You don’t need to do mental parkour to realise that Assassin’s Creed has become something of a polarising franchise. Despite their massive success, the recent trilogy of absolutely massive action RPGS (Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla) haven’t been to everyone’s liking, particularly those without a hundred hours to spare per game. With Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Ubisoft is looking to appeal to the fans of the older Creed era with more pick-up-and-play gmaeplay while also filling in the backstory of Basim, a major character from Valhalla.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage follows the younger years of the mysterious assassin during his time in Baghdad, where he is quickly recruited to the Hidden Ones’ cause after a heist goes wrong. One training prologue (and finger) later, you’re tasked with returning to beautiful Baghdad to find high-ranking members of the Order — and also figure out what’s haunting Basim’s dreams.
Unfortunately, while Mirage’s story sounds intriguing on paper, the actual execution feels rather quite lacking. Whether it’s the feeling of a lack of stakes, the overall solid but hardly captivating character writing, or the lack of onboarding for less seasoned players, Mirage’s narrative never quite soars. While you don’t necessarily need prior knowledge of the rather weighty Valhalla lore to enjoy Mirage as a whole, it will certainly help with the slightly bonkers final third, which certainly goes places. Mainly to mid-2000s thriller movie places.
However, Assassin’s Creed has never particularly puts its story front and center, especially when plunging a concealed blade into some daft bugger’s earhole has been working so well for them for almost 15 years. Anyone who has been pining for pre-Origins Creed will probably love what the relatively bite-sized Mirage has to offer, and while reverse Frankensteining the action RPG framework of nu-Creed into a stealth-focused adventure can feel a little patchy at times, it’s certainly a refreshing turn.
The most obvious way that Mirage trims the fat lies in its map, which should no longer give people with full-time jobs anxiety upon first inspection. Baghdad and its surrounding wilderness feels more like a sandbox of old, with more quality over quantity to be found. The city itself is bustling with plenty to see and do while also balancing the sheer content surfeit to feel less overwhelming. Sure, there’s still a lot of things to jump off and random bits to collect, but it all feels significantly more manageable here. It also helps that Baghdad is quite the looker and a unique location for a video game overall, with the landscapes being some of the most eye-catching yet. Backed by some absolutely fantastic music Brendan Angelides, it’s easy to get sucked into Mirage’s world.
What helps your immersion is how Mirage doles out its quests, which are called Investigations here. Instead of bombarding you with quests, Mirage allows you to chase different objectives on cases in whichever order you like, which means that you’re being asked to organically explore more of the setting. Once you complete a case, more will open up until you eventually uncover the head of the Order. There are also loads of side quests for those who want to play them, but it never feels like just capital c Content for the sake of it. There’s gear, but not sixteen million bits of it, and there’s no floating numbers to be seen. Just you, your assortment of tools, and tonnes of earholes to stab.
Pulling things back also gives Ubisoft a chance to make the world of Baghdad feel more interactive, perhaps more so than you might expect in what’s effectively a lower-budget release. Players can assassinate Order members around the city to help unlock special gear, and then bribe a local or remove a wanted poster to reduce their notoriety level and take the heat off. Similarly, players can also use tokens to convince musicians to play a song to lure away guards, hire mercenaries to let you slip around the back, and even sometimes make guards look the other way or slip you into a building. There’s so many more options than whistling at someone from tall grass (though there’s still plenty of that).
There are multiple ways of approaching most assassinations now, with an early one giving you about five different routes with branching paths to take. For instance, Basim can help “steal” a slave’s freedom to draw out his master, incite a ruckus between two squabbling merchants, or help someone get back their stock to do something simular. You can even dress up as a eunuch at one point to sneak into a harem, which feels like a ballsy move. This all makes Mirage closer to an immersive sim like Hitman than ever before, refreshing the formula so much that I wished Ubisoft had leaned into it even more. Let’s get some environmental “accidents” and more cosplaying next time and it will be the best assassinating a series about assassinating has ever seen.
About Those Microtransactions
Mirage has a raft of DLC available from day one, including cosmetic options, special gear that affects gameplay, and shortcuts to help highlight all of the hidden content on the map. Players are able to purchase it from an in-game Animus Store with real world money, and will receive notifications in-game about accessing said store.Â
It’s good that the stealth is so fun, because the general combat is very much an afterthought in Mirage and is a regression from even the earliest games. While the combat in nu-Creed has always been a bit on the janky side, it’s difficult not to feel like Mirage’s combat is simply action figures smacking together repeatedly. Basim has very few moves in total, even with the (thankfully rather restrained) skill tree to work through and every encounter feels like a rather basic slog. This does makes playing stealthily a more attractive proposition, but it’s doubtful that Ubisoft actively made the combat so poor as a design decision.
It’d also hardly be a modern open world game without a slew of bugs, and Mirage certainly has its ample share of them. There was nothing particularly immersion-breaking on my playthrough (which took a positively breezy 15 hours), just a lot of strange animations, randomly flapping assets, and finicky parkouring in certain places. It’d also be remiss of me not to mention the Denuvo added after most publications had already published their reviews. I couldn’t notice much in the way of a performance hit after it was added, though truthfully the game’s framerates were constantly lurching back and forth in the extremes for me with with my 3070 Ti on very high settings pretty much the whole time. While still overall a pretty smooth experience, there’s certainly a few more patches to be released before Mirage is where it needs to be.
Though far from perfect and from reaching the franchise’s most iconic early games, Mirage feels like a refreshing glass of water for those who want more open world games that don’t ask the world of players. If you’ve got some time to spare and fancy a diversion with some hayjumping in the busiest year for games ever, Mirage is an easy choice to make.
Deluxe Edition key provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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