The latest game from the peeps over at Ubisoft is Assassin’s Creed Mirage and it’s a stripped back throwback to the very first few games in the series. Mirage goes all in on stealth, so we’ll start our honest review with what works well, before pulling it apart in the bad bits section to give you a good idea about whether or not it works.
The game sees you heading back to 9th century Baghdad as Basim, who was a fairly important character in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. To an extent, Mirage is kind of a prequel to that game, filling in some of the blanks about Basim and why things go the way they do in Valhalla.
AdvertisementWe like to keep our reviews as spoiler free as possible, so we won’t delve any deeper than that in terms of the story, but if you’ve played Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to the end then Mirage will make for a nice continuation. However, the two games are very different in terms of size and gameplay, so we’ll take you through the main points throughout our review.
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Assassin’s Creed Mirage… The good bits
AdvertisementThere are a few givens in terms of our Assassin’s Creed Mirage review. Firstly, it’s a good looking game and it’s set in a brilliantly crafted world. 9th century Baghdad comes to life in the game, much like every location in all of the previous Assassin’s Creed titles.
The real surprise is the impact of the music, which makes for an impressive accompaniment to all of the action. You don’t really notice it at first, but by the time the credits roll you’ll look back on it as being one of the highlights of the experience.
AdvertisementIn addition to the music, there’s a lot more history, art, architecture and culture to discover and it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to immerse yourself into it. There aren’t many games that give you the opportunity to take a camel ride in the desert, dress up like a Eunuch and save a kidnapped scholar, but Mirage gives you all this and more.
The story draws you in quickly, thanks in part to the links to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but even without that you’ll get caught up in Basim’s origins pretty quickly. It doesn’t spend too much time trying to give you loads of dialogue to set things up, and it does a good job of building the framework for the game itself.
However, the real star of the show is the gameplay itself, which is how it’s supposed to be. It’s not a massive game with sub-20 hours of action, but what it does it does well, especially at the lower price point compared to previous AC games. We’ll talk you through the blips along the way in the bad bits section of our Assassin’s Creed Mirage honest review, but for the most part it’s a lot of fun.
The stealth setups are well constructed and give you a lot of freedom to choose how you want to get the job done. The reality is that you could just go in for a combat style if you really wanted to, but it’s all about stealth and it’s got plenty of it.
There’s a good amount of variety in the main story quests and side contracts that you’ll have to complete, ranging from set-piece assassination situations to rescues missions and intelligence gathering. One moment you’ll got twin brothers to kill using environmental implements of death, and another you’ve got to find a dancer in the palace to get her to safety.
It gives the game a lot of replay value as you’re bound to want to take on each of them again, trying a different route, alternative NPC opportunity or better stealth skills after you complete the game for the first time. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is pretty good at giving you loads of autosaves to go back to, so you can work out a good run and try to do it perfectly while having a path back to the start to fall back on.
AdvertisementIn some ways it’s a bit like the most recent Hitman series, which gives you a sandbox environment and narrative to follow, but a ton of different ways to complete the mission. What this means for Mirage is that you can try things out on loop until you become a stealth ninja.
Great games are simple, but keep you coming back for more and Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a bit like the Rubik’s Cube of open world games. Once you get into it and you start to understand its mechanics, you can keep it spinning on loop to find better ways to do it, with quicker times or more flourish. It’s for this reason that our review score is so high, but there’s always room for improvement, which we’ll touch on below.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage… The bad bits
As mentioned above, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a good looking game, but it’s far from a giant leap forward in terms of visuals. The last few AC games have looked pretty similar and if you compare the latest with the last entry, there’s not much in it.
It’s definitely crisper than anything from Black Flag and before, but it doesn’t look like things have come along that far since Syndicate and Unity. That’s not to say that it isn’t an improvement, it’s just that the increments aren’t that big, so it’s hard to be bowled over.
