Platform and Version Reviewed:

PS5 Version, on PS5

The Good:

• Solid core gameplay

The Bad:

• The story lacks substance and context

The Ugly:

• Girl boss syndrome

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Set in 861, during the reign of the Abbasid Caliphate, Basim Ibn Ishaq is a young street thief trying to survive in a cruel world.  His nightmares are host to terrifying Jinni (Genies).  Basim aspires to join the secret and mysterious Hidden Ones but is initially rejected, driving him to foolishly try to sneak into the Caliph’s house to steal an artifact that the Hidden Ones’ enemy, The Order of the Ancients, is about to make off with.  When Basim touches the artifact, he is dazzled by a holographic animation of two people fighting. However, before he can escape with it, he is caught by the Caliph and only survives because his partner, a girl named Nehal, kills the Caliph.  While this brings the fury of the Caliph’s house, it also earns him the attention of the Hidden Ones, and he is whisked away to begin training as a Hidden One himself.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a third-person sandbox game set in and around 9th-century Baghdad. The story unfolds from the perspective of Basim, who also appeared as an NPC in 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.  As the name suggests, the players will use stealth, cunning, and combat skills to eliminate enemies of freedom and the enemies of the Hidden Ones. However, much like your high school history book, the game aspires to be a historical reference.  As players walk the streets of this interpretation of ancient Baghdad and its surrounding farms and villages, recreations of actual places are accompanied by markers that encourage the player to dig deeper into their real-life history by reading snippets penned by professional historians.

Story: Less is More

From its roots as a straightforward adventure series, Assassin’s Creed has been pushed into the realm of RPGs with each successive title. This culminated in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), a 60+ hour adventure featuring dozens of fetch quests, crafting challenges, side missions, and presented the player with an ever-increasing difficulty that required leveling up to overcome. On the surface, this meant that the series was delivering tremendous entertainment value because of the sheer volume of content in each entry, but it was becoming an interminable grind-fest that was difficult for players with busy lives to complete quickly enough to still remember what was going on by the end. Assassin’s Creed Mirage, thankfully, ditches or drastically reduces nearly all of the RPG elements for a leaner 20-ish hour adventure that more closely resembles the original Assassin’s Creed (2007). 

Story: But Sometimes Less Is Just Less

Narratively speaking, veterans and newcomers to the series are likely to have very different experiences owing to the fact that the game’s story and its terminology are all built around a context that is completely absent. There’s nothing to explain why dying is called “desynchronization,” and the cutscenes and missions all point to a larger backstory that never sees the light of day. Likewise, If you don’t go into this game already knowing what The Animus is or that the game’s true setting is the genetic memory of some person in the future, Mirage will do nothing to enlighten you. 

While this is obviously part of the minimalist theme of the design, there are numerous plot elements that simply don’t make sense without this knowledge, and the conclusion of the story loses nearly all of its meaning because of this omission.  

Then there is the power struggle between the two secret societies, “The Hidden Ones” (a.k.a. Assassins) and “The Order of the Ancients” (a.k.a. Templars/Abstergo), which receives no justification or rationalization whatsoever. The titular “Creed,” which explains why the Assassins do what they do, is also entirely absent. As a result, the player is left with little to no idea what principles make the Assassins more morally praiseworthy than their opponents.

Gameplay: Remaining in the Shadows

The core gameplay of Assassin’s Creed has always been sneaking around and killing “bad guys” or the people who guard them. And in this respect, Mirage brings the goods.  Almost every mission has you scoping out a carefully crafted location to figure out how to get in without being seen and get to your objective without being caught or at least without getting killed.

When it comes to stealth, Mirage is much more forgiving than its predecessors. Alerting a single guard no longer magically announces your presence to every guard in the area. Line of sight plays a more realistic role. This means that a single screw-up doesn’t necessarily have to send you all the way back to your last checkpoint to try again. There are no shortages of tools and opportunities to stay in the shadows while completing your missions, provided you have the patience.

When the Controller is the Enemy

One of the game’s greatest weaknesses is the unrefined controls. They often lead to more of a fight with the controller than with the enemy. Combat controls sometimes feel like wading through mud. It’s unclear whether this was done intentionally to discourage open confrontation (it is, after all, supposed to be a stealth game) or if this is just the result of poor implementation.

Even outside of combat, there are moments where the game jarringly shifts a camera angle on you, which confuses the direction your character is moving, and you end up getting entangled in a wall you didn’t mean to climb or leaping in the wrong direction, etc. It’s very immersion-breaking when you have to stop, analyze what went wrong, and then back Basim up like he’s a semi-truck that took a wrong turn down an alley.

