I refuse to write a pun on the word 'Faith'

The second of today's promised two posts.

As usual, I will get straight to the point.

Mirror's Edge is great.

DICE's first-person parkour platformer is set in a near-future city somewhere in (probably) America, where the Big Brother establishment monitors all behaviour and communication. Faith, the heroine, is a 'Runner' - an outlaw who transports secret messages and upholds civil liberties via the medium of free-running. I'm sure the majority of my readers know all of this backstory from the countless previews, trailers and promotional materials. Strangely, it has literally nothing to do with the plot after the two or three minute opening prologue level.

The actual plot is a tangled web of murder, deceit and intrigue, not one point of which can last half a second of fridge logic. In fact it rarely makes sense at face value, with one sequence mid-way through the final chapter having two characters engage in some fist-shaking at the name of the entire conspiracy's apparent instigator, who has been dead for the last six levels. The Adobe Flash cutscenes look cheap and ugly next to the beautiful and striking in-game art direction, while the voice cast fluctuates between passably average and utterly terrible.

Of course, this story rubbish doesn't remotely matter. What does matter is whether or not DICE delivered on their promise of an expressive, intuitive and fluid first-person parkour system.

The basic move, look and attack controls of standard dual-analog FPS games are instantly familiar, but it takes a few minutes of acclimatisation to grow comfortable with the context sensitive parkour. 'Up' actions (jumping, vaulting, wall-running and climbing) are assigned to LB, 'down' actions (dropping, rolling, sliding, crouching and coiling up in mid-air) are assigned to LT, and 'reverse' actions (turning 180 degrees, twisting round in mid-air, or turning to face 90 degrees from a wall-run) are performed by RB. Once you are familiar with what each button can do, stringing together elaborate combos and maneuvres becomes second nature. The environmental puzzles easily match (and often trump) the best of the recent Prince of Persia games, by rewarding experimentation and exploration away from the more obvious routes with hidden collectibles, faster Speed Run and Time Trial times, and the satisfaction of using generally cooler combos. While there are occasions where certain actions - grabbing ledges for example - will fail unexpectedly, this is by no means unusual among platform games, and Mirror's Edge is more reliable than most.

Armed combat is a fairly standard FPS run-and-gun system, with Faith noticeably slowing down and losing much of her freedom when carrying a weapon. In order that there is no path of least resistance, shooting is much less accurate and reliable than in more focused games of the genre, but it can still get you out of a tight spot. Hand-to-hand combat is cleverly tied in with the free-running mechanics, with different states (jumping, falling, wall-running, etc.) enabling different moves with RT, and secret achievements awarded for a discovering a handful of the more unusual techniques. Y, meanwhile, performs instant-kill disarm moves when timed correctly, or when an enemy has his back to you. The combos that can be performed from these simple elements are numerous, distinct and rewarding. Like the tragically underrated Breakdown, unarmed combat requires you to isolate your enemies and deal with them one-by-one. Unlike Breakdown, which was widely criticised for the difficulty of doing this, the scale and complexity of the environments combined with Faith's freedom and athleticism makes this an appealing and relatively forgiving challenge - there is always somewhere to run if you mess up. Playing through the game for the oft-mentioned Test of Faith achievement - going start to finish without shooting a single enemy - can be frustrating however, and the best solution to most large encounters is to intelligently combine martial arts with gunplay.

It isn't mechanically flawless, however. The bullet time system, designed for aiming trickier jumps and making it easier to time disarms, cannot be cancelled once it has been initiated, and when it has run dry it takes a great deal of leaping about before recharging. I understand that if it recharged quickly it could be exploited or damage the sense of momentum, but five seconds of slow motion for every two minutes of normal gameplay in such a fast-paced game is pushing it hard. Enemies can be cheap sometimes too, with their wildly fluctuating accuracy making it just as likely that you could sprint through an area unscathed as you could take one step and be instantly mowed down. Enemy spawning is often based on a timer from a save point rather than a straight trigger, meaning that certain platforming sections can be rendered impossible if you don't pass them early enough. This latter problem is made even more frustrating with the lack of an option to reload the last checkpoint on the pause screen. Suicide against hopeless situations is all too frequent.

Loading is slow, and I often found myself overtaking the streaming for flow-breaking Half-Life loading pauses in the Story modes. Since there was no sign of this problem in the demo, I suspect that Mirror's Edge will benefit greatly from the installations allowed by this Wednesday's NXE update, or on the PS3. Time Trials are wisely confined to a single preloaded area and, mercifully, can be quickly restarted as a result.

I cannot begin to describe how glad I am that Mirror's Edge has been touted as another of those 'planned as a trilogy' things. If DICE can smooth off the rough edges of this gem in subsequent installments, and deliver on that level editor they mentioned, it could shine as one of the best of this generation.

As it stands, it's just a bloody good game.