Assassin’s Creed Mirage – An In-Depth-Review.

Back in 2020, The Assassins Creed Valhalla. I talked about how much that game’s story had a real sense of finality to it, bringing together and concluding dozens of narrative threads from across the franchise, although it serves as somewhat of a prequel for Valhalla.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage doesn’t push the series story in New Directions, opting instead for a narrative that is heavily dependent on you already knowing Bassam’s story in Valhalla.

AC Mirage does get back to the basics that first defined the series by refocusing on social stealth and making it fun to learn about a city’s history, but a weak cast of characters keeps it from reaching the same heights as some of its earliest predecessors. Free running is intuitive though occasionally clumsy in its design with vassim sometimes getting snagged on corners or leaping off rooftops in a way I didn’t intend these mishaps are thankfully not very common allowing you to focus on strategizing how you want to get from one building to the next but most of all Baghdad feels alive in its history incorporating Pinnacles of the city like the House of Wisdom into main story missions and highlighting every Discovery and fresh face with new pages and an expansive codex that details the history culture and importance of the setting you’ll be exploring that city as Basin a talented Street Thief who eventually joins the hidden ones the precursors to the Assassin Brotherhood bathroom is assigned to eliminate the various members of the order of ancients the precursors to the Templar order who control Baghdad from the Shadows leaning into his Origins as a thief Basim excels at subterfuge and stealth.

You can openly fight enemies in AC Mirage, and Basam is a fierce duelist who can parry and execute individual enemies with satisfying ease. However, once you’re confronted by three or more guards, Bassam’s skill set is far better suited to running away and hiding. This encourages you to embrace the social stealth elements in the game, including hiding in plain sight within crowds, scouting areas from the rooftops, and utilizing an assortment of gadgets to mask your presence or distract enemies. The gadgets at your disposal range from throwing knives and sleep darts to noise makers and traps, and they can be customized with materials discovered in hidden chests or earned by completing optional contracts. allowing you to further Define your ideal approach to stealing and unlocking new tools.

New options for your tools and new abilities for Bassam at a fairly regular rate, and AC Mirage allows you to easily tweak your build. That said, like previous Assassin’s Creed Mirage games, the enemy AI Mirage is dumb as rocks and they’ll fall for the same tricks over and over someone’s up to something. This is particularly noticeable in AC Mirage though, as this game places more of an emphasis on stealth and makes Boston much less of a powerhouse, but the enemies don’t present any sort of opposition. In most cases, challenges are instead dictated by enemy placement of Boston’s resources and the design of buildings utilizing Bassam’s Eagle companion and All-Seeing Supernatural.

With your Eagle Vision ability, you can scout an area to get the lay of the land, map enemy locations, and then plan how you’re going to use your assortment of stocked tools and free-running abilities to navigate the space without drawing attention. Breaking stealth is never punished with an immediate game over, keeping each mission from becoming overly frustrating, but failing certain conditions, like preventing multiple guards from seeing you or not stopping a lookout from sounding an alarm, can lead to a situation where you get a game over with an area on high alert. Basin can be sworn by enemies, which in turn can up the challenge considerably, and since you’re not a Greek demigod or Viking Berserker like in the last two assassin’s creed mirage games, it’s better not to be outnumbered. Because of this, there’s still a gratifying tension to maintaining your stealth.

There are more than immediate consequences to being discovered, as well as Citizens watch him in action. Lord poured him to the city’s guards for his transgressions. As Bassam’s new array declines, the city becomes more dangerous to him. Citizens will recognize him when he tries to blend into groups and calls for the guards and archers. Patrol the rooftops, and specialized hunters will pursue him across the city. It pays to remain hidden and unnoticed when planning an assassination mission, lest you make getting around the city much more laborious and dangerous once the mission is complete and the heat gets too high.

Take a break to rip down posters and bribes. City Heralds can lower your notoriety. I found notoriety to be too lenient of a system; however, the entire basis of its threat is that enemies more easily recognize Bassin and pursue him with more aggression, but again, the enemy AI isn’t very smart. Instead of feeling like the city is becoming more aware of you and testing you to utilize every trick you have in a desperate gamble to reduce your notoriety, feels like the game is trying to force a mild frustration onto you that you have to take care of before you can go back to enjoying it.

Thankfully these forced breaks from tackling your next assignment are the only ones you have to make no one will be pulling you out of the simulation this time around like past games in the franchise the entire experience of AC Mirage is a virtual reality simulation being watched by someone in the present day however there is hardly any modern day storyline in Mirage something we haven’t seen since 2012’s Assassin’s Creed Liberation barrage is one of the most concise Assassin’s Creed story lines we’ve had in a decade as a result every part of the storyline is written in service of Boston’s Journey without needing to twist it in some way to answer a question posed by a secondary present-day protagonist without another face distracting In the narrative, we’re allowed to focus on Bassam and see how his desperate struggle to make the world a better place for the likes of the downtrodden becomes twisted and jaded over time.

