I will go over as to why I’m giving Assassin’s Creed Mirage a 5.5 out of 10 as my final rating when my early initial impressions were a solid 8/10. I’ve been an avid fan of the Assassin’s Creed games playing all of them through the good and the bad. My love of history contributed to my love for the explorable settings – sometimes highly accurate, sometimes re-imagined – in which a lot of the games take place whether we’re talking about Rome, Jerusalem or Boston. The alternative and conspiracy history mixed with the scifi of the Ones Who Came Before presented through the Glyphs in Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood to where it made sense with the ingame lore was definitely a big highlight in terms of the AC universe lore for me personally. And with the somewhat repetitive and tiring open world RPG elements of AC Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla that pushed the overarching story a little bit more regardless, I was looking forward to AC Mirage in terms of gameplay and of course some potentially juicy lore that had more of that alternative history from the older games.
To give some context for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it was meant to be a DLC for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and a lot of that not only shows in the approximate 40 gigabytes you need to download it but actually shows in the movement and gameplay that I will cover later. For what it claimed to be a return to its roots, the game definitely feels like it really really tried to do that especially with some of the older mechanics or systems you saw in the older AC games but such a return after many years of it not being the older AC games inevitably created a somewhat unfulfilling and janky product.
Settings and Accessibility
First, I want to talk about the settings and accessibility options for AC Mirage. I have to give a lot of props here to the developers because compared to some other triple A games even in 2023, the options being offered are absolutely awesome. You not only have the standard settings for difficulty or calibrating brightness but the developers really went above and beyond with some of these color blind settings, I mean the fact that they not only included colorblind mode but also offered settings for different types of color blindness such as Tritanopia, Deuteranopia and Protanopia is something to seriously applaud here. Other settings include the usual tweaking of graphics, subtitle text, audio and certain components of the ingame UI are present as well.
I would have liked to see the game actually come packaged with the Arabic or other voice language packs instead of me having to install them separately but that’s a minor thing.
User Interface, User Experience and HUD (Heads Up Display)
The User Interface of AC Mirage is pretty straightforward, there’s nothing to confuse you, selecting your available Tools is painless but there’s definitely some elements of the Heads Up Display such as the stamina bar that could have been made a bit more noticeable against the color palette of the game’s surroundings in 9th century Baghdad.
The user experience however is just awful when swapping between some of the menus or getting out of the menus. Pressing m for map as an example but not being able to close the map with m is kind of weird but that’s a minor thing. But since we’re talking about the map now, the beautiful map is terrible to use.
Not only is the zoom in function bugged at times where it moves the map away from where you want to zoom in but why the zoom functionality is even needed to see any other markers besides viewpoints such as Historical Sites, vendors and other points of interest is beyond my mortal understanding considering how many markers there are in this large scope of a world. I would have loved to see a filter function instead especially if the developers were worried about dozens upon dozens of markers overwhelming players, that would have been a better option instead of forcing players to zoom in to essentially move the map around more than we should in a more restricted view.
The Investigations menu is also something that’s a little irritating after a loading screen as it resets to the default zoomed in view of the cases after you zoomed out. I also think the vendor interactions could have been done better with its unnecessary pauses for dialogue, thankfully though you can skip past vendor dialogue.
Audio and Music
In general, the music for AC Mirage is quite nice, I don’t really have anything bad to say about it and there are definitely a couple of moments in the story where the AC Mirage music interwoven with the familiar AC theme music can give you some goosebumps. The voice acting is well done especially during cutscenes or quest introductions however I feel like a lot of it gets drowned out even with adjusting the background noise during some segments of the game. Basically it feels like some of the audio engineering could have been more refined when it came to combat-related or alert audio in busy environments such as the Bazaar especially with ongoing NPC dialogue or background ambience.
Story and Length
For the story of AC Mirage, don’t expect any advancement of the entire series, it’s more of an exploration of Basim’s early life in Baghdad before we meet him during the events of AC Valhalla up in northern Europe. I think we can clearly see the writers’ intent on sculpting a more complex portrait out of a one-dimensional or flat Basim presented in AC Mirage and that’s okay considering it’s his origin story. I think in some ways AC Mirage as referenced earlier in the video tried to lean back into the storytelling style of the older AC games which is okay as well.
