Today we're going to have a look at Mirror's Edge(tm) (2008). It's a real curate's egg of a game. You probably remember the striking box art. Who was that woman?
You probably remember the striking box art from CEX, sandwiched between multiple copies of Madden and NBA, because it was a classic shelf-warmer. People bought it, played it once, then got rid of it.
How come? Back in 2008 the game attracted mostly-good reviews, mainly for its striking visuals and excellent soundtrack. The general consensus was that it attempted to ace something very difficult - first-person platforming - and came without a hair's breadth of pulling it off.
It bugs me that the pillar doesn't line up properly. It's supposed to be the same pillar, running through multiple floors, but the segments don't line up.
How come? Back in 2008 the game attracted mostly-good reviews, mainly for its striking visuals and excellent soundtrack. The general consensus was that it attempted to ace something very difficult - first-person platforming - and came without a hair's breadth of pulling it off.
It sold a couple of million copies, but it had very little replayability value. Despite a generous promotional push from Electronic Arts it didn't become "a thing", and yet the box art was striking, and it looked good, and you can't fault EA for making a sci-fi parkour adventure instead of yet another sports franchise.
Today Mirror's Edge(tm) remains one of those curious one-offs, like Brütal Legend and Alan Wake, that people remember fondly despite its flaws. At the very least it has aged exceptionally well. It was released in 2008 for the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 and a year later for the PC, both as a physical product and via Steam, and latterly Electronic Arts' Origin store; today it's still available for the PC and can be played on the XBox One in backwards compatibility mode. Any modern i5-or-later PC should be able to run it with all the details turned up. I had to set the vertical sync with NVidia's control panel in order to get rid of screen tearing but beyond that it worked fine.
Technically there was a sequel, Mirror's Edge Catalyst(tm) (2016), albeit that it was a retelling of the same story with similar characters rather than a continuation. The general consensus seems to be that it was a missed opportunity, but I haven't played it so perhaps it's a hidden masterpiece.
What is Mirror's Edge(tm)? It's a running-jumping first-person platform game with puzzle aspects and a bit of combat. You are Faith Connors, rooftop runner extraordinaire. You illicitly deliver parcels by jumping across rooftops, because the game was developed in 2007 and the developers didn't anticipate the rise of consumer drones. As such Mirror's Edge(tm) feels a bit like those early-2000s cyberpunk adventures set in a future where mobile phones can only make voice calls and computers have an interface less advanced than actual contemporary computer interfaces.
Parcels etc. But before doing that you have to uncover a conspiracy, which you do by jumping across rooftops and crawling through vents and leaping across gaps and shimmying along pipes and falling to your death a lot, but that's not a problem because the game is generous with checkpoints.
I have the impression the reviewers expected an open-world game with lots of rooftop jumping. Grand Theft Auto mixed with a bit of Thief. In reality however Mirror's Edge(tm) is very linear, and although you can divert around obstacles the basic pathway through each map is fixed. That was one of the major criticisms levelled at the game.
The second was that although the parkour sections were fun, the game continually broke them up with fighting sequences and vertical platforming, which are respectively prosaic and fiddly.
But let's talk about the good stuff first. Mirror's Edge(tm) has aged extremely well. Back in 2008 the fashion was for bloom-smeared greens and browns, as in Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but Mirror's Edge(tm) is all crisp whites and primary colours. It doesn't have distance fog, instead relying on clever design to block the player's view. It uses visual effects sparingly and is old enough to predate the fad for film grain and dirt on the lens.
About the only technical aspect that has dated is the depth of field effect. Sadly there's no easy way to turn it off, short of editing the configuration files by hand. By modern standards the character models are functional, but they don't look bad, just a bit stiff:
In some respects Mirror's Edge(tm) has almost anti-aged. The levels have a bunch of baked-in lighting effects that are the spitting image of modern real-time raytracing. Apparently developers DICE fed the maps into a custom-made raytracer called BEAST that took over a day to render each map, but the results are gorgeous, especially given that the game doesn't seem to have any kind of HDR. Note in particular how white surfaces reflect the surrounding colours:
The downside is that the maps are almost entirely static, whereas modern ray-traced games can cope with moving light sources and interactive environments. The paint cans in the image above are immobile and almost nothing moves, beyond some turny wheels and elevator buttons. Of course Mirror's Edge(tm) is a fast-paced running game, not an open-world adventure with a day-night cycle, so it doesn't matter. The player doesn't have time to watch the sun set.
