Mirror's Edge

In the early 2000s, DICE was knocking out successful games in the Battlefield series of first-person shooters, yet for some reason, they decided to take a huge gamble on a brand new genre for their next game - a parkour simulator.

I’m not exactly sure where it started, but putting parkour (or free-running as it’s sometimes known) into pretty much everything seemed rampant in the mid-2000s. The opening sequence of the James Bond film Casino Royale, released in 2006, is one that sticks in my mind, and Mirror’s Edge would be the video game embodiment of this trend.

Mirror’s Edge was released late in 2008 to positive reviews. It was a real breath of fresh air into what had become a bit of a beige catalogue of AAA games. Mirror’s Edge offered a shiny, bright and colorful world where combat was a secondary objective for a change, and pure speed-based platforming took center stage.

Skill Based Controls

Upon replaying it, I do find so much satisfaction in the platforming mechanics. I find a lot of modern platformers are almost too easy - many jumps are well indicated and the player is pulled to the nearest handhold like a magnet to a fridge, but here everything feels more analogue and variable. This creates the perfect landscape for a skills-based game - it’s very easy to get going and get through the game, but if you take the time to master the controls and really embrace your creativity with the environment, there is a great depth to discover, and this is something you need to explore if you tackle the time trials.

I know that whilst this game is impressive, the gameplay is not for everyone. It can feel very trial and error, and I definitely got stuck in a number of places where I just didn’t know which way to go and what jumps were available to me. Combat in particular is a tricky one. I would say the game largely discourages you from using it, but then there are sections in which it is most definitely mandatory. One part of combat requires you getting close enough to an enemy for them to try and hit you, so that you can counter and steal their weapon. There is a slo-mo you can activate to help you get the timing on the counter. Without that, it is extremely difficult, as one or two hits and you are dead. There were times where I kept dying and I just had to put the game down out of frustration, but it wasn’t long before it called to me again and I wanted to give it another go. Even when I am falling to my death over and over again, the audible crunch Faith makes when she falls off onto the ground below is funny enough to keep my spirits high for a surprisingly long time.

I was also very impressed at just how good the game played on the PlayStation 3 in particular. We have talked at length about how a lot of games were just not optimized for the PlayStation 3 and sometimes ran worse than the Xbox 360 version. There are definitely a lot of better ways to play this game today, and it is a game which really does benefit from being played on a more powerful modern machine, but all of that being said, it still works very well on the PlayStation 3. The load times are fast - which is extremely important as you will die - a lot, the visuals are incredibly impressive for the machine, and the extremely bold and over-saturated color palette is such a welcome change when lined up against the rest of the PlayStation 3 catalogue.

Technical Achievement

As I played through the game, I tried to put my finger on just how this game manages to achieve it. The game is actually taking place in relatively small local locations, either rooftops or fairly small inside locations. The city streets below you and the buildings in the distance can get away with being fairly low resolutions, and actually, the lower resolution of these areas makes it feel more realistic, similar to how your eyes work. There also isn’t a lot of movement of scenery or other NPCs. It’s just the camera of the player that is moving for the most part; this definitely saves on some memory and CPU.

I believe the smaller sections where the player dips into a building and runs through unremarkable corridors are likely small but interactive loading scenes to mask the loading of small outside areas, and of course, the game makes use of the classic hidden loading screen - the elevator.

I believe a lot of the lighting effects were done using new techniques for the time that went above and beyond what were offered by the physics engine and this helped them achieve the visual style whilst using less memory. The bright and overly saturated color palette also can mask less detailed textures, and the modern city is sleek and smooth by design so no heavy textures needed there either. It is the perfect example of designing your whole game around your technical constraints. That being said, these are small tricks that may well help but the real credit should go to the team for their sheer skill in solving these technical problems.

I won’t go into too much detail about the entire game, as it’s well-documented at this point. I suspect you’re familiar with it, whether you’re a fan or not. However, I do want to briefly mention that the story and world-building are really great and help complete the game as a well-rounded world.

Mirror’s Edge does have trophy support, and looking at the list is as far as my Platinum journey with the game goes. You really need to master the controls to get this Platinum, and I think that is a fair challenge that this game deserves. You have to beat the game on Hard mode, do all of the time trials, and finally the speedruns. These require you to know the levels inside out and have that mastery over all of the controls in order to execute it perfectly. These are for real hard-core fans, as that sounds like an awful lot of trial and error to me.

Mirror’s Edge really was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for video games. It perfectly captured that free-running modern trend and combined it with this really unique and innovative gameplay that wasn’t like anything we had seen before, all set in a well-crafted world with memorable characters. There are definitely better ways to play this game in 2025, but the PlayStation 3 version is extremely cheap to get hold of, so if this is your only option, it is still worth looking at.