Mirror’s Edge deserves attention for being utterly unique. People have long since talked about how good it’s felt to shoot a gun in Black, or throw yourself into cover in Gears of War or around a corner in Gran Turismo, but physicality is a real thing in Mirror’s Edge. To move is to be convinced. It’s the wind in your face, the stomp of your sneakers and the sound of your breath. And momentum and gravity don’t feel like simulation, they feel like momentum and gravity actually do. It’s the first video game to make me sweat.

Faith is a real person, and the unnamed city she traverses is a real place, not an assortment of set pieces. Run up to a wall and she stops herself by putting her hands up against it. Look away from the ledge she is hanging off of and she takes one of her hands off so she can turn all the way around. Her subconscious is even relayed directly to you via colored highlights of objects you should move across to advance as easily as possible through the level. Faith knows, so you know. The connections between player, character and environment are as close to seamless as they ever have been. With the utmost respect to Super Mario 64, this is everything it isn’t (in the best way).

It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, though. Mirror’s Edge’s story is a flop and totally usual for video games. This raises questions like ‘does a video game like this need a story?’ What if the time trial and race modes - which you unlock after beating it - were all there were to it? Would it be enough to just have to get from point A to B with no explanation of why? I think if certain areas and enemies were removed or changed, the game would have been better that way.

The other major fault in its design is that of its combat. You’re rewarded with Achievements and unlockables for beating the game without using guns, which is a shame because melee feels floaty and detached (so far the opposite of the rest of the game), and weird because developer DICE seems to be aware of its failings in this section of the game, as they’ve said in interviews that if a sequel is made, combat will be changed or removed. First-person shooting feels alright, but still doesn’t have much of a place alongside the rest of the game.

So this game fails in that it has (bad) combat because it has enemies, and it has enemies because it has (a bad) story. Remove or improve both and we really could have had something special on our hands. Instead, this game only proves its worth as a tech demo, which, thankfully, is more than enough to give us a great experience. First-person shooter developers, take heart. Put this type of animation, control and physics into your games from this point forward. The bar has been set.