12 September 2023 , 12:00
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By stripping the approach to its most popular franchise back to basics, Ubisoft is on course to create the purist Assassin’s Creed in over 10 years.
Playing every Assassin’s Creed game is a bit like going over your parents’ house for Sunday lunch. Sure, some of the vegetables might be arranged differently, and the cut of meat seasoned in a manner that’s set to wow your taste in a slightly new way, yet ultimately it’s still the same familiar dish. This analogy would very much make Assassin’s Creed Mirage the equivalent of that childhood dinner your mum hasn’t made in ages, then, bringing back lots of familiar memories of times gone by in the hopes that it still impresses.
Ubisoft has made no secret of this fact, pitching Mirage as an unabashed throwback to the very first Assassin’s Creed entry that released on Xbox 360 and PS3 no less than 16 years ago. After previously being treated to a hands-off gameplay demo earlier this year, I finally got to put this sentiment to the test myself recently by spending a generous four hours with it at a preview event. In this time, I got to play through a sizeable chunk that included the game’s opening chapters and a slice of open-world Baghdad.
I want to start of this preview proper by mentioning that in very few aspects is Assassin’s Creed Mirage actually breaking new ground; that’s just not the goal here. You’ll still move through the usual rhythms of learning the ways of the Assassins – known here as the Hidden Ones, due to where it takes place in the timeline – alongside synchronising towers across a city, taking on bounty missions and just generally skulking around, as an assassin is wont to do. Social blending is back, as is pickpocketing, as is ripping down posters to decrease your notoriety. Sound familiar?
The good news is, with that out of the way, I can comfortably say that performing all these recognisable tasks and routines (i.e. the ones that first put the Assassin’s Creed franchise on the ma,) looks and feels just as good as it ever has – in many ways, better. Unlike more recent entries like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla that unleashed you into worlds that were just too big, Mirage’s pared-back approach with regards to its location actually encouraged me to not just pick away at it more, but actually want to do so too.
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Helping this attitude is the fact that Baghdad circa 861 AD is simply a beautiful place to be in. A central bazar of the area I was dropped into served as a fully populated hub, full of life and the hustle you’d expect to see from a city that once had a population peak of around a million. Said bazar was surrounded by tented enemy camps, the river, its accompanying bridges and various other types of buildings to climb. In all these ways and more, Assassin’s Creed Mirage constantly reminded me why it was I first fell in love with the series.
Leap of faith
What’s new here feels like twists on the classic Assassin’s Creed formula as opposed to outright reinventions, but this is very much by design. The aforementioned pickpocketing for instance no longer challenges you to awkwardly hover your hand while rubbing closely to an NPC, instead being replaced by a simple ‘hit the button when the patterns line up’ minigame. Another slight twist is in how you can still use your eagle companion to scope out camps, but you’ll need to take down a new Marksman enemy type beforehand for fear of having your feathered friend shot down. Tweaks like this work well to modernise certain familiar aspects that’d otherwise feel stale.
It's not all perfect, though. Because while a more intentional approach to climbing is back (where you actually have to look for hand and footholds to clamber onto), it does result in the same old issue of hopping off and on of surfaces that I didn’t mean to. Then there’s the fact that sitting on a bench and overhearing an important NPC’s conversation to progress a mission is still a bit, well, boring, but fortunately it wasn’t too much long after that I was dipped back into combat or able to roam freely once again.
Obviously combat in the older Assassin’s Creed games was always a bit of an issue, with Ubisoft going to great lengths to introduce contextual manoeuvres and executions in the recent reboot trilogy to add some dynamism. Well, unfortunately, while combat in Mirage does largely relate to a mixture of light and heavy attacks, parrying and dodging all mapped to the shoulder buttons, almost every time I engaged in an encounter, I found myself waiting to parry in the classic sense, standing in a circle of enemies rather than taking the fight to them. Parrying and then following up with an insta-kill is just too effective a technique, so it’s a shame Mirage seemingly has re-introduced this issue.
Fortunately, the actual act of stealth that Assassin’s Creed Mirage places great emphasis on, works really well. The dedicated crouch button has returned, letting you utilise bushes and foliage to sneak up behind foes in a manner that’s satisfying and effective. Better yet, when Basim performs a stealth kill, it’s exactly that. A kill. The last three Assassin’s Creeds determined how much damage a kill strike would do based on you and your enemy’s level, but Mirage completely removes such level-gating to let you fully embrace the role of an assassin. As it should be.
I could touch upon the brief story-centric roots of how Basim comes to be part of the order of Hidden Ones I saw as part of the preview and how tools aid in stealth, but with the game out in less than a month, I won’t rob you of discovering these revelations for yourself. So far, from the four hours I’ve played, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a successful return to the series roots, but one that likely won’t appeal to players that have grown accustomed the franchise’s more RPG-centric outings. It’s an Assassin’s Creed just like mummy Ubisoft used to make – rarely anything more or less.