searching for the experience that I once felt after playing the first game, it's sad seeing swery stray further and further from it.

now i'm one to put up with jank, a lot of the stuff here i fuck with but there's one thing in specific that annoyed me:
for a game about wasting time, i hate how bad is it at it; the reason being that the only way time moves is just being outside doing nothing. being inside buildings or doing minigames just freezes time, which is stupid considering how slow the in-game clock is. so if you wanna pass time you'll either wait around or start smoking to skip time, which is what you'll likely end up doing sadly.

I'll give it some points on the schizo-meter when it comes to the 400 achievos/stamps, because the requirements for them are absolutely ridiculous. Like spending 1 year in-game, shooting your little partner patty in the face 300 times or killing thousands of animals. if there's something tedious you can think of, you'll have you do it 100 times. The worst part is that there's a dedicated community that did all of this, only to find out one stamp is bugged due to one of the fetch quests not triggering properly, swery you fucking asshole.

if i wasn't so attached to york and dp in general, i would've flushed it right away, this game is worse than the first one in every single aspect but hey, it did scratch some of that itch i had for DP.

I can't believe EA came up with something so original!

There is so much I love about this game, and the parkour mechanics are a good place to start. The moveset is intuitive and tight, the controls mostly feel smooth, and the first-person camera manages to viscerally capture the 'feel' of parkour for a couch potato like me to enjoy, alternating between being exhilarating and vertigo-inducing. You also know that a game mechanic is effective when it starts to bleed over into your real-life experiences, and that's what happened here; Faith's instinct and insight on how to get around the environments is represented in-game as various key objects being highlighted in red, and when I went out after a particularly long play session I walked a path I'd walked many times before and noticed some pipes and AC units I'd never paid attention to before.

The aesthetic and character designs are great - I particularly like that Faith is a badass Asian female lead who they didn't sexualize at all, and her design reminds me somewhat of a modern-day Ayame from the Tenchu series (another of my favorite characters). But let's be real here, the best 'character' in the game is the city itself. A dystopia in utopian make-up, with its beautiful skylines and starkly sterile colors (even the plants look more white than green!), with buildings everywhere but seemingly no one in them but cops, the City of Glass takes on a life all of its own. The design of the city parkour sections is incredible, and while there is a key that you can use to point yourself in the direction of your end goal, the level layout does a really good job at subtly directing your eyes towards where you need to go anyway!

This makes it all the more a shame that some aspects of the game just feel 'off', for lack of a better word. The fact that this game was so unique and fresh makes a certain lack of polish inevitable, but I can't pretend it didn't affect my general gameplay experience. For one, certain moves were rather unreliable; wall-running is rather finicky, and there were plenty of sequences in the final act of the game which required near-perfect wallrunning in order to progress. The difficulty curve was all over the place, which I can excuse, but the placement of checkpoints didn't seem very well thought-out. One particular moment stands out to me where I must have died and retried dozens of times: I pressed a button to open a door (which took about 5 seconds to open), walked through the door and was killed within 5 seconds, and was sent back to before the button press, ending up in a very unpleasant loop of playing five seconds and waiting five seconds.

I also feel, given the game's laserlike focus on parkour, that it could have leaned even more into it. Just prior to the final act, the game made a big deal about introducing a new enemy type - a parkour cop that could follow you around the rooftops - and that idea was strangely underutilized in favor of a more action-based final act that mostly took place indoors and shone an unwanted spotlight on the game's gunplay mechanics which are functional but not much more.

As a final point, I wish the game weren't so linear in the paths it sets out for you. There are of course different ways to tackle the various obstacles, and the robust parkous mechanics lend themselves to all kinds of insane speedrun strats. But there are almost no instances of branching paths to get from Point A to Point B, and it really kills the illusion of freedom for me. I'm aware that it's sequel/reboot somewhat botched the transition to open-world, but I would have loved some form of open-world mode in this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay was so good.

The relative failure of the sequel, combined with a seeming lack of spiritual sequels, mean that Mirror's Edge still feels fresh 14 years later, but also means that (AFAIK) we don't have a game that transplants the wonderful spirit of this game into a more refined experience. Mirror's Edge is one of a kind, both for better and for worse.

(PSA! I nearly gave up on this game due to motion sickness at first. If you have the same problem, switch graphic quality to 'low' and remove the reticle - it saved my playthrough and I hope it helps someone!)