The game has a skittery electronic soundtrack from Solar Fields. The music reminded me of Warp Records' Artificial Intelligence compilations, particularly the warmer and slightly less stiff second volume. Stylistically Edge(tm) has something of the late 1990s about it; it feels like a Designer's Republic album cover made flesh. It is the great lost cel-shaded Sega Dreamcast game; the Jet Set Radio sequel that never was. The characters are all rebellious teenage graffiti artists or DJs or delivery drivers, straight from the mind of Jamie Hewlett.
Today Mirror's Edge(tm) remains one of those curious one-offs, like Brütal Legend and Alan Wake, that people remember fondly despite its flaws. At the very least it has aged exceptionally well. It was released in 2008 for the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 and a year later for the PC, both as a physical product and via Steam, and latterly Electronic Arts' Origin store; today it's still available for the PC and can be played on the XBox One in backwards compatibility mode. Any modern i5-or-later PC should be able to run it with all the details turned up. I had to set the vertical sync with NVidia's control panel in order to get rid of screen tearing but beyond that it worked fine.
Technically there was a sequel, Mirror's Edge Catalyst(tm) (2016), albeit that it was a retelling of the same story with similar characters rather than a continuation. The general consensus seems to be that it was a missed opportunity, but I haven't played it so perhaps it's a hidden masterpiece.
What is Mirror's Edge(tm)? It's a running-jumping first-person platform game with puzzle aspects and a bit of combat. You are Faith Connors, rooftop runner extraordinaire. You illicitly deliver parcels by jumping across rooftops, because the game was developed in 2007 and the developers didn't anticipate the rise of consumer drones. As such Mirror's Edge(tm) feels a bit like those early-2000s cyberpunk adventures set in a future where mobile phones can only make voice calls and computers have an interface less advanced than actual contemporary computer interfaces.
Parcels etc. But before doing that you have to uncover a conspiracy, which you do by jumping across rooftops and crawling through vents and leaping across gaps and shimmying along pipes and falling to your death a lot, but that's not a problem because the game is generous with checkpoints.
I have the impression the reviewers expected an open-world game with lots of rooftop jumping. Grand Theft Auto mixed with a bit of Thief. In reality however Mirror's Edge(tm) is very linear, and although you can divert around obstacles the basic pathway through each map is fixed. That was one of the major criticisms levelled at the game.
The second was that although the parkour sections were fun, the game continually broke them up with fighting sequences and vertical platforming, which are respectively prosaic and fiddly.
A tiny, subtle bit of lens flare
But let's talk about the good stuff first. Mirror's Edge(tm) has aged extremely well. Back in 2008 the fashion was for bloom-smeared greens and browns, as in Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but Mirror's Edge(tm) is all crisp whites and primary colours. It doesn't have distance fog, instead relying on clever design to block the player's view. It uses visual effects sparingly and is old enough to predate the fad for film grain and dirt on the lens.
Faith has "runner vision", whereby important parts of the environment are highlighted in red. The idea is that Faith is so used to jumping across rooftops that she has a heightened awareness of useful surfaces.
The flappy bits of plastic are among the few physics-enabled elements of the game, but they're animated really well, even by modern standards.
These marks indicate that there's a collectable bag nearby. The game generally doesn't reward exploration otherwise.
As with Half-Life 2 the developers had the advantage of only needing to animate a handful of models, and one of the major characters only appears in the 2D animated cutscenes.
