“What’s old is new again” is the motto for Assassin’s Creed Mirage as it’s far closer to the original 7th Generation XBOX360/PS3 Assassin’s Creed games in structure, scope and a lot of the gameplay mechanics too. The only problem is the story itself isn’t very interesting, especially as our lead’s final fate was revealed in the previous game, which is especially frustrating because this is the first AC game to not have any modern day story content at all, something I’ve wanted since day 1 of the franchise… Oh well, let’s take a look!
Background:
“R1 to Assassinate”? Since when has that been a thing in Assassin’s Cr- … Oh right.
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage was released on October 5th 2023 for the PS4, PS5, XBOX One, XBOX Series and PC.
It was originally going to be an expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, digging into the backstory of what would turn out to be one of the game’s central antagonists, but it was eventually decided to turn it into its own stand-alone game with some added scope. I say stand-alone but if you play it without at least knowledge of the Valhalla plotline you’ll be pretty lost by the end of the game…
Gameplay:
Throwing knives from a bush: the easiest way to do most of the game…
Mirage plays closer to the original games but doesn’t quite have the same combat. Obviously first things first: the gameplay is a third-person action / stealth game complete with heavy emphasis on parkour climbing / jumping and assassinating people from various hiding spots / ledges above them. When you do end up in a 1-on-1 encounter though you get out your sword and can land light and heavy blows, dodge or parry, with the latter often leading to people being dazed and susceptible to an instant kill. It’s sadly got that recent AC effect of the enemies not always reacting to the deadly blows that always annoys me though I do like the attacking animations themselves, and it doesn’t have the fun Arkham-like parry-kill-combo kill-combo kill chain that the original games had, so it has bits of both but isn’t as fun as either. As mentioned though most of the time you’ll be defeating enemies by sneaking up behind them and hidden blade stabbing them, or pulling them into a hay bail or tall grass and killing them out of sight. Also I have to say a big black tutorial box kept appearing at points during my playthrough, even though I turned them off, especially if I accidentally clipped a heavily armoured foe, man that was annoying! Yes I know they “can’t be hit from the front but try from behind”, I accidently hit him while attacking someone else, I’m not an idiot!
What is new though is “Assassin Focus”, which stops time and allows you to pick several enemy soldiers to kill in a row without the risk of taking damage, complete with a bar that only refills as you stealthily assassinate people (to make sure you don’t just ignore the key part of the game I guess) I’ll be honest, I was shown it and told how to use it and then forgot about it and never actually used it again! Most of the time I was stealth killing, and the few times I got into open combat with multiple people I just parried and dodged until I took them all down, forgetting about the new feature completely… Aside from those more direct methods of assassinating (or just straight up killing) you have a range of other devices, like throwing knives, which are way over-powered once you get a hand of headshots and unlock the ability to retrieve your knives after a kill; blow darts, complete with some different effects like sleep or rage; smoke bombs, noise makers and other, less useful things that I’ve forgotten because I presumably never used them. You can also use the classic “Eagle Vision” that allows you to see enemies behind walls and the like, and an eagle companion who can fly above and search for hidden doors or spot enemies for you, though this time you occasionally get enemies who can fire an arrow at your bird causing it to be inaccessible until you take the marksman down.
I was so happy to see this early mission reintroducing the Wanted Posters. It’s a classic game mechanic I’d forgotten about completely.
That’s the combat, how about the actual game structure? Well, for the most part the story is like the “take down the members of the order” side quests from the past few games only it’s the main quest and pretty much the only one. Once you unmask an order member and go to their location you then have to find a way in to get your kill, and you often have multiple ways of getting into their building and approaching them. It’s a system that was used before in some of the games in the middle of the series, and it’s fun to see it back but I’d be lying if I said the core missions were rather dull. A lot of talking, some fetch quests, even a couple of classic “follow the person but don’t let him spot you” missions that became a meme about the game series at the height of its “these are all the same” period. What was a nice return though was the notoriety system, meaning the more crimes you commit in public the more notorious you get, but you can lower your notoriety by either tearing down wanted posters or bribing a town crier. You can also hide in little huts and or sit on a bench to “blend in”, become part of a crowd of regular citizens to hide in plain sight, hire a group of mercs to attack some guards so you can sneak past… basically all the things you could do in earlier games that became old hat, so “what’s old is new again” as I mentioned in the opening paragraph.
That being said there are some carry-overs from more recent games. Although not as massive or extensive there is still a skill tree that you unlock as you level up, as mentioned there’s a board of Order of the Ancients members to keep track of, and you can get new weapons and armour and upgrade them several times by finding blue prints, with the option to chose a different outward appearance while keeping the bonus effects of another costume if you don’t like how it looks. As for side quests you have “Stories of Baghdad”, which are your classic side quests of talking to random civilian who needs help with something, plus a special notice board at Assassin’s Bureaus to take missions from other people, though they’re mostly escort missions or “kill certain person” missions and honestly I stopped taking them pretty quickly, there aren’t any RPG stuff for health or strength this time so I didn’t need to “level up”, so why bother? Again I didn’t love the combat that much or anything, so I just ignored them. There are of course collectables, like glowing shards to put in an ancient Isu shrine so you can unlock special gear, some trinkets you have to pickpocket and bring to an underground trader, that sort of thing. You can also buy mounts and call them in to ride them but the map was so comparatively small I rarely needed my horse, unless it was one of the few missions in the outskirts of Baghdad (or I was searching for the last few Viewpoints to “synchronise” and unlock all of the map… that’s never gone away in any AC game!)
