Assassin’s Creed Mirage Review

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Release: October 5, 2023
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Bordeaux
Genre: Action, PS5 Reviews, ReviewsXbox Series X Reviews
PEGI: 18
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Assassin’s Creed has become one of those staple games we expect to see every couple of years, having been around the block a few times, Ubisoft is always looking for ways to reinvent the series. Going back to Origins, the game took a GIANT RPG leap forward and started to become a bigger and more robust experience since then.

In many eyes, these games while great, often lost themselves and were just giant to be giant. Lots of collectables, side quests that didn’t really matter much. So they wanted to go back to the roots of Assassin’s Creed while giving it some modern enhancements with what they have learned over the last few years.

In Mirage you take on the role of a poor street thief, working the streets of Baghdad to survive all while aspiring to be something more, to be something greater than he is, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and alleyway to alleyway to steal whatever he can in exchange for a little coin…. while this may sound like an uber popular 90’s Disney movie, I assure you that you will not find any Robin Williams or Will Smith (Ugh).

You step into the role of Basim, whom players will recognize from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla as he is desperate to join the Hidden Ones and help take down the five members of the Order who are up to some shenanigans we need to stop.

The nice thing about this game is it’s size, it’s going back to focusing on stealth and cunning and less on collecting. The entire main campaign takes just about 20 hours, maybe a bit more if you want to clean up all the side quests.

So it’s nice to play an AC game that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome or become SUPER repetitive by the time you near the end. Mirage completely abandons the modern day story aspect of the series we are seeing less and less of at least for now, which I do kind of miss. The story can be a bit of a jumbled mess as they don’t really drive home much about how bad the villians are, so I didn’t really develop any distain for them overall, which made finishing them off a little less satisfying honestly.

Basim is a good character that has a nice (not perfect ) story arc as a character. As he discovers his own abilities of what he can do (he doesn’t start off as some super assassin) and what his beliefs are, but pretty much everyone else is flat and extremely forgettable. To the point that i may run into a side character three or four times and legit didn’t know who they were again at first.

On the positive side of things, the map and city of Baghdad is absolutely amazing to explore, they give you lots of options for routes, traversal and exploring. It’s alot of fun to illude your enemies through some tight alleyways or scaling up the walls and rooftops.

Combat is tight, stealth is your biggest friend but if you can dodge and parry, you can handle yourself just fine. There are plenty of historical spots as well to learn a thing or two about the actual history behind the stories Ubisoft is telling here, which is always something I’ve enjoyed about these games. They are always dripping with culture and authenticity which is greatly appreciated by myself.

Now for some more notes….this game does not in my opinion look like a next gen title, it doesn’t even look as good as Valhalla did. I’m not sure the reason behind it honestly, but it’s just not as polished as the last couple of games, which is a little surprising given the smaller scale of the game I was almost expecting it to be immaculate. It’s not a HUGE dealbreaker and I noticed it less and less as I continued to play but it was definitely something to discover when starting.

All in all this is a great scaled back version of Assassin’s Creed that was fun, engaging, and stealth focused but still allowed me to tackle objectives as I wanted. Its definitely worth checking out, especially as a holiday gift you can likely get a discount later in the year as Ubisoft is known to do.

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