In some respects Mirror's Edge(tm) has almost anti-aged. The levels have a bunch of baked-in lighting effects that are the spitting image of modern real-time raytracing. Apparently developers DICE fed the maps into a custom-made raytracer called BEAST that took over a day to render each map, but the results are gorgeous, especially given that the game doesn't seem to have any kind of HDR. Note in particular how white surfaces reflect the surrounding colours:
The downside is that the maps are almost entirely static, whereas modern ray-traced games can cope with moving light sources and interactive environments. The paint cans in the image above are immobile and almost nothing moves, beyond some turny wheels and elevator buttons. Of course Mirror's Edge(tm) is a fast-paced running game, not an open-world adventure with a day-night cycle, so it doesn't matter. The player doesn't have time to watch the sun set.
The game has a skittery electronic soundtrack from Solar Fields. The music reminded me of Warp Records' Artificial Intelligence compilations, particularly the warmer and slightly less stiff second volume. Stylistically Edge(tm) has something of the late 1990s about it; it feels like a Designer's Republic album cover made flesh. It is the great lost cel-shaded Sega Dreamcast game; the Jet Set Radio sequel that never was. The characters are all rebellious teenage graffiti artists or DJs or delivery drivers, straight from the mind of Jamie Hewlett.
What else does Mirror's Edge(tm) do right? Back in 2008 most games rendered the player character as a floating camera with a disembodied gun-arm, and even nowadays it's common for games to have scripted interactions that don't line up properly with the environment. In contrast Mirror's Edge convincingly portrays Faith's body as an object in physical space. Her arms and legs realistically interact with the environment. When she grapples her way onto a balcony it looks as if her hands are really gripping the edge, and when she presses a button her hand actually presses the button instead of pointing at a texture. Ledge grabbing and shimmying and vaulting and climbing etc had all been done before, but Mirror's Edge(tm) perfected it.
The reflections of Faith's fingers look odd in static screenshots but are subliminally convincing during the game.
Mirror's Edge(tm) also has Faith breathe heavily while exerting herself, partially for verisimilitude and partially because the game doesn't have a traditional HUD. Instead the player learns about Faith's condition through visual and aural cues, a little bit like the ancient you-vs-dinosaurs physics-fest Trespasser.
That's the technical stuff out of the way. What about the gameplay? As mentioned in the introduction Mirror's Edge(tm) is a curate's egg. The irony is that the developers pulled off the game's most famous aspect - the parkour - more or less perfectly, but perhaps because they felt it would get boring they broke up the running and jumping with combat sequences and puzzles, which aren't nearly as successful.
When it works, it's terrific. There are two action setpieces where Faith has to chase down another character; you don't have to worry about disarming policemen or doing tricky wall-jumps, you just go fast and make blind leaps into empty space. During those sequences the game came alive and I wished there were more of them.
On a couple of occasions I even found myself leaning towards the screen and dodging left and right like a big fat moron, which might explain why so many people remember the game fondly. Fallout: New Vegas aroused my curiosity but didn't move me at all, whereas Mirror's Edge(tm) bypassed my conscious mind and took control of my body. It dug into my subconscious. It gave me a mental tingle, like that time in mixed PE when we were doing press-ups and the girl in front of me had a loose shirt and
I felt slightly absurd walking around with an M249. It just doesn't feel right.
However just like real life Mirror's Edge(tm) isn't non-stop action. Periodically Faith has to stop running and climb through vents instead, which isn't as much fun.
Surprisingly, this jump - which put me in mind of the first Half-Life - isn't all that hard.
Mirror's Edge(tm) breaks up the parkour with indoors platforming sections, at which point the game comes to a crashing halt. I've played and mostly finished Ori and the Blind Forest, so even though I'm a throwback to the distant past I like to think that I'm at least familiar with the state of modern platforming.
Very occasionally Edge(tm)'s indoors platforming works and is entertaining, but more frequently it feels like filler, and occasionally it doesn't work at all. I found that Faith sometimes missed what felt like obvious grabs, or she clambered onto a narrow ledge and immediately hopped over the other side to her doom.
