Years ago, Ubisoft changed the formula of their hit Assassin’s Creed series which was losing steam when a very broken Assassin’s Creed Unity arrived. Riddled with bugs, boring gameplay, and some mysterious and unjustified lack of a female protagonist, the game was a tough sell to gamers. Ubisoft responded by publishing Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which brought more intriguing characters, a game that worked well, but that game still fell short in mission variety and side quests. That wasn’t helped by how small the world in Syndicate felt, a familiar trait that was cracking at the seams because of an open-world AC tease established by Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in 2013.
After Syndicate, everything changed for the AC series, as Ubisoft was determined to bring large meaningful gameplay to their new series. And they did that with their next title.
Assassin’s Creed Origins was released after Syndicate, and the AC world that every gamer knew and had been raised on was replaced by an open-world concept that mirrored the girth of Skyrim but still included what made AC a great story. Exploration and missions were encouraged, hidden secrets were scattered throughout an Egyptian backdrop, and the player could now take as long as they would like not staying on the main quest. The new AC concept and release were praised and hailed as a new way for AC to go, where the stakes were higher, and the adventure was much bigger. It was a chance, but one that paid off in the end.
Ubisoft then followed this release with one of its best AC games in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, where you could openly play as a female protagonist with a story of her own, and sprinkled in branching choices that would affect gameplay. The world was bigger in Odyssey, the side quests and hidden secrets were abundant and meaningful, and the game featured so much gameplay to take in that the potential to play it for 50-60+ hours was very real. This game was followed by Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was buggy at the beginning but simmered for a while until it became great with that same open-world concept.
To say the series shifted and the scope changed dramatically would be an incredible understatement, as the very foundation that AC was built on originally became a bigger stage with a huge world on top of it for players to enjoy. Now, I’m giving you this quick history lesson of the AC franchise because as the series grew bigger and better, apparently there were grumblings from fans that it needed to return to its earlier, smaller roots. Who started this grumbling? I can only assume silly gamers who prefer smaller meals at bigger prices. They must live in a world where they go to McDonald’s and enjoy ordering large fries and hoping to pay at least $10.99 for them. If you like living like that, then gosh, live like that, but don’t make us all live like that. It’s like gamers gripe and moan about the silliest shit. Can you imagine?
To play devil’s advocate to my comment, it could also be that Ubisoft wanted to pull back, not spend nearly the amount they probably spent on the last three AC games, and make the experience meaningful. If this was the reason, then it makes sense because sometimes you want people to walk away thinking how wonderful the story was and remember the character’s name rather than their constant and never-dying accomplishments. The problem with that line of thinking is that once you go forward with a series and change it to make it large-scale, it’s tough trying to pull it back and bring it to a more confined and restricted space. It’s akin to having a giant party at your house featuring Snoop Dogg and the best bourbon imaginable, and then having the next party feature the next-door neighbor’s kid singing songs about teen angst he wrote in gym class while offering up store-brand soda for top-shelf refreshment. I’m old and grizzled, so I don’t mind either, except for the neighbor’s kid who is just too darn loud.
Besides opening humor and good history, all this jibber-jabber leads us to Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a pulled-back version of Valhalla and Origins, where Ubisoft scaled back to make the journey of Basim, our lead character, a smaller, more focused adventure while sacrificing a large amount of exploration and content. While there are certainly sprinkles of open-world design in Basim’s world, the game doesn’t touch the scale of the previous three titles. Is that a good thing? Well, this isn’t store-brand soda, but it’s certainly sparkling water with the right amount of flavor to quench one’s thirst for the bubbly.
Let’s get into the light and talk about those shadows.
Story matters
Basim’s journey is a simple one, though it gets incredibly confusing and complicated by the end of the game. He is a common street thief in the Middle East at the beginning of the game, living in what we know as modern-day Iraq. His thieving ways are helped by Nehal, a good friend that he is in cahoots with and someone he trusts with his life. Both Nehal and Basim do their best to survive while robbing the rich in hopes of helping themselves and the poor. One day, while robbing a very wealthy politician, they find themselves in the middle of a situation where they acquire a strange disc that is activated by Basim’s touch to reveal some weird electronic message. The item is owned and kept by The Order, a masked group of dangerous aristocrats, and after panicking and killing the wealthy politician to save their skins, the pair take the disc and begin to be hunted by The Order. While Nehal escapes unseen, Basim is hunted down but is rescued and recruited by the anti-Order called The Hidden Ones. His life changes, as he becomes a keeper of the light and an assassin in the shadows that hunts down the members of The Order to protect whatever secrets the disc holds.
There is so much going on here that it’s tough to fully communicate it without giving away a few things, so I’ll keep it general. The story is straightforward on the surface, as Basim’s mission is linear and clear as day. He must hunt down these main folks and eliminate them before they progress forward with their plight. The complication of the journey comes in the finite side quests and the film noir-like investigative steps that lead to each main member of The Order.
