Assassin's Creed Mirage Review – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, And A Leap Of Faith In The Wrong Direction Entirely

This article is part of a directory: Assassin's Creed Mirage: Complete Guide And Walkthrough

After Valhalla, it was clear 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed had fallen into a slump. Obsessed with scale over all else, the series had stripped away just about everything that made it unique in pursuit of being the next big open world RPG. So the news that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Mirage was ta🐼king us back to basics, with a foဣcus on classic stealth and a smaller, more confined city to explore should have been a welcome relief.

Instead, Mirage is another sign that Ubisoft has🎉 no idea what to do with the franchise. While it sometimes teases a sparkle of what could’ve been the second coming of Ezio Auditore, it’s more frequently a hodgepodge of failed ideas and deca🔯de-old flaws that makes for one of its weakest entries in years.

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Set before Valhalla in 9th Century Baghdad, it tells the story of street-rat turned Assassin Basim and his early years among the Hidden Ones, tracking down members of the Order, wh🤪o are busy twisting the city to their own, mysterious ends. Unlike Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla, Mirage returns to the stealth focus we last saw in Syndicate, with players needing to blend into crowds, eavesdrop on locals, and find ways around enemies by doing more than just cutting them down in a rampage.

Basim jumping into a hay cart in Assassin's Creed Mirage

Assassin’s Creed spent seven years courting open world RPGs, and so hasn’t been able to refine and iterate on its older formula for quite some time. As a result, coming back to it dredges up problems you may have forgotten you even had with the older games, with frustration often masking nostalgia. If there’s a single word I could 🤡use to describe Mirage, it’s dated.

Rather than taking place across an entire country, Mirage sticks to a single city and its surrounding countryside. This is great news after the wading through the sparse celtic voids of Valhalla, but that smaller scale doesn’t equate to a 🦩more detailed world. Baghdad feels lifeless, with crowds blandly milling about and very little to explore outside of the missions. It’s a step ꦑback from the chaotic throngs of Paris in Unity, or the pollution-belching boats of the Thames in Syndicate. It’s more like Constantinople from Revelations, both in size and detail, and that was over a decade and two console generations ago. Mirage is a game that feels distinctly out of time for all the wrong reasons.

Basim walking through a crowd in AC Mirage.

Parkour is also back to its original form, with you holding a button to automatically leap from obstacle to obstacle. Again, this is something that was refined to near-perfection in Unity, only for Mirage to look too far back at a time when it was overly awkward, fiddly, and often saw 🌠you leaping off buildings you didn’t mean to. I’ve spent so much time snogging the walls of Baghdad, just because Basim didn’t want to climb a clearly visible brick façade that sat mere metres away.

For all its antiquated design choices, Mirage does have some cracking missions that remind you why so many people fell in love with this 💜series. Whether it’s stalking and pickpocketing someone with a fancy trinket, or a full-scale infiltration of Baghdad’s most secure areas, Mirage never fails to keep things interesting and varied, without falling victim to gimmicky set pieces.

Even the side-missions are great. Instead of chasing feathers or faffing a♛bout with a homestead, you can pick up contracts that let you do the day-to-day work of an assassin. These aren’t small distractions, they’re often full-blown missions with their own challenges. Taking some time out to steal a relic or rescue an unlucky victim of the Order often results in some of the most fleshed out and enjoyable parts of Mirage.

Overlooking a fort full of guards in AC Mirage.

The high points are the assassinations themselves. You’re given a large area, be it a palace, jail, market, or just a chunk of the city, and told to go find your quarry. All of a sudden, the game turns into Hitman, with missions presenting huge, complex puzzles to solve. While they do ultimately end with you wrist-deep in someone’s neck like usual, the increased buffet of opportunities presented to you makes all the sneaking on the way feel fantastic. You feel like an assౠassin, but sadly this power fantasy is much too fleeting.

It's a good t🌺hing the stealth is great, because going loud would require you to get involved in the worst combat system Assassin’s Creed has ever had. Not quite the Souls-y one-on-one fights of Origins et al., but also not quite the Arkham-y countering of the older games, Mirage finds itself in a stiff, finicky middle ground where you’re often just waiting for your enemy to overextend so you can shank them. They’re effectively quick-time events, yet another thing Ubisoft should have left in 2012.

When it comes together, Mirage does manage to evoke the same feelings I had back in 2007 running round Acre for the firs♔t time. There’s an exquisite stealth sandbox nestled away in here, but a few excellent missions don’t make up for the frequent bugs, lifeles🔯s city, utterly pants combat, or the fact it completely wasted The Expanse’s Shohreh Aghdashloo on some of the flattest, most perfunctory writing the series has ever seen.

Playing on nostalgia is only worthwhile if you’re making it better than what came before, but Assassin’s Creedꦛ Mirage is too busy fawning over the Ezio trilogy to notice just how aged it’s become.