Overall it was a nice looking map and the historical period was, as always, fun to explore and well crafted, but the combat never really clicked with me, and neither did the story, especially after finally seeing the Order of the Ancients crumble and turn into the Templars in Valhalla going straight back to the Order being the main villains felt like a step back… which I guess because it literally was, story timeline-wise, but you know what I mean…
Graphics and Sound:
Couldn’t find a good cliff for the classic graphics pic, but at least its still at sunset!
As I always say for modern games, it’s hard to say anything negative about graphics nowadays. Sure some may be a bit more impressive, use some Gen 9 exclusive stuff like ray tracing, but in reality I can’t look at any part of AC: Mirage and say it looks bad. Lovely lighting, buildings and all that look period (or how we’d imagine it looked I should say) and the character models are good, they have that slightly exaggerated look that all AC character models have that you may like or dislike, but otherwise are perfectly fine.
The sound side is good too, voice work is great, soundtrack is very fitting and the sound effects are great. No complaints here.
Story:
Basim’s early days, before becoming an Assassin… or Precursor Norse God thingy.
Like so many stories our main protagonist starts off as a simple street thief, in this case with his friend Nehal. Plagued by nightmares of being attacked by an undead “jinni” Basim is otherwise happy with his lot in life, at least until he tries to make his life more exciting by joining the Hidden Ones but is turned down by local Assassin Roshan (voiced by the always dependable Shohreh Aghdashloo) In order to prove himself he sneaks into the Winter Palace (not the Russian one, there was one in the Middle East at the time too…) and tries to steal the artefact the Hidden Ones were interested in but as he does so he gets a vision from what we the followers of the AC plot know is an Isu artefact and then in a panic he gets into a fight with the Abbasid Caliph and watches in horror as Nehal kills the Caliphate leader to save him, though not before the Caliph’s son see him fleeing the scene. Due to the incident a good number of Basim’s friends are killed by vengeful guards and he blames Nehal before fleeing, soon meeting back up with Roshan and this time being allowed to become an apprentice Assassin.
We get some training scenes (aka tutorials) and eventually Basim is a fully fledged member of the Brotherhood and is sent to Baghdad to investigate the Order of the Ancients, who are positioning themselves in key seats of power within the city. This is where we get the main chunk of the game as mentioned, hunting down all the Order members and such.
Spoilers Below!
Basim pickpockets another random civilian, as all Assassins do to… survive, I guess? (No I didn’t have another story-relevant screen shot to go here, sorry…)
Eventually Basim confronts the head of the Baghdad Order and she tells him that he is special and one of the chosen ones, that he must travel back to the Assassin’s main base in Alamut and go to the ruins underneath to find out who he truly is. Roshan appears, kills her and tells Basim to forget everything he just heard, but he has a hard time accepting it, and eventually Nehal (who he reunited with earlier) convinces him they should go and look. When he arrives there he sees the Abbasid army already attacking the Assassin outpost with many Brotherhood casualties but he manages to help turn the tide and then heads down to the ruins.
There he confronts and defeats Roshan but leaves her alive as he heads into the Isu ruins underneath, eventually being met with visions that reveal the location as where the Isu Loki had been imprisoned and tortured. As we know from Valhalla Basim is the current human sort-of-reincarnation of the Isu Loki and through his experiences here he finds out that not only was the Jinni from his nightmares part of his original self’s memories but that Nehal didn’t actually exist and was just a figment of his Isu self’s past only visible to him (which is odd because I swear other characters interacted with her… I assume not, you’d think the writers would be onto that, but still didn’t feel right… ) so as Basim and Nehal touch hands they become “one” and Basim is fully possessed by the memories of Loki. As he returns to the Brotherhood base he sees Roshan quit the order and leave soon he is accepted back by the grand master with open arms. We then see Basim monologue to himself that he looks forward to meeting the other reincarnations, the ones who betrayed him, setting up his role in Valhalla nicely.
Spoilers End!
Like I said, the story isn’t up to much. Basic “joins the order and does some tutorials” start, a long middle that’s just the “unveil the order members and kill them” side quest from the past few games, and then an ending that reveals the one thing we knew about the character going into this game thanks to Valhalla, in such a way that if you hadn’t played Valhalla you’d have NO idea what’s going on…
Downloadable Content:
Basim listens out to see if he’ll hear about anything more interesting happening than an eavesdrop mission. He comes away disappointed.
No post-launch DLC for the game (unsurprisingly given the game itself was going to be DLC!) but it did have a pre-order exclusive mission based around the classic “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” story (though I got it for free when I brought the game several months after it released, so *shrugs*) and if you’ve played prior AC games and been forced to sign up to the Ubisoft store you can buy prior protagonist outfits for Basim to wear with Uplay points, which I did because I had so many points built up from beating previous games that I didn’t need to actually spend any real money…
Thoughts Now:
That’s what’s known in the trade as a “Bullseye”.
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is… fine. Its combat isn’t the best, the story is rather dull, but the game looks nice, loved the historical aspect (and the fact it had no modern day story dragging that feeling down) and the parkour / movement is top notch. With a smaller map, shorter play time and some nostalgia for those who played some of the original games it’s probably worth picking up when it’s a bit cheaper, like the kind of price it would’ve been had it been released as DLC for Valhalla…
Hogan Reviews 