Those investigative steps make the narrative journey interesting, as the game does give you some choice to go off the beaten path in a way you might feel is the best way to complete the investigation. The fact that the story has these mini-missions leading up to a big fight gives the story more context and shows that Ubisoft Bordeaux had thought through Basim’s journey and took great care in crafting it. The story feels richer and more complete because of the route the devs took in story presentation and execution. While it does feel linear with each step, and it is on the surface, the small portion offering some branching narrative moments mixed with the illusion of player choice makes this feel a bit more meaningful and focused when compared to previous games in the series. For every step I took leading to the finality of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it truly felt like I was uncovering a bigger story.
Now, the aftermath of that finality was a twist that I’m not sure completely worked, and I’m not certain I fully understood. It’s been a day removed, and I still don’t know exactly what became of Basim’s life and what the big reveal was at the end. I saw it, but I just didn’t fully understand it. Maybe I’m too stupid to get it or maybe the devs were consumed with making a huge payoff with the story that they connected the wrong LEGO pieces to finish their masterpiece. I’m not sure of either, but I do know that I’m now left polarized by the experience and want to do it again just to see if I missed something. It’s not a bad way to go, and I will play it again to see if I’m dumb or not, but I shouldn’t leave a game’s story wondering what that story is about. I did enjoy the adventure to get there, though.
Ultimately, the main story of a poverty-stricken main character who changes his fortunes for the better but may have been misled by what he was doing for The Hidden Ones equaled nothing short of captivating when turned into an interactive experience. The story crafted is a very personal and emotional journey for the main character and by the end of that journey, it creates more ambiguity with the nature of The Hidden Ones and what goals they were trying to accomplish. At the very least, it builds the road for a major story change and view of the AC family of games in future titles.
At the very least, the story is brave in shifting the view of our perceived hero group and the payoff won’t be felt until the next story in the series is released. Ubisoft wanted to boldly go in a new direction and shift away from the open-world concept that it established for the last 5-7 years, and this story is a way to bring it all back to a humble and more creative style.
Gameplay that was somewhere in the middle
While the story of Basim was bold and brash in its creation and execution, the gameplay played it safe. That safe play doesn’t mean the gameplay was bad, rather it just means it wasn’t extraordinary or groundbreaking when compared to other games in the AC series. Now, the gameplay design and decision-making were affected by the story scope, meaning that it would have to be scaled down to fit Basim’s world. For example, instead of a massive skills tree like what might be found with Origins and Valhalla, the skills tree was minimized and plays within the confines of the story and world that Basim exists within. The tree branches were broken into three categories for this game:
- Phantom: This category has eight pieces to it that focus on assassination movement and capabilities, focus, and countering moves that enemies might have during fights. If you’re looking for a branch to improve your movement and killing arsenal then this is it. This is probably the first skills tree branch you should focus on completing, as the set of skills makes the gameplay a lot more fun and far easier.
- Trickster: This branch has to do with gathering material from downed enemies or pickpocketing people and expanding tools to make fighting much more interesting. I didn’t know how much I needed this category until my secondary weapons kept running out. Those weapons are important for taking down a massive number of enemies, which you will do multiple times in the game. There are eight skills in total in this branch.
- Predator: This category, which I have not opened completely because it had less impact on my gameplay, is mainly focused on improving my scout eagle, and vision scope. Out of the trio of categories, this is not as vital as the two above to complete the game. You will need to get them open to platinum, but they aren’t necessary when trying to wrap the story. There are seven skills in total in this branch.
If my memory serves me correctly, and sometimes it actually does, this is a toned-down set of skills that seemed very driven by the story created for the gameplay. Again, it makes sense that these skills are all that are available because anything more than this and the gameplay structure becomes unbalanced and very pro-Basim. It skates on that sentiment without anything more, so pushing it and diluting the gameplay difficulty by making Basim far more powerful than what he should be capable based on the story told will make this 25-hour journey far quicker. Those who loved Valhalla and Origins will not want the game to go quicker.
As Basim makes it through his journey, he must take out people along the way. While being clean with the kill and stealthy is an attractive reason to play AC, how enemies act and respond helps to magnify the greatness of an AC title. Let’s talk about those enemies.
Enemies
My biggest issue with Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the variety of enemies in the game. There are a finite number of enemies within this small world and about 10 hours into the game, you will realize that the variety won’t get any bigger. Because the story is restrictive to a small region of the Middle East, the enemies are finite in their capabilities.
