Assassin's Creed Mirage Review
Assassin's Creed - A franchise that once stormed the gaming world in the early 2000s, but since Unity, everything started to show signs of decline. Particularly, after the release of Origins, the subsequent titles seemed to have lost the essence of the series, which was all about stealthy assassinations. A game with 'assassin' in its name used to represent a certain style and narrative - the story of covert operatives lurking in the shadows, guided by the timeless creed, 'We Work in the Dark, to Serve the Light.' However, starting from Origins, these assassins turned into warriors, bloodthirsty mercenaries, hired guns, losing their identity as true assassins in the process. It seemed like it was all about a few straightforward enemy kills from behind.
But everything seems to have changed with the release of the Assassin's Creed Mirage trailer. Players are once again treated to the familiar stealthy gameplay, a return to classic character mechanics and skills. Everyone is eagerly awaiting the return to the glorious days of the Assassin's Creed series. However, it seems that the 'maybe' factor didn't quite materialize, or at least not entirely. Consequently, this version appears to be just another half-baked assassin game.
At the beginning of the game, we are welcomed to the famous land of Persia, a flourishing nation of its time. We step into the shoes of a young man named Basim. He's an orphan who survives through theft and cunning, which might remind you of Aladdin. One day, when petty thefts no longer suffice for a living, Basim and his childhood friend Nehal hatch a plan to rob the mansion of a local landlord. On one fateful day, while executing their plan, they accidentally stumble upon the landlord and a group of masked individuals discussing something highly significant.
Later, they open the chest they've stolen, only to find a peculiar metallic disc instead of the expected treasures. When Basim touches it, strange images appear before him. Unfortunately, the landlord catches sight of him with the item. As Basim is about to strike, Nehal swiftly takes a knife and fatally injures the landlord. Witnessing the whole ordeal, the landlord's son alerts the city, leading to a manhunt for Basim. Thankfully, his daily evasion skills allow him to escape, but those left behind at the campsite are not as fortunate. They are falsely accused of concealing the murderer and subjected to a public execution. By the time Basim arrives, it's too late. Overwhelmed by grief and anger, he and Nehal part ways.
Thanks to his contact with the disc, Basim gains entry into the Assassin's Guild, seeking answers and attempting to prevent him from revealing what he saw. Meanwhile, Nehal's fate remains unknown. That concludes the tutorial section of the game.
As you can see, the story starts impressively, arguably the most captivating opening since Origins. I would go so far as to say it surpasses Unity and some of the older titles. It's a compelling, well-structured narrative with a fitting background. Above all, the emotions it evokes at the end of the tutorial make you eager to continue Basim's journey. The story gave me a slight sense of nostalgia, reminiscent of Ezio's adventures. Ubisoft was right; this game will indeed bring us back to the roots of Assassin's Creed.
In terms of gameplay, the game introduces both new and familiar mechanics, such as pickpocketing, evasion, and Assassin's Focus. Pickpocketing in this installment is a bit more challenging, requiring precise mouse clicks within a green circle. Any deviation from this circle prompts a chase, during which you must evade pursuit until the guards forget about you, allowing you to pickpocket once more. Evasion, on the other hand, evokes memories of the earlier Assassin's Creed games, where reducing notoriety required tearing down wanted posters or bribing informants.
Ubisoft once again demonstrates how they've combined old elements with the new. Mixing the old with the new is always a nice touch, right? In this installment, we are introduced to a new mechanic called Assassin's Focus. With this skill, you can easily assassinate multiple enemies swiftly without the need for time-consuming stealth, but it's limited to a maximum of four targets with full upgrades and two targets at the start. The cooldown for this ability is rather long, so the game encourages you to use it sparingly when necessary. Additionally, familiar parkour elements return, such as swinging, ledge grabs, rope darting, and pole vaulting.
Side quests in this game are more polished, with clearer storylines and enjoyable tasks. For example, one side quest involves helping your friend Kong (which might be a hint at Ubisoft's upcoming AC Jade set in mainland China on mobile). The Mandarin-speaking segment made me chuckle due to its natural and somewhat condescending tone toward the player. Another side quest has you assisting a young boy in jumping into a haystack from a watchtower. I'm not entirely sure of the lesson this quest is trying to impart, as you encourage the boy to leap like a true assassin. I'm not convinced it's a valuable life skill, but nonetheless, it's an amusing side quest. It's evident that Ubisoft has put more thought into some of their thousand side quests.
