and trying to see what they see. I may not be as in love with Mirrors Edge as my friend is but they definitely got me to sit down, lay back and enjoy something that was ultimately unique. I am going to reiterate what they have said in their review. It sucks to see a game like this be owned by EA who at the time of writing is being bought by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. It has been very disheartening to see things I like become compromised in a way by this. I know there are more examples but I haven't watched WWE ever since they accepted money for their shows, shows which force women into less revealing ring attire. It feels like being spit in the face to see Mirrors Edge be acquired by the thing it was fighting against. Part of me wants to try to be optimistic but that would be naive. It isn't a good thing. Playing this game and reading a passionate review sparked passion in me. I haven't been able to run for years now with hip, knee and back injuries keeping me away from it for a long time. Now I'm making sure to spend the winter in the gym so when the spring hits I can literally take off running and feel the ground beneath my feet again.

This game is a visually striking first-person parkour game set in a clean, minimalist city. Its standout feature is the movement system, running, wall-running, and fluid acrobatics create a sense of momentum that few games capture. Combat is deliberately limited, encouraging players to avoid fights rather than engage, which adds tension and a unique pacing. This game really feels like you are playing PlayStation 2 Prince of Persia but with the first-person perspective, and it is very well executed, quite unique at the time. The story feels more like a backdrop for the action, which can leave the narrative a bit thin for some players.

Controls can feel a bit floaty or imprecise at times, especially with the keyboard, which may frustrate newcomers. Despite these minor flaws, the game’s style, level design, and adrenaline-fueled sequences make it a memorable and refreshing experience that still feels different from most action games today. There are very few characters in the story, and none of them are memorable or charismatic enough, so don't expect a lot on this regard. Still, this is one of the most unique titles that I've ever played and I highly recommend not skipping it.

The audio-visual presentation deserves special mention beyond just the visuals. The stark use of color not only defines the game’s identity but also serves gameplay, subtly guiding the you through environments without intrusive HUD elements. And while nowadays we have a lot of minimal HUD games, this was a standout at the time. The OST is atmospheric and restrained, perfectly matching the sense of isolation and speed as you traverse rooftops high above the city. Sound design reinforces momentum too, with footsteps, slides, and jumps providing constant feedback that keeps you locked into the flow of movement.

From a modern perspective, this title feels like a bold experiment that didn’t care about following trends. Its relatively short length and focus on time trials and replayability make it easy to revisit, especially for those who enjoy mastering levels and shaving seconds off their runs. While it may not fully realize its narrative ambitions, its commitment to a clear gameplay vision is admirable. Even years later, it stands as a reminder that taking creative risks can result in something truly distinctive and enduring.

Bright but dystopian future where modern forms of transportation are heavily monitored. Here enter the ‘runners’ who must ferry data and documents on behalf of their employers. I love this premise. Everything is gorgeous. The controls could be so much better. They were literally killing me every few seconds it felt like. It might simply be a case where I’m the problem and need to put in the time to better learn the systems.

Given how quickly I picked up the traversal mechanics in Titanfall 2 and how much better those felt, I have a suspicion it’s not just me. I understand ME is supposed to be much more grounded parkour compared to a TF2 game. While that may be true After three or so missions and a prologue the controls just never clicked. I’m going to keep at it though...

Mirror's Edge does the seemingly impossible and makes fast paced, precision platforming from a 1st person pov work. Going back all these years later, I'd forgotten a lot of how it actually played. My impression was that it was mostly a straightforward experience of just following the intended path, with only occasional moments of difficulty or creativity. But it's a lot more freeform than that, with me often finding alternate routes and only realizing the way I was "supposed to" go when I got to my goal. And it is much, MUCH harder than I remember, with me frequently dying over and over on even the simplest little jumps and wall runs. But despite how bad I am, I never felt like the controls were wonky or unpredictable. Occasionally you get caught on a random bit of architecture that you wouldn't expect, but mostly it works very smooth.

The combat is also pretty fun and extremely hard. I've heard a lot of people back in the day say they wish the game didn't have combat at all but I vehemently disagree. The combat is stylish and feels good, but if you screw up you will die in a second or two. The gunplay feels a lot better to me than a lot of FPS even though it is very simplistic, but the reliability and steadiness of the guns means its way more about positioning and timing than aiming, which I prefer. When you get stormed by half a dozen armored swat members and you have to jumpkick off a wall, disarm one, then use their guns 1 by 1 to dispatch the rest, tossing aside the spent weapons with each one, it starts to feel like a scene out of The Matrix. The game very much plays differently than any modern style shooter, which I feel have all become pretty homogeneous with mostly the same controls and handling.

