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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

Continue to part two...

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 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.

Jackknife is the second and longest level of Mirror's Edge, and is a chapter that Lorna Reid spoke fondly of last year. The following video isn't the best way to revisit its twists and turns—but it is a world record-breaking speedrun that was two years in the making, covering the entire game in just 22 minutes and 40 seconds. 

Beating the previous record by almost six minutes, the following is 'segmented' wherein 11 players contributed specific sections of the run. A description below the video states it has "been a project of the Mirror's Edge community for the last two years", and that "while the possibilities in Mirror's Edge are almost endless, this is as close as we have ever (and potentially, will ever) come to presenting a run which truly bleeds the game dry."

Onto the run itself:

The video description continues, suggesting the above is the result of nine years worth of practice without mods, hacks or external aids. "Everything that you see in this run is done by exploiting in-game mechanics," it continues, "and can be performed by anyone with a copy of Mirror's Edge [on] PC."

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off for a lie down. 

Thanks, Polygon. 

There s something about trying to wrestle a monitor from your desk with the express intention of hurling it out of a window, only to find said window has long been painted shut, that really makes you stop and think: what am I doing? Mirror s Edge inspires many such moments. Moments of pure rage. But in among them, there s something else. Something special that keeps you from drowning this game in acid.

In a game of (often literal) highs and lows, Jacknife, Mirror s Edge s second chapter and its longest, remains a flawed gem for me. It has made me angrier than any level bar the last, but when I sit back and regard the game in its entirety, it s always Jacknife that I come back to as the standout.

While a good slice of the action of this game takes place on rooftops, Jacknife offers a blistering run through some truly memorable alternate locations. From the streets and the depths of the storm drains back up to the heights again, diversity is shovelled at you like coal into a fire.

I think that s what appeals to me the most. As beautiful as the rooftops are, some breathing room is always a good thing. And what better way to contrast the sharp, primary look of the roofs and pristine offices than going down to the streets and underworld. Alleyways and cement trenches lead to grimy maintenance rooms, there s a brief taste of the clean outside world, then you plunge into the maw of the storm drains.

The chore of getting down there while a helicopter vomits bullets at you is infuriating when you re exploring and pathfinding for the first time. If you re masochistic enough to be speed-running the level it s ten times worse. And that helicopter seriously? Can those guys spell waste of public resources ?

At first I was appalled at where I found myself. What the hell am I supposed to do here? Where are the rooftops? Where are the brilliant dashes of colour against the sea of white? What have they done? I despised it. I hated struggling to navigate the perilous gantries of the imposing underground chamber, with its glistening columns stretching to infinity, let alone avoiding the searching beams of the snipers on the upper levels.

Struggling and feeling lost here feeds your resentment. But then, slowly, as muscle memory developed and my pathfinding improved (often thanks to some useful YouTube speed-run videos) I started to appreciate the location. Despite it being such a dank, lonely place, in which you re made to feel so small, I began to enjoy the little touches. The lighting, the water, the scuffling and squeaking of my shoes as I wall-ran and short-cutted, and occasionally managed to double jump beams.

Gliding down a slope in a sheet of water cast in a Halloweeny green was one moment that became a favourite. Right up until I realised I d have to scramble back out of another drain, amid platforms and pipes. And then, bliss, I was back up to the rooftops with their jumble of air-con units and architectural bric-a-brac.

It isn t just the paying out of such contrasting places that stands out. It s the pace. Had I the chance to indulge my usual gaming habits and lollygag, meander, and generally faff about, the level may well have lost some of its charm. But taken as it is, at near breakneck pace, it transcends the string of locations to become a fluid, urgent tour, doused in panic.

The level practically drags you along before suddenly thrusting you into the role of pursuer as you set off across the rooftops after the titular Jacknife. This switch from hunted to hunter is masterful and exhilarating, used again later in the boat chapter, but to lesser effect.

The more I examined this chapter, and the more I allowed myself to become immersed (largely through self-imposed repetition) the more the negativity fell away, leaving only a deep appreciation and respect for the level design. A design that undulates beautifully through changing locales, playing with pace and testing your abilities at every turn.

Like the game itself, Jacknife isn t for everyone, and it will stretch your patience to breaking point, especially with the numerous glitches. But love it or loathe it, it remains the most memorable chapter in a flawed but brilliant and original game.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst was good, but not quite as good as we all hoped it would be: As close to a definitive version of a Mirror's Edge game as we're likely to get, Samuel wrote in his review, despite retaining some of the first game's issues. If you don't happen to be familiar with those issues, you might want to point yourself at GOG, which now has Mirror's Edge and two other not-exactly-recent EA releases, all of them currently on sale.