Worse, the game's mixture of mostly-linear-but-slightly-non-linear puzzles meant that I often found myself confused as to whether I was doing the right thing badly, or if I was wasting my time with the wrong thing. In the golden trench above I at first tried to wall-jump onto the vent in the distance, and with split-second timing I did it, but only once (Faith immediately jumped off the other side of the vent into empty space). Was that how it was supposed to work? It felt much harder than the puzzles surrounding it. After consulting a video walkthrough I realised that I was supposed to do a much simpler wall-bounce onto a swinging beam instead, which I pulled off first time because it was much simpler.
It was particularly galling because that part of the game urges Faith to reach the top floor of the villain's skyscraper, but my progress ground to a halt as I negotiated the puzzle. Whatever momentum the plot built up quickly evaporated. The same thing happened several times, especially towards the end, and judging by the comments on Youtube there are a handful of irritating jumps that fooled lots of people. At its best Mirror's Edge(tm) is a kinetic experience, but even when the vertical platforming sections work they interrupt the game's flow.
One thing that dates the game is the prevalence of 4:3 monitors. But then again this is supposed to be an office, so perhaps they haven't gone widescreen yet. Note the refreshingly understated bloom, which - as with the lens flare - I didn't really notice until looking at the screenshots.
The second element that doesn't work is the combat. The game has an extensive melee system that mostly goes unused, except for a couple of boss battles; with deft timing Faith can knock guns from the hands of the enemy and use them to clear a path, but the use of firearms feels out of character. Initial concepts portrayed Faith as a gun-wielding cyber-hacker, but in the finished product the shooting feels tacked-on, both technically and thematically - in the cutscenes Faith doesn't come across as a killer. The game ends with Faith shooting a bunch of computers with a machine gun, which again feels as if it belongs in Duke Nukem rather than a stylish game of elevated parkour.
I can see what the developers were going for. There are a couple of action setpieces where it's obvious that they wanted the player to perform a fluid sequence of kung-fu moves against multiple baddies, along the lines of the lobby shootout in The Matrix, but in practice it's often faster to just run past the enemy and escape. If you do engage the enemy in combat it's usually easiest to disarm the first baddy and turn his gun against his teammates, shooting them and picking up their guns one after the other. The only exceptions are the enemy parkour soldiers, who appear briefly towards the end of the game and can't be disarmed, but even then I found that a flurry of sliding kicks knocked them out.
Furthermore - and this is a common criticism from when the game was new - the mere presence of firearms feels wrong. Half-Life 2 sets up its dystopian environment in the first few minutes of gameplay and gives the player a good reason to shoot the security forces. The game shows them brutalising and gunning down innocent civilians. Later on the player learns that they're working for an occupying army that is actively exterminating all life on Earth.
Mirror's Edge(tm) on the other hand merely suggests that life in The City is stifling and dull and that Faith is breaking a few rules, but it never shows any of this. The plot explains why the baddies are eager to kill Faith without provocation, but I just didn't feel it. I kept expecting a sequence where one of Faith's friends surrenders to the police but is unexpectedly killed, but the game simply has the security forces attack faith with helicopter gunships from almost the first level.
The developers of Edge(tm) originally planned to have in-engine cutscenes, but were forced by a lack of time to outsource the animation to a third party. The 2D cutscenes tread a fine line between minimalist stylisation and crudeness.
The plot is something about a corporate conspiracy to replace the police with mercenaries. It's insubstantial. It appears that the developers came up with an interesting main character and a basic scenario, plus some visual designs for other characters, but they didn't have time to flesh anything out. The writing reminded me of Miami Vice, in the sense that the plot and characterisation feel like a child's imitation of hard-boiled crime fiction. Everybody speaks in exaggerated tough-guy cliches - "Ropeburn's got the Blues in his pocket", that kind of thing - and the characterisation is sketchy.
It's interesting to compare it with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which has a jumbled mess of a plot but solid writing. The two games introduce a character early on who is obviously a traitor, but HR subverts this whereas Edge(tm) doesn't, and I wasn't at all surprised when one of Faith's friends turned out to be on the take. The two games end with the main character blowing up a computer, but HR's denouement has a tragic element whereas Edge(tm) doesn't have a moral dimension. The two games have downbeat, bitter-sweet endings, but with Edge(tm) it feels accidental, as if the writers had forgotten that Faith's former colleagues were mostly dead and the world was worse off than it was at the beginning of the game.