The common enemies are broken into those wearing blue sashes and those wearing red. The red sashes are the bigger group, as they exist as patrols within cities and are found in most infiltration missions. They are broken down into people with swords, spears, and giant armored brutes that can only be smacked around if you hit them in the back. All of them are vanilla with their moves and rarely are you confused with how you should approach them. The only outlier to the red sashes is some crazy, mask-wearing guys who are jacked up with some sort of adrenaline boost and who are super quick as they are dangerous. These guys were challenges, as no matter how I leveled Basim up, it never felt like I completely figured those dudes out. The only fun part of killing them was figuring out that I could get on high ground, a large building structure, wait for them to climb up, and then hit them relentlessly until they fell from the high ground and died from the fall. Otherwise, one-on-one they were usually at the winning end. Regardless, the red sashes and the soon-explained blue sashes were the same in how they attacked. They were extremely patterned in their movements.
As for the blue sashes, they acted like more mercenaries than they did anything else and didn’t contain that tough, jacked-up enemy. They were just different in dress color and were more than likely to pick a fight more than to avoid one. Again, their style and execution were like the reds.
Beyond those enemies, there weren’t really any other human enemies. When you do walk outside of the city limits, you will run into wildlife and the occasional roadblock of thieves. The wildlife is unforgiving and tough to kill. The thieves are just colorless sashes with the same movements and offerings as the blue and reds.
Enemy artificial intelligence
Now, a huge plus to these rather pedestrian enemies was their AI, which was mostly great, especially in the context of crimes you might commit in a city. Enemy AI would be set off if they noticed you on the streets as a scoundrel with a bad past, as they would chase you relentlessly. The reason why they would notice you on the street is because you have killed some of their brethren on the street in the crowd. If you did that in the game, as I did on many occasions, you would build up a notorious meter on the bottom right of the screen. The meter was broken into three major points, the first point would not activate the enemies to notice your presence, the second point would have the enemies recognize you only if you were running or didn’t blend in with the crowd, and the third point is that they see you if you have a body count. If it’s the latter, then you’re constantly hunted. In addition to being constantly hunted, having that meter maxed out will also make people on the streets rat you out. There’s nothing quite as cool and nerve-wracking than having someone yell, “That’s the criminal! Guards!” and then you’re constantly on the move. It puts a nice little touch on a simple notorious system, and it makes you very aware of killing guards in plain sight.
If you don’t want to be chased down every time you’re on the streets, to bring down that notorious meter, Basim would have to tear the kindergarten drawing wanted posters from buildings around the city. Each torn wanted poster brings down a level of notoriousness which makes you anonymous with enough torn. If you don’t want to waste time finding those posters, and they’re easy to find on the hub, you can also pay off a street announcer to make the guards forget who they were chasing and why. Either way, it keeps you out of trouble and prevents the enemy AI from activating. This part of that AI design makes for a cooler, and more intense journeying experience, though the solutions to rectify that AI activation are incredibly available and simple. It’s certainly not as complicated as Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption’s notorious meter, but it adds more decision-making thoughtfulness to killing a guard or starting a fight in front of a crowd. The failing point of the enemy AI is how they react to their cohorts murdered on stealth missions.
When I infiltrated buildings and slowly started disposing of guards, I lured them into places to kill them. Most of the time, guards would be in groups, sometimes literally beside each other, sometimes within feet of each other. My technique was to whistle from bushes or hiding spots, which would activate the enemy’s AI system, and lure them to walk towards me, and I would kill them before they could alert their friends. Once dead, I would drag their bodies out of sight, then wash-rinse-repeat the process until no enemies were around. No matter how many times I did this technique, none of the guards would be the wiser. Because of this, I must have scattered a lot of guard fertilizer into bushes everywhere in Baghdad. I stuffed so many dead bodies in bushes that those plants shouldn’t die for centuries. Even if a guard was dead and his legs were sticking out of the bushes, the approaching guard wouldn’t think too much of it before it was too late and they suffered the same fate. It was ridiculously easy to kill guards in this game during stealth missions. I think a lot of players are going to be turned off because of the lack of challenge in this arena and the lack of AI fortitude that enemies have when their best bud goes off to investigate a whistle from a bush and doesn’t come back. I think there is a sharp decline in AI intelligence in this respect.
Mid-Bosses and Bosses
Beyond these enemies and their intelligence, there weren’t any mid-bosses, and the bosses I fought were a lot easier than the troops that defended them. Even the last boss was a bit of a disappointment, as I expected a great, huge battle, but it ended up being a more cutscene-driven experience than anything else. I know that the entire premise of the Assassin’s Creed series is to be sneaky and stabby without incident, but I wanted a little fight in the boss battles that made the mission more emotionally lucrative for my efforts. Generally, it was just kind of getting to the boss, killing them quietly, and then leaving. The story progression helped to stem the rather boring boss battles but not enough for this to be overlooked.
