Image: Ubisoft
Even with all its faults, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a satisfying return to the smaller-scale games this franchise started with.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage sees Ubisoft turn what was originally meant to be an expansion for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla into a full-fledged game of its own - but one feels a lot more scaled-down in scope compared to recent entries. Ranging from about 20-30 hours of playtime to complete, Mirage feels like a franchise throwback to an era long thought lost: when stealth was of the utmost importance, and your adventures were mostly confined to a small city filled with nosy citizens and pesky guards.
I thoroughly enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and to a lesser extent its sequel Valhalla, but I wasn’t quite ready to jump into another epic filled with quests and collectibles scattered across a behemothian map. For anyone feeling the same franchise burnout, Mirage will feel like a pleasant detour that gets back to the roots of this franchise with a beautiful setting - even if its gameplay feels rather underbaked.
Enter the Hidden Ones
Assassin’s Creed Mirage dives into the origins of Basim Ibn Ishaq, a familiar face to anyone who’s already played through Valhalla. Basim starts out in the story as a regular thief in a city called Anbar, before he runs into a Hidden One named Roshan and embarks on a quest to impress the legendary order of assassins she belongs to. One thing leads to another, and Basim ends up being inducted to the order before journeying into Baghdad for a mission with very personal stakes.
Anbar might be where players spend the early hours of the game learning the ropes, but Baghdad is where most of the action takes place. While the city isn’t small by any means, it’s certainly smaller than the huge swathes of land we’ve been able to explore in recent games - and I quite liked that. It allows the game to tell a more focused story for Basim, one that begins with him living the harsh life of a street rat and ends with the newly-minted assassin having experienced a lot of growth. I wouldn’t rank Basim highly on my personal list of favourite assassins (Kassandra gets the highest spot, sorry Ezio fans), but he’s a solid protagonist with charm to spare. He’s just let down by his cohorts here.
Ubisoft has a reputation for packing its games full of colourful personalities to make open world quests and side-activities that much more enticing. Here, the characters Basim meets and eventually befriends - or kills - are uncharacteristically drab. Not a single one has stuck with me besides Roshan, and even then, it’s hard to create a forgettable assassin when the fantastic Shohreh Aghdashloo is voicing them. Yes, I adore The Expanse - how can you tell?
The lively city of Baghdad
Ubisoft has all but mastered the art of recreating ancient cities and landscapes in extraordinary detail for this franchise, and Mirage is no exception. Baghdad is a serene and inviting place to be, containing a satisfying variety of locations for players to visit without feeling bogged down by repetition. The city bustles with activity as its citizens cycle through their daily routines, and vendors try to hawk their goods in the streets. There are a few points of interest here to check out, and plenty of visual splendour - from the gorgeous, weather-beaten towns to the lush flora and fauna circling the city - to keep players enthralled.
Unfortunately, the one thing Baghdad lacks is any form of believable life. True, it's jam-packed with people and teeming with guards, but none of them behave like real people, and there’s little reason to visit locations once their quests are completed. None of it sticks. I think of Valhalla and the settlement you build throughout the game, or the lively sun-dipped city of Athens in Odyssey, and I see none of that ambition here. The characters wandering about the streets simply do not matter, and the vendors quite literally hold no identity. The city’s four boroughs might as well be filled with robots, they’re so devoid of personality.
The best open-world games place a keen emphasis on their world design - such as Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City or even Assassin’s Creed Unity’s Paris - but Baghdad plays second fiddle to Basim’s adventures here. Its occupants spring to life when they’re pulled into the narrative, only to fade into irrelevance shortly after. Beyond the obvious beauty of the city and its surroundings, there just isn’t a lot of charm in Baghdad, which is disappointing considering its potential.
Sneaking around, just like the good old days
Mirage is a fairly short adventure, and that length allows for a more simplified method of player progression that doesn’t involve big tanky endgame enemies and labyrinthian skill trees to counter them. Stealth is key in Mirage: all of your Hidden Blade assassinations will kill an enemy so long as you catch them unawares, and hand-to-hand combat can be quite punishing should you be spotted. It’s not just that enemies hit hard and soak up damage in this game, but the game also introduces a three-tier wanted level that sends higher-level warriors after you if your crimes are spotted by Baghdad’s nosy citizens. Stealth might take longer, but it does pose less risk so long as the Hidden One stays… well, hidden.
The game’s main missions also accommodate some level of creativity in how you want to pull off an assassination or sneak into hostile areas. One early mission tasked me with infiltrating a sprawling base and luring its leader out for the kill - and I found no less than three ways to get inside, and many more ways to pull off the assassination. These levels are designed like elaborate puzzle boxes that, while not as fleshed-out as I’d like, still call for experimentation in ways that stealth fans will definitely appreciate.
Mirage’s skill trees are startlingly small compared to Valhalla and Odyssey, but that suits its length nicely. I didn’t need to feel like an overpowered Viking or a Greek hero - I just needed to be a lightfooted assassin my enemies wouldn't see coming. To that end, Basim has a variety of tools at his disposal - like throwing knives and blowdarts- to get around encounters more easily. Progressing through the story involves completing ‘investigations’ that involves Basim chasing down vaguely-worded clues across Baghdad - but there is no actual sleuthing involved here, as Basim’s eagle Enkidu usually points you exactly where you need to go. The illusion of choice here is appreciated, but sadly thin. Interestingly, you only get skill points by progressing through the main quests. The game does away with an XP system altogether, tying Basim's progression as an assassin to the events of the story. It's a neat idea that works really well here.
Verdict
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a welcome detour to the smaller-scale games this franchise spawned from, and which veteran fans seem so desperate to return to. Unfortunately, it also serves as a reminder that smaller games like these are no longer Ubisoft’s forte: they excel in making massive games filled with stories and characters you live with for months on end, for better or worse. With that level of scale comes unnecessary bloat and padded-out campaigns, but the journey is often compelling and packed with enough memorable setpieces to make it worthwhile.
Mirage lacks the staying power of recent entries in the franchise on all counts. Its main location Baghdad can be jaw-droppingly beautiful, but beyond its historical context, it fails to make a real impression. The journey Basim goes on can be compelling when focused on his relationship with Roshan, but it often leans on far less interesting characters whose stories don’t land nearly as well. This game shines when it goes back to fulfilling the core Assassin’s Creed fantasy. Creeping up on enemies and putting them down with the Hidden Blade feels fluid and satisfying when RPG numbers don’t muck up the process, and parkouring around the city to escape guards and find new angles on an objective is just as fun.
If you enjoy Assassin’s Creed because of how well it does the ‘go back in time and kill people in different corners of the Earth’ formula, Mirage actually scratches that itch pretty well. It just lacks a decent story with compelling stakes, and a protagonist who can actually carry a game of this calibre. Somewhere between Mirage's scale and Odyssey's narrative lies my ideal Assassin’s Creed game. Unless Ubisoft sees fit to cut about 50 hours of content from their mainline titles however, this is the closest we're going to get to a bygone era.