Mirror’s Edge, close as it is to release, already has the world behind it, but, we suspect, still isn’t yet fully understood. As attractive as its clean good looks are, its abstinence from the weapons that popularly define any first-person game could prove puzzling for some.

Solving a lot of this will be down to EA’s marketing, but its early stages, a build of which we’ve played, will be the test of DICE’s ambitions. It’s a test that the game passes easily. Though the tutorial has a worrying knack of over-complicating things, thankfully, once the game proper begins, you realize DICE has created a world that’s both visually arresting and beautifully functional.

Executing an unbroken flow from A to B is what Mirror’s Edge is all about; stringing together a few moves increases your speed, and there’s a purity and zing to bouncing between surfaces and popping over a low handrail in one smooth motion. Red environmental elements, which act as targets for you to hasten to, might initially seem condescending in labouring the obvious, but in fluid play they become enormously welcome. They allow the player to focus on reaching a destination swiftly, without too much stop-start exploring or trial and error.

They also help with what may be the biggest difficulty for Mirror’s Edge – a player’s usual instincts in first-person mode. The designation of FPS is useless here, unless it’s repurposed to Fast-Paced Stunts, and overcoming inclinations toward caution and inertia in first-person should perhaps have been one of the tutorial’s priorities. Instead, the police bring it home. The first time they appear, your gravelly voiced navigator simply tells you to run. As they block one route, you change direction and keep running, looking for those flashes of red that offer a way to maintain momentum, even when you’re sprinting at full tilt at what looks like a dead end. Such leaps of faith are exhilarating.

The pressure forces you to keep moving, to try new combinations, and only very rarely are you forced to confront an enemy physically. The opportunity to disarm an opponent is brief, though this can be widened using bullet time accumulated through earlier stunts. Two or three police will easily down you in seconds, so it’s far more effective to dash around them, stopping only to wall-kick or slide at single enemies directly in your path.

Stepping back from these breathless sequences, you can see the linearity of the routes you’ve been channelled down. But Mirror’s Edge is clever at making the world look open and occasionally offers multiple routes to a red destination. It’s not unusual to find straight runs over and under obstacles for building momentum, while for every jump that needs precision and timing there’s a stretch to build up some speed. And for every misjudgment, there’s an instant restart.

This last point helps immensely with the game’s only serious problem, which will hopefully be tweaked: pipes. Jumps between them often end with a miss, due to a rare moment of counter-intuitiveness and the tendency for the view to clip right through the geometry of the target. It’s a small falter in a control scheme that’s otherwise an absolute triumph.

Minor gripes aside, Mirror’s Edge looks like a brave new direction for first-person games, and it plays like one. Your first steps are bewildering, but they soon become bewitching and even oddly familiar. DICE’s game offers plenty that’s new, but some that’s old and borrowed too. It isn’t an FPS, not as we think of them. It’s a Full-on Platformer, Stupid.