The game still looks amazing even so many years later. The aesthetic is beautiful and clean while managing to create that stark, empty feeling the game is going for with its atmosphere. Even the character models look pretty good for a game from 2008. The animated sections that depict most of the story are pretty poorly animated and artistically kind of bland to me, but they don't wear out their welcome.

The story is interesting from a modern standpoint. It comes from a time where I recall a lot of games were dealing with themes of totalitarianism and fascism, but also from a time when games were really afraid to get too explicitly political. Outside of some vague descriptions of free speech protests, surveillance, and a lot of implications that the city used to be a lot more free, the game does not really go into why the status quo is bad or what political goals your rebel faction is working towards. It's kind of amusing that for 2008 this was plenty enough excuse for players to feel comfortable killing dozens of cops over the course of the game, though I certainly don't have a problem with it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that as soon as the police see an unarmed woman in a restricted area they all immediately start trying to gun her down.

What's most surprising about the story is the way it just sort of ends. It feels like it's setting up a major plot, then it hits a climactic moment and it is like the developers decided you know what, that's a good stopping point. There is zero resolution for any of the main plot other than character specific arcs. I never did play the sequel, mostly because it came out 8 years later, but I'm looking forward to getting into it now and seeing where it goes.

for a couple of months, my brother had PSN for free in 2012 or 2013. I started playing Mirror's Edge, Okami HD, & MAYBE Shadow of the Colossus or Ico? Never got close to completing those games (bad habit) but found a physical copy of the SOTC/ICO Collection. I'm unsure if I bought Okami or if I still have access to Mirror's Edge (on PS3). Funny enough, I have a note on here that was supposed to be a reminder to check if I have a copy of those last two games here on Grouvee from three years ago. Oops. Well. Maybe keeping all this info in one place will help me, so here's another reminder to me to check + finish these games (Can I still even buy these games? Hopefully at a discount on PS3 too?).

I'm also uploading a screenshot of my trophies so I hope this status is long enough that it will truncate or at least grouvee members aren't online so they don't have to suffer my post. pictures/youtube embeds usually show up very large on grouvee and since I have a screenshot feature that lets me capture really long screenshots, I posted ones longer than this one privately.

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Started playing this for the first time last night. I picked it up after my wife said she’d enjoyed it, prompted by the Mirror’s Edge Catalyst theme I’d once used on my PS4 account.

While the characters look pretty 2008, and the 2D cut-scenes are rather poor, everything else looks wonderful even by today’s standards. Perhaps it’s something about the colour scheme and lighting effects… And in terms of gameplay, I’m mostly enjoying it. I used to avoid FPP action games (which is one of the reasons I missed Mirror’s Edge until now), assuming that I’d find them too disorientating to have much fun—and I didn’t expect that platforming would work from a first-person perspective—but I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

The controls take a little getting used to, though, and I’m not quite comfortable with combat yet. Also, the placement of checkpoints can be a little annoying/inconsistent sometimes: for example, I had to replay the whole descent into the storm drain in the ‘Jacknife’ chapter umpteen times, when there really should’ve been at least one checkpoint midway through that section—while other checkpoints felt almost too generously close.

Clunky controls (bad news in a movement-based game) or bad button-mashing skills? Eh. And the checkpoints! Ugh I felt like throwing something every time I fell because I apparently didn't click the jump button at the right time.

It felt like such a chore to finish every chapter I started, and yet at the end of the chapters (or at the start of my day), I'd tell myself, "Okay, just one more." I also just really wanted to try and get through all the chapters considering how few there were — alas, I quit at Chapter 6. x_x I just felt like there are other games out there that I could play and enjoy much more.

Mirror's Edge is an incredibly innovative game, employing first-person parkour in some stunningly beautiful scenes to create gameplay that, while carrying some frustrations, creates a unique and captivating experience.

In a excessively clean future city, underground parkour couriers called Runners carry information and goods across the city. After a mayoral candidate for deregulation is found dead, the player takes the role of a Runner called Faith to find out the murderer and clear her sister's name.