If you enjoy the little tidbits of lore that reference other AC games such as notes or letters about double hidden blades, the piece of Eden in Jerusalem and communiques with other brotherhoods in other parts of the medieval world, you will enjoy the environmental storytelling for sure. I think also lore-wise AC Mirage is significant for showing Alamut in a game as the location of the Hidden Ones’ fortress has been referenced in other AC games in the past. I would say it took me about 13-14 hours to complete the old case-by-case assassination story of AC Mirage with another 22 hours to figure out and get all collectibles.
History, Graphics, Art and Environment
The graphics and art for AC Mirage are more than fine though there are a lot of awkward issues in particular with the facial animations and expressions of the characters in both cutscenes and dialogues which I think affected the impact of the good voice acting for the characters. It’s just strange to see a glossy eyed, blank stare by a character who’s supposedly frightened or angry and this even includes Basim, the main character, who I even covered with a mask with little impact for me on the immersive front. There’s also numerous visual glitches that can occur which can definitely throw you off but overall as a package, the end result is okay.
The attempted recreation of medieval Baghdad during a period of time coined the “Islamic Golden Age” and its notable landmarks such as the Dome of the Ass is actually quite impressive. In terms of the historical accuracy, they definitely got a lot of the architecture and concepts right especially when it came to the concentric walls of the capital city of the Abbasid caliphate that are described in numerous contemporary accounts. I actually know a fellow historian who was brought on board for consultation by the game’s developers which was a big reason as to why I was so excited for this game as he knows his fields extremely well.
The multicultural environment being shown through different languages spoken by NPCs from Chinese to Greek, the Historical Sites data you can collect that tells you the contextual history of Baghdad and the fact that the developers included actual photos of the artifacts and art pieces that represents said history are so incredibly well done. I think AC Mirage really will draw you in if you’re a lover of history or may even get you interested in learning more about history. It’s also nice seeing that the NPCs for the most part react appropriately to your notoriety and what you’re doing in the moment which makes the environment feel a bit more alive.
The environments through which you can traverse whether we’re talking about the urban layout of Baghdad or the open wilderness surrounding the city are visually pleasing but functionally terrible when it comes to the parkour and movement of the game. It feels like a lot of the buildings, walls and even the locations of various movement methods such as lifts, poles and cranes were not placed or made appropriately for parkour in mind and they serve more as obstacles rather than an alternative route of movement.
Movement, Gameplay and Combat
So since we’re talking now about movement, I have to say I just did not enjoy AC Mirage at all and it’s one of the few games where I can say it seriously annoyed me the longer I played it. The janky movement is just something that even my livestream viewers noticed without playing the game and even they said they felt frustrated watching me play. Now don’t get me wrong, AC games have always been somewhat janky with the parkour or movement but I am not joking when the movement in AC Mirage is significantly worse than AC Brotherhood, Unity and yes even Syndicate. The movement and parkour are fine if you just want to go straight for as long as possible.
No problem with that, but gods save you if you want to go left, right, diagonal, backwards by climbing, jumping or moving because there’s such a huge disconnect between what you want to do with Basim’s movement and what actually happens in the game. It genuinely feels like there’s always an invisible barrier in front of you every time you move. The movement is just not very precise even on controller which some of the previously User Experience seems tailored to.
There were countless times where my movement and parkour just had no flow or where I couldn’t even get into a window because the game struggled so hard to differentiate me wanting to climb another ledge and getting into a window. At a certain point, I just basically gave up on rooftop running and climbing and actually had a far more enjoyable time just traveling at a ground level which is crazy to me because it’s supposed to be an Assassin’s Creed that goes back to its older roots. And I tried everything, I tried controller, I tried adjusting settings, I tried exaggerated camera movements to try to make this movement less awful but nothing worked except avoiding the parkour. If AC Brotherhood or whatever or even Armored Core 6 as an extraneous example was chef’s kiss in terms of movement and the tactile feel of playing the game, where you could feel the game, then AC Mirage is a skunk’s kiss.
Now the extremely poor movement I think can be attributed to two main factors, first I mentioned the environment just not being very friendly for parkour. There’s too many breaks or gaps between even some buildings in the same neighborhood, non-climbable walls or structures and an absence of movement mechanics such as poles in places where there should have been more of them. I don’t know if this is because it’s been a long time since Ubisoft had to make AC like this or if they were trying to really be historically accurate but the latter hasn’t stopped them from making other historical settings in other AC games enjoyable to traverse through.
