Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed has established itself as one of the giants in the gaming community. With over 12 installments that all connect to make one continuous timeline, the genre of Assassin games has been well explored. In spite of this Ubisoft has managed to create another great addition to the franchise.
Over the years, Ubisoft developers have made two different styles of Assassin’s Creed games: older games which are more linear, and newer installments which have a vast open world to explore.
Due to this split in game development, two opposing parties were created. One is the original Assassin’s Creed fans who preferred the original style of games, and the newer fans who prefer the open-world style of development.
After the last three installments being open-world based, Ubisoft heard the cries of their original fans and decided to move back towards the original style of Assassin’s Creed.
With the release of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, there has been a mixed bag of reviews. The consensus is that Mirage is not anything special, but a definite step in the right direction.
As with most Assassin’s Creed games, one of the biggest components to the game is the location and time period the story takes place.
The narrative of Mirage takes place in the 9th-century city of Bagdad during the Islamic Golden Age. Ubisoft managed to capture the stunning architecture of Baghdad by including four distinct districts all with a unique atmosphere. They’ve also included the small city of Anbar, which is on the outskirts of the main city.
In this outskirt city, the players are introduced to the main character Basim. Basim’s character is a simple yet interesting one with him being a street thief who strives to be more.
Along with his immense sense of justice, Basim manages to be your standard protagonist. The main events of the game begin as a mission to steal an unknown target goes wrong. With a well-done parkour scene, Basim manages to escape and is accepted into the Hidden Ones, a group of assassins, where he trains to make himself into a proper assassin.
After this prologue, the game brings you to the central city where you can play the story at your own leisure.
With Mirage being more towards the linear side of things, the gameplay mainly consists of the player going from mission to mission, taking on smaller ones that build up to a finale of assassinating a member from the antagonist group, The Ancient Ones.
This style of gameplay is satisfying yet it never excels to a higher level that you would expect from a multi-million dollar franchise. The parkour manages to be relatively smooth with some minor flaws with the overall flow that previous games like Unity or Syndicate managed to accomplish.
Without a doubt, one of the weakest points Mirage has is the quality of the combat system. The vision that developers were going for was to make the character feel like an unstoppable force, but instead, it ended up being quite rudimentary and clunky.
With most of the combat consisting of the player parrying a couple of times to then one-shot the enemy, it makes the gameplay feel simple at best and boring at worst.
It’s clear to see the reasoning for the neglect of the combat system, as the developers focused more on the stealth aspect of the game. The assassination animations are well done with the only complaint being that the enemies are, to put it simply, too stupid.
When you can run up and assassinate a person right in front of somebody and the guy goes on like nothing happened, it takes the immersion and fun out of stealth.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage was a much-needed break from the open-world genre of Assassin’s Creed games. With the game being enjoyable, but falling flat in multiple aspects it comes nowhere close to what Ubisoft is capable of.
However, great things are to come if Ubisoft learns from their mistakes of Mirage and continues down this path of going back to their roots.
