Yamakasi Masters

You'd think those who practise the 'urban art' of parkour would be quite a live-life-on-the-edge bunch. Hence it's quite a disappointment to discover the Yamakasi Masters - a real life Parisian parkour group that was one of the first to start throwing themselves off lamp posts - seem to be even more obsessed with punctuality than your average office HR manager.

Enter Adventure mode and nearly every objective is to meet Rick in three minutes, or register for the championship in four. Call me difficult, but if I'd just made a dash across ten skyscraper roofs, pausing to backflip off a wall then roll under a railing, only to be met by the stony-faced organiser of a parkour competition who tells me I'm ten seconds too late to register, I wouldn't take it well.

Still, there has to be a reason for all the running and jumping against the clock that this game is based around, and we suppose that timeliness is as good a reason as any. Besides, when the running and jumping is this good, the story behind why you're doing it isn't that important.

And it really is good. Yamakasi Master is a bit like Prince of Persia - except the palaces are park benches and the prince looks a bit like a chav.

The way your character is animated - with moves like grabbing ledges, hauling himself up then diving through a set of railings - is seamless. Importantly, too, it's not difficult to get around the game's playgrounds of high buildings, ledges, railings and posts - there are no combos to remember and instead it's all about pressing 'down' or 'jump' at just the right moment - but you can still spend hours getting it just right.

Levels are designed in such a way that there are multiple routes through, easily missed first time ledges and neat little tricks hidden throughout. So you might be able to complete a level, but not with maximum finesse - or flow, as it's called.

It's just as well they are, because the ten-level Adventure mode doesn't take long to complete. The game is impressive from the start but - just when you really start to enjoy things and have unlocked some nifty new moves - it's over. A handful of levels present enough of a challenge that you'll probably need to have a few tries and memorise the quickest route through, but those aside it's a straightforward and entertaining hop, skip and jump from start to finish.

Harder difficulty levels would have been welcome, but Yamakasi Masters does at least have some replayability up its sleeve. Challenge mode lets you replay all the levels for high scores, hitting checkpoints and the finishing line within time limits, and scoring maximum points as you go. Free Run lets you just explore and practise and there are also three bonus levels (which I didn't manage to unlock, but presumably you get them by hitting some particularly high scores along the way).

With its nifty city visuals, seamless controls and adrenaline-charged high drops and jumps, Yamakasi Masters is prize parkour stuff. It's not perfect. Some levels could have done with being designed with fewer ledges to scramble up one after another for example, and the points for flow feel a bit randomly dished out. A proper Championship mode would have been good too - instead the Adventure mode has you fighting to get to the championship then the game ends.

But still, the core running, jumping and scrambling is spot-on. The only bit that perhaps isn't so realistic is the parkour crowd being so eloquent in their time-keeping, and we think we can forgive that.