The second factor may just be the inability to jump which has been continued for awhile in the franchise. It felt like with the AC Mirage environment, the ability to actually jump could have made the movement a bit more bearable.
Next, I want to talk about combat and it’s this weird blend of Valhalla and the old AC games in terms of the feel. The old counterattack and auto-kill is nice to see for most of the enemies, there can be happy accidents of environmental damage and overall, the combat is very straightforward, very basic which is fine as the combat skill trees would have enhanced it however they don’t because apart from the Tools and the tier 1 bonus addition for Tools which are great for either stealth or outright combat play, the skill trees for Basim or his bird Enkidu are very shallow and don’t offer much else for you to say oh I really should get that. It also irks me that there are so many moments in combat where the kill finishing animations do not grant you an immunity period towards the end of their animation. Like why do I want to be stuck in this automatic kill animation if another enemy is going to hit me anyway. It’s also incredibly frustrating that in 2023, AC Mirage does not let you shift targets with its target lock system with your camera. Instead, you are forced to manually de-select your current target to lock onto a different target. The only solution to this awkward combat feature is simply to not lock onto your target at all in a 2 or more versus one scenario and it feels a lot better after that.
Now obviously AC Mirage really wants you to put more emphasis on stealth gameplay and sneaking. The game presents this aspect of gameplay decently however with the extremely awful movement, automatic corner body dragging combined with the awkwardly placed patrols and positions of guards, you again depend a lot more on the Tools or the recruitable merchant and mercenary groups than anything else including your own intelligence. I don’t expect Assassin’s Creed to be as in-depth for stealthplay as the Hitman games but AC Mirage just didn’t feel too satisfying even in the stealth department outside of some rare moments in some locations or instances in which you used the Assassin Focus mechanic where you basically glitch out the Animus for teleportation kills.
Content and Replayability
I will say with all of the things I’ve said about the movement and user experience in mind, the exploration of AC Mirage can be a bit tedious and at some points a little demotivating for me to try to collect everything. The rewards for doing a lot of the collecting whether we’re talking about the Lost Books, Dervis Artifacts or Gear Chests were also pretty underwhelming and the Tales of Baghdad seemed like quirky side quests that offered no impact on me as a player. The puzzles for finding some of these things are not exactly puzzles either. It’s more of running around a building to see if it has a window or opening where you can proceed from there.
There is no parkour puzzle or anything like that in AC Mirage, it’s more of the same moving obstacle crates you see in Origins or Odyssey and everything is just extremely unsatisfying or unfulfilling to do. Even the Isu weapons and armor you can get in a very straightforward manner don’t give you that same sense of awe and satisfaction you got when you had to figure out how to get the armor of Brutus in AC Brotherhood. While yes you can pet cats and there’s some easter eggs in the game like the ones about HP Lovecraft, they’re just not enough to keep you engaged with a lot of the things you can do in this game. There is not much of a replayability factor in AC Mirage as expected from this more older model of AC games so take that as you will.
To sum it up, if you want to experience a much shorter Assassin’s Creed game compared to the RPG trilogy you can try out AC Mirage although I would definitely wait for a sale as even the $50 instead of the usual $60 or $70 retail price is in my opinion still not worth it if you’re on a budget. I would have liked to pay maybe $40 for this at most for what it is. In terms of the story, you don’t really miss out on too much, I think this game can be a very immersive game for history buffs but beyond that as an Assassin’s Creed fan I think this is one you can just miss out on without any consequence for your knowledge of the narrative of the AC universe or you can just look up the plot online and read it and you wouldn’t miss out on much apart from some ingame references to the other AC games. I think it’s fun to play with the tools like the berserker blowdart again but movement/combat wise I just think it’s absolutely awful.
I really really really wanted this game to succeed and revive more interest with both the developers and AC fans in going back to the older AC roots at least in terms of the mechanics and features and if there are any developers watching, I do hope that they cherrypick the positives from AC Mirage like the crowd stealth, tools or Assassin’s Focus and just as they did with the systems or features from Black Flag to Rogue or Origins to Odyssey, that they continue to refine said systems and produce an even better Assassin’s Creed experience for both the RPG and older AC enjoyers.