That means the original Mirror's Edge for $10, the Spore Collection for $12, and The Saboteur for $10. Mirror's Edge is probably the marquee game in the list, but Spore is the real deal: The regular price of Mirror's Edge and The Saboteur is the same on GOG as it is on Origin, but GOG's Spore Collection normally lists for $30, while the combined cost of the Spore titles on Origin (which doesn't offer them in a bundle) is a whopping $70. GOG's listing may be a sign that EA's prices are about to change, but unless and until that happens, if you want to buy Spore, you'll probably want to do it on GOG.

The only downside, at least when compared to classic GOG releases, is that the bundled extras are very spare. Mirror's Edge includes two wallpapers and two avatars, while Spore and Saboteur have nothing. (The manuals are listed as included goodies but I tend to view them as something that's included because they're part of the game. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.) Still, sale prices and DRM-free are nothing to sneeze at. All three games are available now, and will remain on sale until September 29.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be bouncing onto PCs and consoles early next month, after which Faith's next stop seems to be her own TV show. A Deadline report says Endemol Shine Studios, the scripted division of Endemol Shine North America, home of such fine fare as Big Brother, The Biggest Loser, and MasterChef Junior, has acquired the rights to adapt the property into a female-centered action series.

We clearly see Mirror s Edge as a franchise for the global TV audience, Endemol Shine Studios President Sharon Hall said. It has a strong female protagonist, a wildly rabid fan base and a worldwide brand that Electronic Arts and EA DICE have done an amazing job establishing.

Statements from involved parties in the early stages of creative projects generally veer towards the hyperbolic, but even bearing that in mind I'm not sure that describing Mirror's Edge fans as wildly rabid is really the sweetspot in terms of PR mots justes. The game was more of a cult classic than a smash hit, and while there are plenty of people dearly hoping that Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be a satisfying sequel, it's not like we're talking about the Call of Duty crowd here.

Nonetheless, at least the reception isn't like to be worse than the one the Warcraft movie is receiving, right? Right?

There must be a special modder gene that compels them to rebuild famous gaming locations using tools that were never designed for the task. Modder SuX Lolz is clearly too hard on himself, because he's done a spectacular job of shoehorning an interpretation of Mirror's Edge's prologue into a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Deathrun map. Here's the original for comparison.

Some of the grime and fine detail is absent, sure, but the palette and stark lines of the city is dead on. The preview went live in late February, and I'm struggling to grasp how such a massive project has only just surfaced, but here in is now—soak it in. Maybe file a bookmark too, because it's not quite done: Lolz plans to add a number of secrets to the map and is contemplating bringing it to Black Ops 3 should modding tools ever surface.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

I completed Mirror s Edge four times, so I know the first person parkour- em-up stupidly well. To me, Catalyst feels almost exactly like the Mirror s Edge of 2008 in all the right ways. The platforming feels identical minus a couple of button press changes that only super hardcore players will notice, and my same muscle memory and sense of timing served me well during my hands-on at E3. For those worried that Catalyst might lose the very specific essence of the original, this doesn t feel like a reboot—it feels like a true sequel.

My demo took place in a tiny snippet of what is apparently a seamless open world in Catalyst, a series of rooftops with three tasks to perform: a time attack run (Race), a chain of combat encounters (Delivery) and a challenge to climb to a high point in the world and hack a propaganda billboard (er, Billboard Hack). My main reaction to the demo was delight at how it felt to finally have more Mirror s Edge in my hands, after seven years of championing the game to any poor bastard that will listen. There s been six Call of Duty games since the first one came out—that Catalyst exists in a landscape of absurdly expensive triple-A games is a bit uplifting to me. Even better, what made the original Mirror s Edge so special is seemingly still intact here.

What this 13-minute demo didn t do was outline how open world play will work, since this area of shiny rooftops was boxed off and honestly felt like it could be a level from the first Mirror s Edge. This setting will start small then open up, but how big does it really go? The map screen in the menu suggests a huge open city, but the demo doesn t answer the question of how that ll feel to the player to travel from one place to another.

Greater changes come in the form of the combat, which was divisive the first time around, but has been overhauled so it s noticeably easier. While it seemed a little too simple to me on first inspection, it might suit players who found the original s fighting too challenging or fiddly. Attacks are now mapped to the x button on an Xbox controller, rather than the trigger (this is now just the barge button for opening doors), and as long as you hit the button in close proximity to an enemy, Faith will quickly take them out, sometimes with a pleasing third-person finishing animation.

The demo didn t really have enough combat to make a call on it either way. Combat presented no immediate threat, and with no guns for faith to pick up, DICE clearly gave this a little more thought than the platforming. What s obviously different is that you can pretty much fight while still running, whereas Mirror s Edge sometimes required more of a duelling mentality, where you had to circle around cover and ambush enemies, distracting from the pace of level. Maybe a complex fighting system just isn t that important to Mirror s Edge—I ll need more time with Catalyst to be convinced by this change.

Mirror s Edge was well worth reviving, and this demo tells me that Catalyst will look and feel familiar to the game s existing audience. DICE should now focus on showing players how the open world really adds to that.