While the plot goes by fairly quickly and can be ignored (except for the hugs, nobody can ignore those), the gameplay is the main focus. Faith must perform a somewhat linear sequence of acrobatic maneuvers, whether it be jumping, sliding, wall running, etc to reach her destination. The game is starkly color coded and places of interest will appear red to lead the player - this is an ingenious way to lead the player through a platforming obstacle course. That said, some segments can get pretty tricky and trial-and-error mixed with checkpoint saves can get frustrating at times.

There are also armed enemies that the player must either run past or fight and disarm. The combat is a little shaky, with things like time-slowing abilities for reaction speed, simple combos, and disarming/shooting weapons but these often get subject to the same trial and error of the tougher parkour segments. Still, it's not too frustrating and with enough effort the player is back on their feet.

The game is flat out GORGEOUS, an incredible achievement that remains one of the most beautiful titles in the PS3 library. The use of simple colors on a clean and futuristic landscape age incredibly well, and the electronic music is suitable ambience for the journey.

Mirror's Edge could use some iteration in some places like its tougher parkour segments or combat segments but is overall a great game to play, building a type of gameplay I always want to see more of in the future.

i've played through 6 out of 8 missions of mirror's edge, and i consider this long enough to give a full review in this specific case. the only aspect i could see being potentially gamechanging (😉) in such a linear game would be the story, and that was the most underwhelming part all the way through anyway, so i didn't even care enough about it to mind whether there was some major twist heading my way or something else that would elevate it beyond mediocre.

in fact, i'm not even sure why they bothered giving this game a story. it would've probably worked much better as a parkour sandbox with increasingly complex levels. i know there are time challenges available, so the prototype for such a game is already there. why bother coming up with a plot if it's gonna be so boring and irrelevant? oh, wait, the combat.

i'm 99% sure the story only exists in this game because some unfortunate dev (or worse, and more probable, someone higher up) decided it needed combat for some reason that's beyond regular human comprehension. jk, the reason is money. it's always money. combat sells, prototype parkour games don't. just put some guns in there, get more funding, bang bang ka-ching.

anyway, hope i'm wrong on that one. to elaborate on why combat is so unnecessary in this game: it brings the parkour elements to a screeching halt more than once, which is the equivalent of hosting a golf tournament where every hole has an invisible wall between it and the players. the point is to get the ball in the hole, but now the players have to to shoot it higher, make double the effort to be able to continue playing at all. if i wanted shooty shooty funtimes, i'd play something else.

i'm not saying this to exclude the possibility of a good parkour game with combat mechanics thrown in. i'm sure there might be one someday, or maybe there already is. i'm just saying this is not the one. combat feels like an afterthought, like you're supposed to be avoiding it. and you are — the game directly encourages you to run past enemies when you can, but right after that it locks you into combat situations you can't maneuver yourself out of. that's the part i can't understand.

combat aside, the controls feel fluid and genuinely fun during parkour itself. you can hear faith's breath as she runs and feel the impact of her moves; it's very immersive. i was going to talk about this some more, about the many, many parts i got stuck in due to poor game design, but right before this review i was reminded of runner vision and remembered how i barely used it in my playthrough. that's on me, and it's possible that it was an integral part of puzzle-solving, so i'm not letting it affect this score too much. maybe if i ever do a replay.

also, like i've said before, i like to consider a game's context at the time of release in my reviews and scores, and this alone almost bumped this up to a 4-star. mirror's edge did shake the industry when it came out; the only reason it's as famous as it is is because nothing else quite like it existed at the time. i appreciate that, i'm a big fan of innovation in any medium. i simply think the game's flaws are irrespective of its time and could have easily been avoided. perhaps i'd be kinder if i could know more of its internal context, who made the big decisions, whether its flaws were at the mercy of time constraints, etc. but i wasn't really able to find that information anywhere.

overall, mirror's edge is very solid if you're looking for something new in first-person gaming, but don't expect much out of the story. do expect to find combat a very awkwardly shoehorned experience, and potentially to get stuck several times over if you're not extremely observant. or maybe just don't forget to actually use one of the game's key gameplay elements to figure things out. press r often! don't be like me, kids!