These are all aspects where the game excels, but here's where I start to see the game's issues.
The most important aspect, in my opinion, in a stealth-based game is diversity in the ways you can eliminate enemies. Games like Hitman provide a wide array of methods for dispatching foes, from various firearms, knives, poisons, disguises, electrocution, burning, traps, strangulation, and even more unconventional methods like slipping on banana peels, as seen in other titles such as Dishonored.
In Assassin's Creed Mirage, we have a limited set of options: stabbing from behind, throwing knives, using poison, and setting traps. There are only about four discreet ways to silently take out enemies. This is a stark contrast to the ten or more methods available in some other stealth games. Despite the game offering various gadgets, only a handful of them can be effectively used for killing.
What's even more disappointing is the skill tree in the game, which is perhaps the most lackluster and ineffectual skill tree I've encountered in an Assassin's Creed title. The three main skill branches offer minimal upgrades. The first branch enhances your eagle's ability to detect enemies, the second provides additional slots for throwable items and a few throwing-related skills, and the third branch upgrades your Assassin's Focus slot and offers minor support abilities.
None of these skill branches significantly enhance the art of silent, covert assassinations. If you recall, in previous Assassin's Creed games like Unity, you were given skills that allowed you to assassinate multiple enemies nearby, blend in with crowds by wearing a disguise, temporarily blind enemies, or perform double assassinations from above. In Assassin's Creed Mirage, these creative and efficient assassination methods are absent. When you're faced with multiple enemies, your best option is to use a smoke bomb to assassinate them, but even this doesn't add much depth or strategy to the gameplay.
So, the question arises: why should you upgrade this skill? Ubisoft has provided me with the answer. All skills in the game are tied to fixed skills, meaning if you want to level up a skill later, you must upgrade this one first. However, upgrading this skill doesn't significantly affect your gameplay; it's mainly about leveling up quickly. Nevertheless, Ubisoft has considered this move. Leveling up in the game is a slow process. Initially, completing about 1-2 missions is enough to level up, but as you progress, you'll need to complete around 4-5, then 6, and finally 7 missions to level up. However, leveling up doesn't offer much because the initial three skills consume one level each, while the later ones require 2-3 and 4 levels to unlock. With each level, it takes about 4 missions to progress, and upgrading a skill within those three underwhelming branches requires 8-12 missions.
Apart from stealthy assassinations, like many other games, the game features direct combat mechanics when you're detected. Moves like light attacks, heavy attacks, dodging, and parrying are all applicable, but the dodge mechanism is particularly problematic. It comes into play when you encounter larger foes who have a high chance of blocking your attacks. The tutorial instructs you to use dodges against unblockable strikes, but in actual combat, dodging and then attacking these larger foes often results in a very low hit rate and requires precise timing. Additionally, these larger foes can counter quickly, making it challenging to react. My advice would be to assassinate them or, if detected, use a smoke bomb and retreat to wait for an opportunity to assassinate them. Fortunately, the number of enemies has been significantly reduced in this installment, allowing you to solo larger foes without worrying about other enemies sneaking up on you from behind.
NPCs in the game aren't particularly intelligent. There are moments when I've walked right past them or assassinated someone nearby, and they didn't seem to notice or react. As long as you find a hiding spot, they tend to give up searching after about 10 seconds. The game offers three difficulty levels: easy, normal, and hard. I selected normal, but the detection and enemy response times are quite slow, so I'm confident that you can comfortably choose hard mode for a bit more challenge.
Maps in Ubisoft games, in general, and Assassin's Creed games, in particular, have been a common point of frustration for many players. They often feel empty, lifeless, and involve a lot of running just to climb a tower and unlock parts of the map for faster travel, and Assassin's Creed Mirage is no exception in this regard. The game provides vast desert landscapes with a few NPC huts that serve no real purpose, forcing you to either ride a horse or a camel through these endless dunes. The real frustration, however, lies within the cities.
In the cities, your horse can't be ridden, and you're forced to run on foot. This isn't particularly comfortable, especially when you need to cover a lot of ground within the city. What makes it worse is that sometimes, while running, you may accidentally bump into crowds, causing your character to stumble and then resume running. It can feel like an annoying interruption to your gameplay experience. You might even compare it to a form of torture for players.
