TYOA: 8 Great Video Games RUINED By Their Final Level

5. The Shard - Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge may not have been a perfect game - hence its inclusion on this list - but for a solid 95% of its play-time it was a deliriously entertaining action-adventure platformer centered around vertiginous parkour-style traversal.

But developer DICE threw all that out with the bathwater in the game's final level, The Shard, which shifts away from breakneck acrobatics and instead hands the player some guns.

Climaxing a game centered around adrenalised running and jumping with a molasses-slow trudge through a skyscraper while holding a massive machine-gun just isn't it. 

It feels wholly inconsistent with the game's design philosophy up to that point, as though an EA executive mandated that Mirror's Edge of all things needed a more conventional shooty-shooty final mission.

When a game has been getting pretty much everything right, it makes no sense at all to change tack so aggressively at the very end, grinding the pacing to a halt and throwing up some aggravating difficulty spikes to boot.