Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a game that fans of the series have been demanding for a long time. It steps away from the huge open world RPGs of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla and slips back into the original social stealth gameplay for which the series was originally known. Yet it’s indelibly linked to the most recent games thanks to its protagonist, telling the backstory of Basim, a significant character from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Basim starts the game as a thief on the streets of Baghdad, but it’s not long before his illegal antics get him roped into joining the Hidden Ones and getting his very own secret wrist blade. What follows is the obligatory hunting down of a mysterious order, and a narrative that’s pretty much right in line with what you’d expect and want from an Assassin’s Creed throwback.
What else do we want? Social stealth, ridiculously conspicuous robes and weapons, and sitting on benches, and Mirage has all of that. It really is a return to the classic style, you’ll find yourself blending into “crowds” of three people to get past guards, waiting around on benches so you can stab a guard and sit them down “inconspicuously,” and running away when you get spotted because twelve guards is a bit too many to fight off again if you’ve run out of smoke bombs. If you miss the gameplay of the Ezio saga or Syndicate, this is exactly what you want.
There are even some refinements to the formula. Eavesdropping is much improved, as now you tend to sit on a nearby bench to listen instead of following people around. You’ll now need to identify opportunities like access points, disguises, or nearby fighters who can attack the guards so you can slip into restricted areas to assassinate people. Your tools are your second or third best friend (after the hidden blade of course), allowing you to disappear in a puff of smoke, knife people from a distance, or set traps, and they can now be customised to your preferred playstyle.
Your blow dart, for example, starts out putting enemies to sleep, but you can upgrade it to send enemies into a rage or poison them instead, or change it to affect a small area instead of one guard, or ensure they can’t be woken up by other guards. It’s useful and allows you to specialise yourself, although these options were traditionally available without having to sacrifice the other possibilities in the older games. It does ruins the immersion a bit to have throwing knives that turn people into dust so their bodies can’t be seen, but you can always just not use that one.
Mirage also features its own eagle, called Enkidu, though using him felt mostly superfluous. The experience of using eagle vision and sneaking around was far more satisfying to me than just marking guards with the bird beforehand anyway. Speaking of unrealistic abilities, Basim has actual magic powers. As you assassinate, a meter builds up that, once full, allows Basim to take out an enemy automatically. He basically teleports between them and plays a standard stabbing animation, then teleports to the next if you’ve selected another. It’s like the marked takedowns from Splinter Cell Conviction, but a mish-mash of animus glitch effects and underwhelmingly normal stabbing animations. I honestly forgot I could do it for half the game, though I did find it useful for getting onto guarded roofs without having to climb a way around, which feels a bit like cheating but saved time!
Unfortunately there’s a mixture of new, old and typical issues for an open world sneak ’em up like this. From the classic AC games, trailing missions have returned, and while most are fine, one was frustrating enough that I wondered what they point of bringing them back was. Eavesdropping, while mechanically better, sometimes just doesn’t work, the conversation stopping part way through and restarts.
Parkour can also be a little frustrating as Basim jumps to or grabs the wrong thing – once I tried to climb one wall and Basim appeared three feet to his right and used a lift instead, propelling me up onto a restricted roof and into a fight. Things like this happen a tiny bit too often and aren’t helped by how easy it is to miss the warning on the compass for when you’re approaching a restricted area.
Merchants, scholars, fighters, and basically anyone you’re likely to want help from is not paid with money, but specific types of token instead. TIt can be a bit frustrating during an assassination to have to wander around pickpocketing for more tokens because there’s only a certain amount of possible opportunities available on any given mission. Even once you have paid them, they can be unreliable – I paid a group of merchants so I can follow them through a restricted area, and they just stopped half way through and left me in the middle, obviously triggering a fight.
Returning from AC Valhalla is the armour and weapon system, where you find specific armours throughout the world and upgrade them, which causes you to stick with the first decent one you find because otherwise you literally need to find hundreds more pieces of leather and iron to upgrade your new ones. The amount of resources required to upgrade your tools is absurd as well – there are eight tools each with three levels of upgrades, exactly where all these resources fit inside a throwing knife is anyone’s guess.
Then there’s the annoyance of barred doors. When you carefully plan your route through a palace, meticulously avoiding being seen by every single guard to make your way into the building like a ghost, only to find a door that is barred from the other side, I challenge you to not be annoyed. I once quietly unlocked a door with a key I’d silently pickpocketed to be faced with nothing but two more doors inside, both barred from the other side. “Have fun sneaking all the way around the outside of the building looking for tiny holes in the wall without being seen” says the game, between barely stifled laughs.
While this catalogue of issues might seem like a lot, I have to say that I did actually enjoy Mirage quite a lot. I’ve always loved both styles of Assassin’s Creed and returning to the old school style has been a lot of fun. Basim’s story isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s good enough and has some memorable characters and moments to keep you going for that next assassin-y fix. Some of the side contracts you can do were particularly enjoyable, just good old inflitrate and stab everyone missions, complete with a slightly unrealistic bonus objective to fail.