i'm astounded?? that the devs apparently thought the mission where you infiltrate the security company would remotely work gameplay-wise. you're somehow supposed to outrun the entire cast of cirque du soleil while climbing obstacles way slower than they can twirl around the place. at one point a dude shows up directly in front of you and it's nearly impossible, in my experience, to dodge him properly and keep running, and the best part: you can't even disarm him, he just punches the shit out of you instead. so, ok, i figure you need to punch back and knock him out, BUT REMEMBER! you have like 10 other people already on your trail, and they're very fast. much faster than you. because fuck you, i guess.

i'm probably going to keep banging my head against this one (casually) just to see if i can make it, but i caved and read the story on wikipedia just in case i give up lol. i figured it wouldn't be anything special, and i was right. the celeste reveal was glaringly visible all the way from jupiter for anyone who knows narrative tropes, and the rest is nothing i haven't seen done a hundred times before.

anyway, more in my review to come.

getting really frustated with controls at this point. they still feel nice and responsive 90% of the time, but stuff like wallriding seems to be pretty much a cointoss as to whether it'll stick or not. i just climbed the same section 20 times over and finally gave up for the day.

sometimes i wish there was just a "skip puzzle/battle/etc." button in games, both for accessibility reasons and for stuff like this. i know what to do and how to do it, the game simply won't let me. so give me the option to skip chapter entirely or something similar and save me some grief.

Story: Laughably bad. Filled with cliches and characters you don't have enough time to care about at all. I would have preferred this game if there was no story.

Visuals: God tier. Very nice color palette and art direction, which was part of the reason I wanted to play this in the first place.

Gameplay: Kind of torn on this one. The parkour is pretty good although it does feel limited at times considering the lack of variety in obstacles and ways of traversing those obstacles. The visuals largely carry the gameplay as the mechanics themselves are not that great. Holding down w and pressing spacebar is practically all there is in the way of mechanics. The shooting was extremely basic and felt out of place. This game would have been a lot more fun if faith was never allowed to pick up a gun. A lot of the game felt very hand-holdy and set piece driven as opposed to mechanics-driven, which I was not a huge fan of (a bit of a regression from classic 3d platformers like odyssey/64 in that sense).

Level design: It is so frustrating how unaware this game is of its own strengths. This game is fun because of the parkour. What is very, very, very not fun is when you turn your interesting parkour game into a generic, linear shooter where your progress is blocked by braindead swarms of soldiers that you literally have no choice but to fight. I am genuinely baffled as to how they thought these levels were a good idea. If they had allowed you to run past the guards it wouldn't have been too bad, but in a lot of these levels your progress is blocked by an interactable object that takes several seconds to engage with. The shooting areas during the outside missions weren't as awful because they were at least semi-interesting ways of manuevering around the guards, but some of the inside levels make me think they outsourced certain stages to people who thought this was supposed to be a cover shooter. The non-shooting, outside portions were cool though, and there were some very memorable set pieces, like the crane jump near the middle of the game. Even some of the inside levels like the vertical ascent near the end of the second to last mission were pretty entertaining but the last mission was so rife with the things that frustrate me that my view of the game is a bit marred currently.

Mirror's Edge is a palate cleanser: quick (both in pace and length), light on story, and heavy on action. There's nothing wrong with that, but a game like this lives or dies on the strength of its mechanics, and there are some notable flaws in that regard.

Having been spoiled by Valve's Portal and Half-Life series, I now expect all my games to have impeccably designed mechanics, not just in their functionality but in the way they are taught to the player. Valve understands that people don't learn best when presented with all the information at once. Rather, they give the player one or two pieces and make sure their fundamental uses are mastered before introducing the next piece.

Mirror's Edge, in the more traditional mode, introduces all the mechanics in a single tutorial level, expecting you to master them all with relatively little practice, and to remember them with very little reinforcement during the game proper. For me this led to a few too many moments when I got stuck simply because I forgot how to do something. That combined with some overly-demanding timing/aiming caused a lot of interruptions in what is supposed to be a constant flow of action.

All that being said, when it worked it felt like the Matrix game we never had, one that focused not on the kung-fu or firefights in the 2nd half of the movie, but on the hacker-on-the-run urban gymnastics implied by Trinity's opening scene. If the sequel can convince me that it's fixed the first game's design problems then I'd definitely give it a chance.