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Assassin’s Creed Mirage review: the most enjoyable Assassin’s Creed game for yearsEverything is permitted, but stabbing is the most permitted.
Everything is permitted, but stabbing is the most permitted.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
This is, broadly speaking, the plot of most Assassin’s Creed games, and Basim is an able enough main character to carry it. He’s extremely dedicated to the creed, bless him. Mirage’s smaller size really helps focus the plot, though, as it does everything. Because all this is taking place in one city, it’s much easier to track the key players than on a map that takes up half a country; you can remember that this freedom fighter is kind of a showy PR guy even if he’s your ally, that the academic burned the books at the library to cover up stealing one in particular, and that the doctor performing experiments on patients is a nervy piece of shit. You can drop some threads of an investigation if you want to pick up a different, interesting one on the other side of the city, without fear that you’ll forget what else is going on.
Nothing ever really stumps you for that long, though, again because the world is smaller and more dense. It’s not actuallysmallexcept in relative terms, and there’s still a lot to do in Mirage. But doing it all is much more feasible when you can clear most of the game in about 20 hours. It also means Baghdad itself feels much more dense and alive, with districts that you come to recognise and a Hidden Ones bureau in each one. There are secrets to rootle out without following quest markers, and freelance assassin contracts to take on that earn you tokens to spend in the course of your investigations.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Rather than a double assassination skill, you can kill assassinate a second enemy in quick succession after dusting off one, with a throwing knife if you have one. Throwing knives don’t work on big heavy armoured lads like the one pictured on the right, though. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
These tokens tie in to the increased stealth of it all. While you can, at later levels, take on a few soldiers at once, it really is best to go unseen in Mirage, creeping through tall grass, hiding behind corners, and crouching on top of rooftops to perform a quick, silent assassination. A dedicated assassin will case the whole building as much as possible, using their pet eagle (an innovation returning from the later games in the series) to mark guards and spot unhelpful items like alarm bells, which can be disabled, or helpful items like explosive jars of oil.
Basim has a combination of tools and skills at his disposal that bring together good bits from the whole series - the tokens, for example, can be used to bribe different factions, so mercenaries will fight alongside him or a merchant will smuggle him into a target building. But he can also wear a disguise for some levels, or listen to gossip that reveals a secret entrance. Equipment is pared back to a half dozen tools, limited to throwing knives and one other - unless you spend skill points to unlock new ones in one of your three equally restrained levelling trees. I favour, as I did back in the day, the poisoned blow dart. There are throwable traps and smoke bombs. Weapons, rather than a grab bag of whatever is around you, are similarly limited to a sword and a dagger.
Mirage cleverly drives you to engage with treasure hunting, because without infiltrating guarded areas or solving some traversal puzzles to open chests, you won’t get new swords or armour, and neither will you get upgrade schematics. If you don’t try, you’re stuck with the bog standard stuff. It makes everything you do feel more worthwhile, rather than being optional filler. I wore an off the shoulder number that reduced the impact of my naughty actions if civillian witnesses saw me. Mirage brings back a notoriety meter, which you can pay to remove, or rip down wanted posters, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciated having that impact debuffed, because despite my efforts to be stealthy I got seen a lot.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Mirage takes the good bits from what the series has become in decades of not being a stealth RPG, polishes them up a bit, and puts them together with some of the best bits from the early games in the series, in a neat little package. It’s smaller, sure, but you don’t miss out on anything, and when you’ve finished you don’t feel like you wasted any time. This is how big companies should make better games.
