Mirror's Edge 2 © DICE

Ask any joyless videogame cynic and they'll tell you that there was plenty to dislike about Mirror's Edge . The story was shonky, the gunplay was like shooting fish in a barrel with a water pistol and the enemies were as thick as an elephant's mattress. And then there were the sewer sections.

But the freerunning...oh, the freerunning. For the all-too-brief stretches that the game wasn't forcing us to fight roomfuls of idiots or piping us down linear corridors like angry fondant, Mirror's Edge showed us a parkour paradise of open rooftops, vault-able scenery and perilous, bone-shattering drops. For six years, a cadre of die-hard fans has been clattering on their keyboards for protagonist Faith's return – and now it's finally happening, with EA promising a return to the rooftops sometime in 2016.

Little on how the new game will differ from the old has been announced, barring an E3 2014 video that promises greater openness and a tightened combat system. So, allow us to strap on our springiest trainers and run down (geddit?) our list of must-have fixes to make Mirror's Edge 2 the parkour game it always should have been.

1. Advanced (but optional) parkour techniques

The first Mirror's Edge made parkour easy – unlike sprinting head first at a wall in the real world, where blunt force trauma is only avoidable through years of training and complex hand and footwork, in ME1 you squirreled your way past obstacles with a single well-timed button press. But as we've learned from our own annual Art of Motion freerunning championship , there are so many different and exciting ways to upset a stranger's roof garden. Variety is what makes pro parkour runs so much fun to watch, so why not introduce some trickier vaults that we can pull off for points, similar to the bonuses earned in games like SSX for doing something a bit daring?

Yes, these would make the game more complicated, and yes you'd have to introduce some new animations of Faith faceplanting into flowerbeds or toppling off advertising hoardings. But it would be a difficulty that would scale: like with Devil May Cry's Style Rank system, if you're only comfortable repeating the same Safety Vault over and over again, you can still hop through the game. It's just that your Twitch stream will look more like Baby's First Free Run than Ryan Doyle's jaunts round Jordan .

2. Multiple routes

For all its promise of 'free' running, Mirror's Edge felt more like charging round an immaculately curated walking tour – rewards for exploring rarely (if ever) amounted to anything more interesting than another impassable precipice to peer over while your pursuers gratefully strafed you with machine gun fire.

Sometimes, that worked fine: flawlessly pegging it away from a helicopter over a route that had been clearly laid out made you feel like the champion of some warzone marathon. But at other times, it was frustrating – you knew where you had to go, but couldn't figure out how to get there (the sewer section), or kept tripping over your own cleats trying to make a tricky jump that was the only way to escape a pursuant cloud of lead.

DICE is promising an open-world for ME2, which we hope means a choice in whether we slink off round the side of a conflict, vault over the top of it or plunge head-down into it to clobber everyone to death with all our snazzy new kung–fu moves (more of which in a moment).

Mirror's Edge © DICE

3. Varied environments

Mirror's Edge's city is awfully clean – Dystopian–ly so, we'd say. And while all those stark whites and bold neon reds, greens and oranges made for a nice change from the thundering grey-brown landslide that buried the start of the PS3/Xbox 360 era, it did also mean that in the later stages of game, things got a bit samey. Zipline over one improbably spotless construction site, and you've ziplined over them all.

Keep the colour scheme; that's part of the game's DNA. But where do the poor and downtrodden live in this futuristic police state? What would a tumble-down shanty town look like in this pristine near-future, with cramped apartments stacked one on top of the other, massive verticality and awkwardly slanting roofs? Where do the people of this city live? Can we see them? And then jump up and down on their stuff? Failing that, give us some of that dynamic weather that featured so heavily in Battlefield 4 's Naval Strike DLC. The first few times we saw Faith accidentally slip-and-slide her way off the edge of a roof, we probably wouldn't even be angry.

Mirror's Edge © DICE

4. Less time indoors

A stand-out weird bit of design in the first Mirror's Edge: why not take all the awesome freerunning stuff we've taught players in the game's opening, tie it down in front of a speeding train and trap the player in some confined corridors for a bit? Or even better, a sewer? People love running through sewers.

If the outdoor sections of the game felt linear, the indoor sections felt like a fairground ride – that constantly broke down. There was one way through each area, but this time there was no blowing off steam by racing from platform to platform in the fresh air. Worse, the game would occasionally trap you in a room full of trigger-happy guards, and make you sneak – sneak! – from cover to cover, beating them up one by one. We're not even going to touch on the ethics of these encounters – bludgeoning the city's hardworking security guards after you've kicked in the door to their place of business – but if you are going to make us murder five guys just for trying to put a stop to our crime spree, at least let us do it in the sunshine.

Mirror's Edge © DICE

5. No gunplay

And while we're on the subject, we'd like an amnesty on firearms this time around. Just some time where everyone, Faith included, can take all their guns and put them in a big, locked bin and never touch them again.

While the first game never forced you into a gunfight (even in its inescapable areas, you could always disarm enemies and smack 'em round the head a bit instead – like that's any better), the inclusion of firearms was as jarring as those tedious corridor segments. Stopping to aim, ducking in and out of cover and watching your flanks as enemies raced up to get their teeth knocked out broke the game's flow like a squash game in a Pottery Barn, witlessly transforming Faith from picture of grace into bumbling Betty-Ten-Thumbs. One particularly egregious section even had Faith stop moving altogether in order to pick off distant enemies from a roof with a sniper rifle, like it's part of a contract that all DICE protagonists have to sign before they're let out of drawing-board-prison.

And if that's too much to ask, at least make pacifist playthroughs an option. Some of us really are just out for a run.

6. Better flowing combat

Faith's combat always looked good – all twisting arms and pinching guns and dropping on people from ladders – but besides leaping off things onto the unsuspecting, the environment was pretty well disconnected from the business of battering people. But why? Movies have proved time and time again that parkour and martial arts mix together into a very tasty soup – just look at 2004's District 13, its sequel, or its shameless American remake, Brick Mansions. If we absolutely have to abandon sailing across the skyline to crack a few skulls, at least let us do by combining vaults and kicks, tackling people into ladders or forcing enemies to wobble at us across balance beams while we throw combinations at their trembling legs.

Sleeping Dogs nailed its system of environment kills – and while it would be undoubtedly harder to get that required level of spatial awareness from Faith's first–person perspective, don't forget she's got her time–bending Reaction Time power that you could use to better plan your more stylish finishers. It's been six years since Faith's last landed on our consoles – if she's going to combine freerunning, exploration and hand-to-hand combat, she needs to up her game.