Even if you find running in the game tolerable, there's the issue of parkour. As mentioned earlier, the game introduces the same old parkour elements without any real improvements or added excitement. It feels like you're revisiting the parkour mechanics from the earlier Assassin's Creed games, but not in a good way.
Furthermore, parkour in this installment seems to have regressed compared to previous entries. For instance, when traversing objects on water, it's easier to fall into the water rather than land securely on floating planks. Sometimes, the parkour controls feel unresponsive, causing your character to go up, then down, and then back up again, almost like you're controlling an animated sequence rather than a fluid parkour movement. This is a stark contrast to the smooth and responsive parkour mechanics seen in games like Unity.
There's also an odd parkour animation that players may find unusual, where the character can miraculously jump horizontally from a concave surface to a convex one and cling to it with unnatural finesse. It makes you wonder if Ubisoft has any plans to upgrade or improve these animations, given that they've remained virtually unchanged for over a decade.
While these issues may not fundamentally affect the core gameplay, they do contribute to a feeling of stagnation and a lack of innovation in the series. It's as if you're getting a new iPhone that looks like the previous one but is heavily marketed because its predecessor performed well. Players may rightfully expect more evolution and innovation in a long-running franchise like Assassin's Creed.
Now let's talk about the graphics in the game. As you mentioned earlier, Ubisoft presented a character menu that looked polished and minimalist, but it seemed that the in-game graphics didn't live up to that expectation. While the character menu displayed your character wearing a dazzling, detailed golden outfit, in the actual game, it didn't look much different from a simple rag.
This graphics downgrade is even more apparent than what players experienced when comparing game trailers to the actual release of Watch Dogs. In terms of NPCs, Ubisoft seems to have continued with the same lifeless and random NPC behavior found in their previous games. NPCs roam aimlessly through the city, sometimes even standing atop guard towers. During high-alert situations when you need to tear down wanted posters, you might encounter NPCs who simply stand and watch. When you approach them, they don't recognize you, allowing you to tear down the posters easily. Except for the level 3 wanted level, the other two levels almost require no attention.
Ubisoft has developed a reputation as one of the laziest game developers and publishers, but it's surprising to see them reuse a single model and face for NPCs throughout the game. You might unintentionally come across the same face on a woman, a man, a young boy, or a girl. The voice acting in the game is equally terrible. Scenes meant to be scary, emotional, or pleading are delivered in an unconvincing and forced manner. The voices often fail to convey any emotions, and there are instances where the dialogue is even slower than the lip movement of the characters. Some characters have difficult-to-understand voices, like Uncle Dervis, who sounds as if he's speaking with a lump in his throat, making it highly unpleasant to listen to. Roshan's raspy voice goes beyond the point of being comprehensible. My advice would be to keep subtitles on, as you might have difficulty understanding what some characters are saying.
It appears that Ubisoft, while selling the game at a $50 price point, may have thought they needed to cut back on content, resulting in everything in the game feeling half-baked and subpar.
The game still retains a highly annoying element that I believe affects players, and that is the black blocks within the game. Whenever you enter an overly dark area, these black blocks don't just appear as simple darkness; they emit a very uncomfortable color that makes players themselves experience eye strain and headaches after 20 minutes of playing at nighttime levels. Therefore, I always choose to switch to daytime in the game to avoid eye discomfort.
These eye-straining and headache-inducing black blocks also appear in cutscenes, most notably in the opening cutscene of the game. Your initial impression of the game is likely to be one of eye discomfort, dizziness, and headaches. So, it's best to play during daylight hours in the game to prevent any harm to your eyes.
VERDICT
In summary, the game evokes nostalgia entirely through its mechanics, gameplay, and even graphics, for those who aren't too critical of games and want to spend time enjoying the scenery and learning about the history of this Middle Eastern country or want to know how the first Assassin's Creed game was played.
However, for those eagerly awaiting Ubisoft to return to its former glory and provide the same amazing feeling as in previous years, you might be in for disappointment. As someone who has played many AC titles and has expressed skepticism about the surprise return to Ubisoft's roots, I wanted to hold onto hope and not be pessimistic, but after all, Mirage still only brings a sense of longing and anticipation for when Ubisoft will figure out how to revive the AC franchise.