There’s a genuine earnestness to him that slowly erodes as he’s faced with the complexities of balancing a desire to serve the greater good with an ever-present need to serve himself. The issue that Mirage runs into is that this characterization doesn’t stand on its own. Bowson doesn’t have much of a narrative Arc throughout AC Mirage; instead, his journey leans on the knowledge that he is destined for a tragic fall that will twist him into becoming one of the main antagonists to avor in Valhalla. Bassam storyline is filled with hints and Mr X toying with you as it pulls you along leaving you guessing as to what’s finally going to be the Catalyst for his eventual downfall only to then conclude when he finally reaches some semblance of development there there’s a whole lot of context missing if you haven’t played Valhalla and Boston’s story is only interesting if you have that context without it you’re left wondering what the journey was all for the game’s story doesn’t completely fall apart without knowing Boston’s future however the boss of story is told within the confines of his hunt for the order of ancients the stakes of which are laid playing in mirage’s opening act the order wants to control Society the hidden ones think that’s bad and what to stop them to preserve people’s personal freedoms Fasten is a hidden one, so his stance on the matter is pretty cut and dry. There’s no personal investment helping you to buy Bassim’s motivations for hunting the order down, but the game at least sets up that he may at least feel Duty bound to the task at hand. It’s not enough to make things interesting, but the loose framework works out and at least brings you into Mirage’s most enjoyable gameplay.

Loot the investigations Possums hunt for the order, which is organized into individual cases. tasky with uncovering clues that eventually reveal the location nation of the lower ranking members of the order of ancients. As you kill these targets, their deaths slowly reveal the true identity of the handful of big bands that they serve, unlocking the mission to go hunt them down. The hunt for the order of ancients is at the center of Mirage’s gameplay. Loop injects the free-form nature of how these hunts worked in Odyssey and Valhalla within the step-by-step framework of the original Assassin’s Creed, though the beginning and end of Mirage are entirely linear. The middle portion is completely open, allowing you to tackle three separate investigations in whatever order you want.

The freedom to chase leads at your leisure encourages you to go after whatever interests you, with every lead reliably leading to the satisfaction of Crossing another name off your list, many of the smaller cases crisscross with one another, as well as unifying the open-ended nature of Mirage into a more concise narrative. At the end of the day, you’re trying to unearth the face behind the mask at the top of this branch of the order, but the very nature of your investigations It clues you into how the entire group has insidiously wormed their way into the inner echelons of Baghdad. You are a predator, and the order is your prey, but as you fill out your evidence board with clues, you quickly discern how those roles could be reversed. The order is everywhere, and their influence touches almost every aspect of Baghdad. It’s not hard to believe that one of your allies May secretly be one of them, and I remain blue to every conversation Bassam had with his friends, if only to discern hints of a future betrayal that may or may not come. The benefit of such an intriguing twist is lessened by Mirage’s weak past; however, beyond Bassam’s closest allies, his childhood friend and fellow street thief Nihal, and his mentor and surrogate mother Roshan The rest of the characters are paper thin, and forgettable stand-ins were really just there to deliver.

Exposition most of the conversations basem has with other characters left me wanting for more or at least wishing for more time with nehal or Roshan instead both women act as foils to one another provide further insight into Bassin whereas nihal wants Boston to pursue his own personal agency and seek care for the nightmarish visions that have plagued in his entire life Roshan admonishes bass and for seeking these answers and demands he instead Wars his pain and Trauma into being a better killer it’s an interesting dichotomy that’s not given the space to be explored in any sort of entertaining way both women despite touching on potentially interesting themes of identity and coming to terms with one’s past are practically non-existent within the story only popping up briefly to pose an idea before leaving just as quickly worst their characterization only seems to Leap Frog from scene to scene with both shifting and how they feel about bosom with an unrealistic swiftness that doesn’t feel authentic to how human emotions work Nihal, in particular, gave me Whiplash for how quickly she forgave Bassam for an earlier transgression only to then reappear hours later somehow still angry with him regardless your efforts in unravelling the mysteries of the order culminate in rewarding assassination missions these resemble the Black Box Mission seen in Assassins Creed Unity and Syndicate the Bassam tasked with infiltrating an area uncovering the identity and location of his target, learning of possible ways to assassinate them, and then executing the plan These five assignments are the best part of the game.

By leaning into a mission structure that prioritizes creative reactivity, Fasten can unlock new paths forward in these black box missions by bribing servants for information, stealing keys from guards, eavesdropping on conversations, or finding and dawning disguises. You can also just murder everything that stands between you and the target abusive wish, though that’s a difficult prospect given the number of guards devoted to these locations. . Oh, AC Mirage is a true prequel to Valhalla, only able to tell a compelling narrative.

Arc for Bassen with the knowledge of what he becomes later in life, at the very least, you don’t need an encyclopedic understanding of Assassin’s Creed to appreciate Bassin’s growth from a young street thief to a duty-bound assassin to a truth-seeking detective as he looks into the interconnected investigations, then unlocks the enjoyable Black Box assassination missions, and though uninteresting characters more, the experience and emphasis on social stealth and a history-rich city curate a fun and educational gameplay Loop .