Mirrors Edge still kicks Ass
Its been 13 years since its console launch and 12 since the PC release, and still Mirrors Edge is the best at what it does.
Since 2009 many first person games about parkour have come out. The big ones you may of heard of are Dying Light, Mirrors Edge, its sequel ME: Catalyst and Ghostrunner. These are the most notable first person games where Parkour or platforming is a primary gameplay mechanic. Games like Titanfall and Apex Legends include elements of parkour while being more focused on shooting, and there are tons of indie games that focus on first person platforming, usually involving a grappling hook.
Out of all of these games of differing scales, 1 gets parkour down perfectly, and 2 get it right but are inferior in some way to the first. Titanfall is a brilliant game to parkour around, but I also have to shoot people. People who happen to have access to the parkour I have, and are far better at merging the two than I ever will be. This leads to a fun game of dying to people flying around a corner faster than I lose energy on a treadmill, but isn’t a great parkour game unless modding in maps specially for it. Hot Lava, a game by Klei Entertainment, is the second best iteration of first person parkour. It is probably on par with the perfect game for jumping around spaces, but its based on source movement rather than actual parkour. I prefer doing the latter. Its entertaining to find a line while strafe jumping and bunny hopping to cut 20 seconds off my previous time, but its not the same.
So out of all the games which one got it right, or at least, the closest to right we’ve seen? The very first one, Mirrors Edge by Dice in 2008.
Why not the sequel? Well, Catalyst is far from the worst example, but it somehow makes mistakes the first game didn’t. EA clearly had a lot of oversight into what should be added/removed, or DICE decided to take all the unique interesting shit out to hit a wider audience. There’s a button to hit max speed immediately, there’s a skill tree that’s half filled from the start, making it almost pointless. The open world is a nice in theory but the way the game plays practically means there are very few interesting routes and you end up just following the recommended path all of the time. All of this plus the generic icon collectathon bullshit that is still in every open world as well as the larger focus on combat make the game a complete downgrade of the first. Its not bad, its just worse.
Before gushing about the game I should probably forewarn of the flaws, its far from perfect. Combat sucks, its clunky and unsatisfying. Luckily the game can be played by avoiding combat with 2 or 3 exceptions on easy mode, with harder difficulties requiring more fighting. So my recommendation is to play on easy, as difficulty basically only affects combat.
The other major issue is the story, its half baked. A lot of story elements got cut in order to hit deadlines, and what’s there is far from stellar. Characters are hard to care about and on a larger scale its not doing much beyond typical Dystopian stuff. A trigger happy private military company trying to politic they’re way into replacing the police by pinning a murder on a policewoman, who happens to be Faiths sister. There are Utopian elements mixed in, it seems that until this murder things were on the rise and the city certainly looks very pretty, but its mostly Dystopian and without anything particularly special.
So what makes the original Mirrors Edge so great despite those pretty nasty flaws? Mainly the feeling. Game feel is really hard to describe, Its a mix of mechanics, visuals and audio that convinces the player they are who the game tells them they are. For example, the Arkham games work so well because the tone and gameplay match Batman’s character, leading to every journalist saying the same line about the games over and over. The same is true of the insomniac Spiderman games. In Mirrors Edge this combination, at least for me, is the soundtrack, a lot of the minor details and how the game mechanics make you feel like a human being moving, as opposed to a hitbox and a physics engine with animations.
Lets go backwards. The game has momentum, you take a few seconds to speed up fully, your current momentum affects how far you wallrun, jump and how fast you move. This means ideally you want Faith, the protagonist, to be at max speed as often as possible. This means avoiding enemies, finding the route around that slows you down the least, and in a speedrunners case glitching the shit out of the whole system. On top of this is the roll, the roll prevents all damage to a certain extent if you tap the slide button just before you hit the ground. This prevents you from taking damage and conserves at least some of your momentum, so you aren’t sitting still for too long. A new ME players first level of mastery will be consistently nailing a roll to prevent damage to to keep speed Using the momentum mechanics to figure out a fast route through a level is really cool. At first you will slide under stuff as it is clearly what the game intends, then you may find sometimes jumping over something keeps more momentum than sliding under it, so you’ll slide only when 100% required, keeping your momentum more often.
The levels of mastery of the game are also wildly varied. I can beat mirrors edge in about 3 hours, I know the first few levels like the back of my hand but I’m less knowledgeable on the last 3 or 4 levels. I’ve played through this game about 4/5 times for context. Speedrunners using glitches beat the game in under 30 minutes, and speedrunners that run glitchless beat the game in about 45 (although it isn’t actually glitchless). Once you’ve mastered the games intended mechanics, there is a ton of glitches for you to explore/master that demolish your times in levels and create lines you never would have thought existed, like helicoptering your legs through the sky to skip massive portions.
On top of this are the minor visual effects, mainly the wind blowing past Faith as she picks up speed. This really helps to emphasize that you are a human who is speeding up. Mirrors edge also has a full character model, with a shadow, that is fully visible to the player looking in a mirror. This is something that even cyberpunk probably failed to do given the state of the game, and it came out 11 years later, which in technology years is equivalent to the difference between us now and the Romans. There is also the crunch of faith when she falls off a building, which you will do often. Its a little dated by modern standards but is still crunchy enough to make me not want faith to go through that more than necessary. On top of this the wind noises really pick up when faiths falling at terminal velocity, really selling that someone fell and got squished into little giblets.
And finally the soundtrack, its a good soundtrack, it isn’t shoved down your throat unnecessarily, and the main theme ‘Still Alive’ is a classic, coincidentally named identically to the portal song.
Mirrors Edge is far from perfect, the story is lifeless crap, the game is best played by avoiding the jank as shit combat, and if your avoiding combat playing on anything that isn’t easy will probably lead to pain. This combined with some finicky hit-boxes on climbable poles and such (one of the very few ways Catalyst is an improvement) make for a game that is a cult classic rather than a classic for a reason. Despite this its aged incredibly well, and most modern FPP (first person parkour) games take direct inspiration from this in some way. It may show its age in some ways, but it certainly holds up as one of my favorite's of all time.