The developers also had to cut out an elaborate final battle - the last level has an extensive rooftop arena, but the player doesn't get a chance to fight anybody in it - and as a result the actual final battle is essentially just a quicktime event.
Beyond the main plot there's a series of time trial races. There is another world in which Mirror's Edge(tm) was a straightforward parkour game with a storyline that would probably have involved competing gangs of delivery runners trying to deliver sandwiches faster than everybody else. If the developers had added a multiplayer mode - Mirror's Edge(tm) is strictly single-player - the series might have evolved into a competitive future sports franchise. WipeOut but on foot.
This was the approach taken for the DLC levels. They were abstract maps made of geometric blocks floating above an endless ocean, and they are perhaps what Mirror's Edge(tm) might have been if the team had given up on the idea of a plot entirely and instead spend their time developing levels. Perhaps they could have added a plot later, as with e.g. Team Fortress or Portal.
The plot is something about a corporate conspiracy to replace the police with mercenaries. It's insubstantial. It appears that the developers came up with an interesting main character and a basic scenario, plus some visual designs for other characters, but they didn't have time to flesh anything out. The writing reminded me of Miami Vice, in the sense that the plot and characterisation feel like a child's imitation of hard-boiled crime fiction. Everybody speaks in exaggerated tough-guy cliches - "Ropeburn's got the Blues in his pocket", that kind of thing - and the characterisation is sketchy.
It's interesting to compare it with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which has a jumbled mess of a plot but solid writing. The two games introduce a character early on who is obviously a traitor, but HR subverts this whereas Edge(tm) doesn't, and I wasn't at all surprised when one of Faith's friends turned out to be on the take. The two games end with the main character blowing up a computer, but HR's denouement has a tragic element whereas Edge(tm) doesn't have a moral dimension. The two games have downbeat, bitter-sweet endings, but with Edge(tm) it feels accidental, as if the writers had forgotten that Faith's former colleagues were mostly dead and the world was worse off than it was at the beginning of the game.
The developers also had to cut out an elaborate final battle - the last level has an extensive rooftop arena, but the player doesn't get a chance to fight anybody in it - and as a result the actual final battle is essentially just a quicktime event.
That hasn't stopped modders trying to recreate it.
Faith delivers a little voice-over when she sees this piece of graffiti, which is in a vent near the end of the game. As far as I can tell she doesn't react to anything else in the game in the same way, and I wonder if it's also a remnant of something else that was cut.
Beyond the main plot there's a series of time trial races. There is another world in which Mirror's Edge(tm) was a straightforward parkour game with a storyline that would probably have involved competing gangs of delivery runners trying to deliver sandwiches faster than everybody else. If the developers had added a multiplayer mode - Mirror's Edge(tm) is strictly single-player - the series might have evolved into a competitive future sports franchise. WipeOut but on foot.
This was the approach taken for the DLC levels. They were abstract maps made of geometric blocks floating above an endless ocean, and they are perhaps what Mirror's Edge(tm) might have been if the team had given up on the idea of a plot entirely and instead spend their time developing levels. Perhaps they could have added a plot later, as with e.g. Team Fortress or Portal.
The decision to concentrate on a single-player experience did have the positive effect of keeping Mirror's Edge alive long after Electronic Arts gave up on the franchise. In January 2023 the company deactivated the time-trial servers, but this wasn't a huge problem because fans of the game tend to share video recordings with YouTube instead. Alarmingly, in March 2023 the company announced that Mirror's Edge was being removed from sale entirely, but it turned out to be a mistake, perhaps because someone in the press office assumed that it was a multiplayer title. The little burst of extra publicity still doesn't seem to have made Mirror's Edge "a thing", but there is still time.
Still, Mirror's Edge(tm) is intermittently brilliant, often frustrating, ultimately unsatisfying. At the very least memorable, if only in a might-have-been way. I'm glad it exists.