Eliminating and moving
The very positive of Assassin’s Creed Mirage is that it carried over the ease of movement and stealth attack that made Origins and Odyssey, and even Valhalla to an extent, entertaining. Moving quickly across buildings or through the streets was simple. Holding down X and then pointing Basim towards where you want to climb or go means that you can traverse areas quickly. Occasionally, you would have to hit X multiple times to get climbing but for the most part, it was seamless. The only thing holding you back from always doing this was a stamina bar that was mostly affected by running and fighting. For the most part, getting out of bad situations wasn’t a problem, and finding hiding spots like hay, covered canopies, or just blending in on a bench was easily accessible through a quick getaway. The movement was great and I enjoyed being creative with Basim’s movements.
The actual killing part of the game was quite good as well, as you have a lot of ways to take down enemies quietly. Building up the Phantom skills tree helps in bringing various killing options into the game, which helps to keep you interested in the gameplay. For example, if you eliminated one guard in the open, you could throw a knife and eliminate another guard that might alert more guards, if you open that skill in the Phantom branch of the skills tree. The multi-killing and ways to dispose of enemies quickly, quietly, and out of sight were just plain fun. I think that Ubisoft Bordeaux nailed the landing with how you can take down enemies. It’s one of the more entertaining parts of the gameplay. It’s certainly what kept me more engaged, as it was easy and abundant in the variety of moves you can execute.
All these elements create a decent to good gameplay structure. I didn’t walk away from this game unsatisfied with what I had played, rather I left it wanting more complication and more challenges. That is not at all a deal breaker by any means but it does show what could be improved.
Side missions, crafting, and collecting
The actual gameplay for the main mission lasts between 24-27 hours in length, depending on how you may wander and explore. Beyond the borders of the main mission, you’ve got a few side missions that are constant in the game. The first is finding valuable books for a questionable man who is blunt with his words and intentions, and more brutish than your typical librarian. What he does with the books is a mystery, but it’s a constant and adds a quest line that will keep the game extended. It’s not as meaningful as the other set of side missions, but it does keep you in the world longer as finding books isn’t as easy as it sounds, even with a restrictive amount of land to explore.
Another side mission is acquiring rare artifacts for a reseller named Dervis, who is funding the rebel uprising in the story. You acquire these by pickpocketing rich people in cities, a quick technique where you must push the triangle button to match two diamond shapes together, and then return the items picked to Dervis. If you pickpocket wrong, you will alert authorities and must end up killing the citizen, which is mostly a bad thing because you have a finite number of innocent people you can kill in the game before you’re punished. There are many of these artifacts so expect to stay a while on this quest line. The chance you take with pickpocketing to fulfill this mission keeps the game interesting.
The other additional quest line is contracts. People need things and sometimes they need people to disappear, so the best way for that to happen is to get a contract going. It’s akin to contract killing in Hitman, where tasks are given, and you execute them. It’s not a bad quest line, as it presents a variety of opportunities for the game to stay interesting.
The additional content to extend gameplay is good, though some of it feels a bit forced. The idea of searching for books just didn’t appeal to me but the other quest lines did.
Collecting and Crafting
As you progress through the game, you will find chests lying around during main missions, as well as quest lines, and just by finding them through general exploration. These chests can contain material that you can combine to upgrade weapons, armor, daggers, or anything else that is craftable. The materials are readily abundant, and you’ll end up collecting and building them up without thinking.
The additional collected treasures come in the form of schematics that you can use to build out weapons, costumes, or daggers. Having these schematics means you can collect material that can equal more ways to dress out and arm Basim. It’s a minor amount of collecting and crafting, and that’s more than fine with me, it motivates you to keep searching and creating within AC Mirage. It does help extend the gameplay considerably, as most treasures are difficult to find and get to thanks to clever puzzles and barriers. You will spend a good number of hours trying to learn how to break into a building to acquire material to dress and arm Basim out more.
Overall, all the gameplay in Assassin’s Creed Mirage isn’t nearly as big as the last three previous AC titles, nor does it try to be. It wants you to experience the story above all else, and the gameplay shows that sentiment with its lack of enemy AI, variety, and enemy boss fights. The gameplay also does a good job of extending its purpose through mostly meaningful quest lines and its collection/crafting system. Assassin’s Creed Mirage does a lot right and doesn’t lie in what it wants to be, but the big question we are left with is, will that be enough for AC fans to enjoy? I would have liked to see another Origins or Odyssey, but I completely get why a company wants to pull the scope back a bit and make it more focused, and why some gamers would want that too for a series they covet. I get it, but I left this experience wanting more and feeling like, even in this small world of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, there could have been more.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Assassin’s Creed Mirage from developer Ubisoft Bordeaux is a scaled-back version of the last three games. It puts more focus on story delivery than it does on gameplay options and complete execution of them. It’s a good game with a wonderful lead character, but at the end of the day, you’re probably going to leave the experience wanting more.
