By the end, the problems become too prevalent to recommend this game.
While the game is labeled as a first person shooter, the vast majority of the game revolves around actually running away from your enemies. The joysticks control movement just like any other FPS, but the acrobatics are controlled by the left trigger and bumper. The trigger crouches when standing still or slides on your back when running. The bumper controls anything that makes your character go up, such as climbing or jumping. After the tutorial, you will find yourself pulling off some amazing feats. On the lower difficulties, objects that need to be jumped too or off of are highlighted in red in order to make it easy to know where to go without slowing down. Soon, you will find yourself running along a wall, hurdling a fence, sliding below an AC unit, then leaping off a building onto a roof below, all without slowing down or missing a beat. The first few levels are an absolute blast because there is a margin for error that allows for you to fully get used to the controls. Soon, though, you will find sections are require perfection. If you don't hit a wall run in the perfect spot or make a jump at the last possible second, you will find yourself splattered on the pavement below. The checkpoint system doesn't help either. Quite frequently, you will be forced to do two or three of these nearly impossible jumps before reaching the next checkpoint. About halfway through the game, you will start finding level design quirks that are thrown in just to annoy you. While jumping from one spot to another, you may bump your head on a rafter that looked out of range and fall to your death. On other occasions, you will clearly see your destination on the other side of a railing, but instead of jumping over, the game is designed to make you hurdle the rail and fall right off the other side. The red highlighted objects that are supposed to help you are sometimes mysteriously missing in areas where enemies are right on your tail and you must die a couple of times in order to find out where to go. It almost feels like the levels were designed by two teams. The first team's goal was to make a fun and unique game, while the second team was made up of guys that used to burn ants with magnifying glasses as kids and intentionally wanted to torture the players with frustrating additions. It also doesn't help that on occasion, the game mechanics simply fail. In one example, I had to make it from one roof to another by leaping along three parallel pipes mounted on a wall. I had to attempt this five times because my character would literally jump through one of the pipes and fall to her death.
The shooting isn't particularly satisfying, but luckily it also isn't very common either. You can carry only one gun at a time and cannot perform any acrobatic moves while holding one. This was done in order to keep your character on the move and not allow the game to breakdown into full on shootouts. While the guns are realistically inaccurate, it can be frustrating when trying to shoot at an enemy while on the move. Since most of your enemies are horrible shots, it is often easier to just run right past them instead or trying to take their gun and kill them.
The storyline is nothing much worth playing the game for. You play as a runner who is passively fighting the (allegedly) oppressive government by running along the rooftops of the city to transfer messages. Your sister, who is a police officer, is framed for the murder of a politician. After exactly zero police investigation, she is arrested and you are the only one that can clear her name. Each mission that follows can be described as 'find this person and they can tell you who the next person is'. By the end of the game, you don't get much explanation of why she was set up or who did it. You are also still on the run, making this another example of a game that ends on a cliffhanger to a story that wasn't particularly good in the first place.
The graphics are mediocre. Everything looks OK, but there is a clear lack of diversity to the levels. Most of the indoor areas look the same and all of the rooftops could be from the same few buildings. It doesn't help that several sections of the daytime rooftops sequences are way too bright; so much so that the screen is nearly all solid white. On the other end of the spectrum, several indoor areas are almost pitch black. There were a few occasion where I had to turn the brightness up in order to see a platform that I needed to jump to, only to have to turn it back down the next time I was outside. Nothing breaks the immersion like having to fiddle with the television picture. The cutscenes tried to be artistic, but they just came across as bad. They are simply two dimensional cartoons with an extreme lack of detail. This probably wouldn't have bothered me as much if the story was better, but since I didn't really care what the people in the scene were saying, I had nothing else to do but nitpick at the graphics.
Mirror's Edge is a great idea that is hurt almost entirely by the fact that the levels are designed to work entirely against the player. All of it's other faults could have been forgiven if the game remained fun, but unfortunately, this wasn't the case. The first person acrobatic is definitely a gimmick every gamer should check out, but it isn't enough to carry the rest of the game.