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Reviews
Assassin's Creed Mirage (2023)
Back to the original formula
I've been playing the Assassin's Creed games since their first release in 2007, so I'm well versed in the franchise and honestly I have enjoyed every single game.
I've just completed Assassin's Creed Mirage after receiving it for Christmas from the wife. With the short break from work over the festive period I thought what the heck and glued myself to the couch. Needless to say I was hooked.
Mirage takes the franchise back to the original formula. I was so happy to learn that the player gets to play as an actual assassin again as opposed to Valhalla's viking Eivor or Odyssey's mercenary Alexios/Cassandra (no judgement on the quality of either of those games, Odyssey will always hold a special place in the series for me).
Once I arrived in Baghdad as the newly trained assassin, Basim I was instantly reminded of the first time I played as Altair all those years ago. The map is smaller than the RPG trilogy (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla) but it's full of amazing sights including palaces, a bazaar and return of Assassin Bureaus. The game still has viewpoints dotted around the map to synchronize with and reveal more of the map before you leap of faith from them into a haystack, and it's nice to see that the vendors are still around for the player to purchase upgrades and other bits and pieces for your inventory.
As for gameplay, the parkour is great and you can move quickly from A to B, whether it's getting to the next mission or making a quick getaway from pursuing guards. The inclusion of the classic vertical and horizontal zip lines helped me traverse the city with ease however I didn't tend to use the "pull down scaffolding" feature during the story all that much, something I should've done considering there's a trophy for doing it 20 times and they're scarcely spread across the city. The combat is good, a bit repetitive in the animations but with four different types of guards it mixes up the gameplay nicely. I guess with the majority of the games in the series the idea is to avoid a fight so stealth is definitely the key to completing a mission smoothly.
The story is very good, not the strongest in the series but certainly not one of the weakest. I felt like I connected with Basim from the get go, it helped that he was introduced in the previous entry so it was interesting to go back and see him becoming an assassin. The side characters were pretty good too, especially Roshan (Shohreh Aghdashloo was a fantastic pick for the voice actress). The story was a little shorter than I expected though, it took about 9 hours to get through the main storyline but with the assassin board contracts and the Tales of Baghdad side quests it made up for what was lacking. Being a completionist, it took me just over 30 hours to collect everything.
I was also surprised to see that none of the present day story made an appearance in the game, there wasn't even a mention of the Animus or what was happening with Layla or present day Basim aside from a brief monologue from William Miles at the beginning of the game. Maybe Ubisoft will continue it in the next installment?
I really enjoyed Mirage, it was nice going back to the type of assassin's creed games I played in my teens and not feeling like the game was such a struggle to collect everything and hunt for a platinum trophy for hundreds of hours.
Keep it up Ubisoft, more games like this please!