A couple of things struck me after playing the game. The developers had a laser-like focus on parkour, and so even though Mirror's Edge(tm) has the ideal setup for a stealth game there's no stealth aspect at all. The baddies don't patrol, they're just spawned into the world to shoot Faith. There are two occasions when Faith can conceivably sneak up on a baddy and disarm him, but they're essentially just scripted events rather than a natural part of gameplay.
Furthermore Faith doesn't have an inventory - she can carry one gun, and that's it - and there are no stats, or power-ups, or special potions. To the developers' credit I didn't miss any of this until after I had finished the game, but I suspect that if the game had been a massive success they would have found it very difficult to pull off the same setup twice.
Anything else? The baked-in lightmaps meant that there wasn't an official level editor, but the geometry runs on Unreal Engine 3, so a small modding scene emerged. I haven't tried any of the mods. The game ends in a skyscraper called The Shard, which is used as the headquarters of the city's totalitarian government. There is an actual skyscraper called The Shard, in London. It was in the advanced planning stages when Mirror's Edge(tm) entered development. Back then it was going to be called London Bridge Tower ("The Shard" was a nickname). I have no idea if the game's developers intended the fictional shard to be a mirror of the actual Shard.
As with the Walkie-Talkie and the Erotic Gherkin, The Shard was controversial at the time but is now just part of London's background. Is it the site of Britain's secret government? If I was a totalitarian dictator I would want to be based in Senate House, not The Shard. It's south of the river, miles from anywhere.
There's some debate as to where the game is set. The sequel appears to take place in south-eastern Australia, but the original is a mish-mash of Dubai, Singapore, Japan, China, a dash of Hong Kong. I wonder if the team used some of the development money to go on fact-finding trips to those places. Back in the 2000s EA was infamous for its work-hard, work-often corporate culture, so I doubt that the developers had any spare time, but then again DICE is based in Sweden so perhaps employment law is stricter there. Who knows.
Still, Mirror's Edge(tm) is intermittently brilliant, often frustrating, ultimately unsatisfying. At the very least memorable, if only in a might-have-been way. I'm glad it exists.
The Shard, London, in infrared
A couple of things struck me after playing the game. The developers had a laser-like focus on parkour, and so even though Mirror's Edge(tm) has the ideal setup for a stealth game there's no stealth aspect at all. The baddies don't patrol, they're just spawned into the world to shoot Faith. There are two occasions when Faith can conceivably sneak up on a baddy and disarm him, but they're essentially just scripted events rather than a natural part of gameplay.
Furthermore Faith doesn't have an inventory - she can carry one gun, and that's it - and there are no stats, or power-ups, or special potions. To the developers' credit I didn't miss any of this until after I had finished the game, but I suspect that if the game had been a massive success they would have found it very difficult to pull off the same setup twice.
Anything else? The baked-in lightmaps meant that there wasn't an official level editor, but the geometry runs on Unreal Engine 3, so a small modding scene emerged. I haven't tried any of the mods. The game ends in a skyscraper called The Shard, which is used as the headquarters of the city's totalitarian government. There is an actual skyscraper called The Shard, in London. It was in the advanced planning stages when Mirror's Edge(tm) entered development. Back then it was going to be called London Bridge Tower ("The Shard" was a nickname). I have no idea if the game's developers intended the fictional shard to be a mirror of the actual Shard.
As with the Walkie-Talkie and the Erotic Gherkin, The Shard was controversial at the time but is now just part of London's background. Is it the site of Britain's secret government? If I was a totalitarian dictator I would want to be based in Senate House, not The Shard. It's south of the river, miles from anywhere.
There's some debate as to where the game is set. The sequel appears to take place in south-eastern Australia, but the original is a mish-mash of Dubai, Singapore, Japan, China, a dash of Hong Kong. I wonder if the team used some of the development money to go on fact-finding trips to those places. Back in the 2000s EA was infamous for its work-hard, work-often corporate culture, so I doubt that the developers had any spare time, but then again DICE is based in Sweden so perhaps employment law is stricter there. Who knows.
Surprisingly EA didn't release a physical version of Faith's shoes. The lack of loot boxes and extensive DLC is another sign that this game came out in 2008.
