HomeFeaturesAssassin’s Creed Mirage
Assassin’s Creed Mirage harks back to Ezio’s glory days, for better and worseAfter playing three hours of it, I can confirm that yep, this sure is old Assassin’s Creed again
After playing three hours of it, I can confirm that yep, this sure is old Assassin’s Creed again
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
I don’t know about you, but after spending 100+ hours in bothAssassin’s Creed OdysseyandAssassin’s Creed Valhalla, I’m well up for an AC game that reins its open world in a bit and goes back to the sort-of single city stab-athon the series used to be. The ones where stealth actually mattered, and you felt like a proper assassin working from the shadows.Assassin’s Creed Mirageis all this to a tee - as Ubisoft have taken great pains to remind us over the last year as they gear up tocelebrate the series' 15th anniversary.
And after spending three hours playing some of its early mission sequences, I can confirm this is very much a game whose sole purpose is to scratch that nostalgic itch good and proper (before we inevitably hurl ourselves into the still very ambiguous void ofwhatever the heck Assassin’s Creed Infinity is). If, however, you don’t have much fondness for those older games, and prefer the more action-oriented RPG-ing of recent Creeds, Mirage is probably going to feel like a step backward from all the things you know and like - and you may be better off waiting until thenext big open world entry set in feudal Japanpitches up instead.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settingsKatharine recently played four hours of Assassin’s Creed Mirage and, yep, it’s certainly a classic Assassin’s Creed game.Watch on YouTube
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In truth, the younger Basim I played in the game’s early tutorial mission, where he’s tasked with stealing a ledger from local Baghdad port office, didn’t feel substantially different to the slightly older Basim I was handed in the second part of my preview, which covered both the before and after moments of his official induction into the proto-Assassin Brotherhood (which at this point in AC lore is known as The Hidden Ones). Even when he’s fully tooled up with a fully grown out man beard, Basim is still just as nimble at the old parkouring and auto-climbing as he was before, and he was still as much of dab hand at whistling to guards from a hedge and luring them to an unseen oblivion. In this sense, Basim is as much an empty vessel as previous Creed heroes and heroines - an umpteenth avatar for us to slip on like the same old comfortable pair of shoes we’ve been wearing for the last 15 years. And honestly, that’s fine. There’s a muscle memory built into Assassin’s Creed now, and given Mirage is effectively one big nostalgia bath, I wasn’t expecting anything less.
I’m pleased to report that Valhalla’s oversized, huggable cats are BACK. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
I mean, it would almost be rude not to, given you’reofferingme the choice (PS: despite the PlayStation button prompts, I was playing the PC version - just had a Dualsense 5 plugged in).Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
I’d be surprised if it did, given this is a strict homage to old AC, but what skills I did see in my preview session didn’t exactly get the blood pumping with excitement. The Predator tree focuses on your eagle Enkidu, enhancing their ability to mark up guards and chests and the like, while the Trickster tree lets you carry extra tools and increases the number of potions you can carry. Inventory-based stuff, in other words. Finally, Phantom is a bit more focused on combat, adding a light (but certainly not Kassandra-strength) knock-back kick to throw guards off balance after a successful parry, as well as the returning chain assassination ability to take out another guard after a successful stealth kill.
Simple, she says. Easy, she says. How about a spare 200 coins to bid on this special hairpin, then, eh, Roshan? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Yes, there have been variations of these hostility tactics in more recent AC games - see the warring nations of Odyssey and the bristling, anti-Viking cities of Valhalla - but here it feels like a much more obvious throwback to ‘how they did it in the olden days’ and I actually quite like it. I was, in fairness, deliberately going out of my way to push its boundaries and see what happened (I mean, if you’re going to offer me the button prompt tohijack a camel, who am I to refuse it?), but the reactive nature of the city made it feel much more alive than previous AC games I’ve played, and the warren-like streets of Baghdad made for much more thrilling escape sequences, too - especially when, with the aforementioned combat not being particularly brilliant, getting caught is something you actively want to avoid.
You can also bribe conveniently placed groups of mercenaries to create brouhaha distractions for you in the vein of more recent Assassin’s Creed games, though a new barter system of specially designed tokens to enable these opportunities in the first place makes these moments feel a lot more earned than they’ve ever done before. The rarity of these tokens - at least in my preview build - also made me more cautious about utilising these distractions at all. I might need that token for something else down the line, so do I really want to waste it on a bunch of mercs? Other AC games simply let you chuck money at them, which you always had plenty of, so I’m glad Mirage is trying to shake things up here and make you engage more deeply with its stealth and methods of approach.
When Eagle Vision is active, all guards, treasure and interactive objects are highlighted - including our favourite flaming oil cannisters from Odyssey and Valhalla, oh yes. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
In truth, this particular black box mission felt like it was leading me to a single conclusion. While I was free to gather said evidence in whatever order I liked, it still culminated in an auction scene where I could bid on the desired item (which, if I’d won it, would presumably cut out the very small ‘steal it back’ sequence afterwards if you don’t have enough money), and I still had to acquire a special brooch to access to the target’s private office. I looked for other ways in, but alas, if there was another route in the vein of Syndicate’s brilliant ‘rise up from the morgue and pretend to be a cadaver’ style nonsense, I wasn’t about to suss it out.
Still, even if this particular mission wasn’t agreatshowcase for a return-to-form ‘black box’ mission, the assassination itself still felt a heck of a lot more momentous than, say, taking out Valhalla and Odyssey’s extremely underwhelming Cultists/Order bods. I hope these missions get more creative as the Mirage goes on, but even if they don’t, the fact they have any build up at all, with twists, turns, stealth, drama and a clearly paced, authored structure makes them instantly more appealing to me than yet another board of 30-odd random, out in the open throats to slice. If Mirage can sustain this kind of momentum throughout its (hopefully) shorter run-time, I’ll put up with as many duff sword swings as it takes just to get another bite of its meaty murder missions.
