Since there's so much of running involved, momentum also plays a major role. You start slow and you will need 5-6 strides before you start to gather enough steam and momentum. Momentum is especially important when making big jumps and when faced with several enemies. And being a rather diminutive figure, Faith will also be slowed down considerably when carrying a weapon. It's fight or flight; either stand your ground and take out the hostiles or drop the gun and make a run for it.
You also have melee attacks at your disposal as well as disarming abilities, which is, in fact, the only way to get your hands on a gun. There are no guns and ammo stashes lying around for you to pick up. And if you do decide to shoot, you only have as many rounds as are already in the gun. After that, you better just drop it and start moving.
The hand combat works reasonably well but the AI does seem dull at times and you can very often simply run past an approaching cop and not have him even turn around and shoot you down. It's also very strange that while Faith can take 3-4 bullets at a time, two melee attacks will kill her. A rather jarring oversight is the death animation. Every time Faith dies, she will fall on her side with her hand in front of her face, but strangely if you get shot dead in the middle of a jump, that animation will play out the same way, which means she'll fall on her side and die in mid-air. Unpardonable.
Disarming an enemy can be difficult because only for a brief instance during the enemy's melee animation can you pull off a disarm. To make this a little easier, you have reaction time. Hitting the SQUARE button will slow down time, allowing you to time your disarm move better. You can also use reaction time to find your way around when you're at full speed, but you'd much rather not; it's a lot more fun that way.
Being a skilled exponent of Parkour, Faith also possesses skills such as wall-running and can combine wall-runs and jumps together to get to hard-to-reach places. These combinations are the key, and you'll want to figure them out early on in the game. Wall-runs can also be used effectively during melee combat and while a regular melee attack won't do much damage, an attack off a wall-run will disorient the enemy long enough for you to disarm him.
Also see: Review: FIFA 09 rocks!
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