AdvertisementHowever, it’s fair to say that the current generation of gaming is probably the least improved overall. There are plenty of PS4 and Xbox ONE era games that don’t look that different from their PS5 and Series X/S counterparts and that’s the case here.
In addition to the lack of big strides forward visually, there just aren’t that many dramatic sights to see if you compare it to a lot of previous Assassin’s Creed games. The 9th century Baghdad that they’ve created is immaculate and beautifully realised, but there aren’t that many wow moments.
They’re still there, but in fewer quantities than say Britain in Valhalla, Greece in Odyssey or Egypt in Origins. You could say that this is just a product of the location itself and the size of the game world compared to the other titles, but that’s not entirely the case.
Firstly, there are a number of huge features of the landscape that just go ignored in the main campaign and the contracts. The desert is largely just a jaunt if you want to explore instead of being an integral part of the gameplay experience and it’s a similar story to the rive Tigris, which surrounds the city.
AdvertisementIf that isn’t enough, there’s also the Hidden Ones’ fortress hideout of Alamut and while it look good, it could have been so much more. The height of the area is a massive missed opportunity and the fact that it’s off the world map means that you can’t go back to it and there’s no epic synchronization point, or high dive, which the game misses out on.
There’s also no photo mode as of yet, which means you can’t snap away at some of the better locations in the game. Hopefully, Ubisoft will add this in later, which happens fairly regularly with God of War Ragnarok being the most recent example of a later patch.
Despite our earlier praise, the gameplay isn’t quite perfect. In addition to the missed opportunities of the desert of and river, there’s the weak AI system for the guards and enemies that you encounter.
We’re not talking a massive overhaul, but a few tweaks and you’d have something that’s far more seamless. For example, a lot of the animations for assassinations start with the enemy turning to face you as if ready to happily die at your blade. Change these to a tap on the shoulder surprise situation or something similar and you’d take away one of the biggest tells that you’re playing in a game world.
It’s a similar story with the detection mechanism. Even on maximum difficulty, you can easily crouch walk right in front of an enemy in a restricted area and not get spotted properly if you’re quick enough. It doesn’t make sense and a slight increase in the sensitivity of the system would result in a better experience overall.
It’s a bit like the gaming equivalent of the strings on a puppet. We all know it’s a puppet, but the moment you can see it’s strings it takes away some of the magic. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is all too clearly a simulation, which doesn’t match up to the nature of the story and game.
Another fault is that apart from the auto-saves and option to replay the game from scratch once you’ve beaten it, there aren’t any formal modes of replayability. If you compare this to the respawning bosses and experiences of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, or replayable missions in Spider-Man Miles Morales, you can’t help but feel disappointed.
AdvertisementAn animus option to replay missions would make a lot of sense here, but then a new game+ mode would be a good addition too. Hopefully, someone over at Ubisoft reads this and gets an update out in time for Christmas 2023, which would give us all a better way to replay Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
In the interim, the best way to get the most out of the game is to do manual saves when you get to a mission that sounds cool. This way you can go back to it any time you want to after you complete the game.
Finally, the skills and perks are pretty much spot on, but the gear is a little on the disappointing side. The focus seems more on the mitigation of damage or bigger hits in combat, but the game actively encourages you to opt for stealth, which the game is set up for, so it’s a mismatch.
There needed to be more options to improve stealth with weapons and outfits, which would have made way more sense. A costume that re-absorbs smoke bombs if you enter them would have been a nice touch or one that allows you to focus leap between hiding places similar to multi-kill system.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage overall review
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a solid stealth adventure that will keep you coming back for more. Not everyone will get into the genius of the replay, thanks largely to the fact that Ubisoft hasn’t done anything specifically designed to aid this, but for anyone that does it could go on to be a minor addiction.
The gameplay is a lot of fun. The tells take away from the experience, but if you put that to one side you’ve got a lot of stealth craft to get into. Mirage is far from the biggest or most involved game in the AC series, but it does land well with its stripped back focus on old-school stealth.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage honest review score: 88%
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