Finally, there is a single action button mapped both to pick up objects and to interact with them. When the designers place pick-up objects next to a bench, your character must go through a multi-second sit-down animation if you accidentally hit the button at the wrong time. It can really interrupt the flow of the action when you’re running for your life, and Basim decides to sit down and take a load off. 

Sound Judgment

This series has never been known for its audio quality, so it’s no surprise that there’s nothing special here. The music is fitting but forgettable. The voice acting is professional, but there are no particularly inspiring performances.  What’s more, the audio mixing is terrible.  Background noises and music easily drown out the main dialogue, even with a full-range surround setup with a center channel devoted to voice.  Ironically, there’s a “voice enhancement” setting in the options menu, which is off by default but brings the balance almost up to where it should have been by default. This setting was never needed in previous titles.

Final Thoughts

The Assassin’s Creed formula was very much in need of a trim, and in many ways, Mirage delivers on the promise of a more accessible, more action-oriented experience. Unfortunately,  it also feels like they cut too deeply, leaving out important story context that will leave first-time players wondering what the point was. History buffs who enjoy Assassin’s Creed for the opportunity to walk through approximations of real historical locations may be let down by the ridiculous glazing-over of the true position of women in 9th-century Baghdad. 

Woke Elements

The woke elements in this game are mostly concentrated in a few cutscenes and some mission dialogue.  The game is so light on story, to begin with, that they just aren’t a constant annoyance, and they don’t really interfere with the pure enjoyment of finding the best and sneakiest way to slip past or kill every bad guy in the way of your goal. As much as they would probably have liked to have done more, the setting went quite a long way to stop the dialogue and scenario writers from incorporating more woke elements.  The ancient Middle East wasn’t really compatible with woke thinking.

Girl Boss Syndrome

• For a series that prides itself on its historically based fictional narratives, which incorporate real places and people from history, the writers are playing fast and loose with the role of women.  As politically correct as it is for the Western world to pretend otherwise, women are second-class citizens in Islamic societies even today. Twelve hundred years ago, it was measurably worse. In fact, the Abbasid Caliphate was particularly known for eliminating women’s roles entirely from public and political life. Despite this fact, in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, women openly operate businesses and hold positions of celebrity and authority.
• This doesn’t just apply to Basim’s two main “mentors” but other figures significant to the plot as well. To say more would risk spoilers.

Misandry

• Basim might be the protagonist, but from the first scene, he’s getting hen-pecked by his female “friend” Nehal. He is insulted and spoken down to for his successes and his failures alike. There’s a moment towards the end of the game that may cause you to want to reevaluate this situation, but there’s no getting around the unanswered toxicity that Nehal represents.
• Roshan is Basim’s next girl boss after he parts ways with Nehal and trains to become one of the Hidden Ones (Assassins).  There are men in positions of authority with the Hidden Ones, but their roles are relegated to the background, and whenever they’re in Roshan’s presence, they show deference to her, even though some appear to outrank her.
• To its credit, the game does eventually, reluctantly acknowledge the physical disadvantages that women have against men in combat.

Subliminal Trans Agenda?

• There’s a point in the story where we discover a character has a split personality, with the other personality being the opposite gender.

The post Assassin’s Creed Mirage first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Platform Reviewed:

PC

Build:

NVidia RTX 3090 Founder’s Edition (not overclocked)

32 GB DDR3 2666

Intel Core i7 4.4 GHz

Windows 10 22H2

Samsung EVO 970 SSD

XBOX One Wired Gamepad

The Good:

• Tight FPS controls
• Fresh UI (not just re-skinned Fallout)
• Multiple play styles (explore everything, just chase the dot, bit of both)
• Clever hybrid progression system
• Boost packs!
• Space combat is simple but well-implemented

The Bad:

• Still crashes whether you need it or not like every other Bethesda game
• Shipbuilder is clunky and poorly documented
• Gets boring traversing empty landscapes
• Missions get super repetitive towards the end

The Ugly:

• Suffers from a mild infection of the “Woke Mind Virus.”

Starfield

Mysterious artifacts are being discovered all over the known systems. They bend gravity and distort space, and for you, the player, they impart unintelligible visions, but their true nature and purpose are unknown. However, when brought together, they respond to one another like pieces of a whole. As you search for the artifacts, you’ll encounter exotic landscapes and hostile alien wildlife, navigate asteroid fields, and political intrigue with equal peril. You’ll shoot, talk, or sneak your way in and out of danger until the assembled artifacts bring you face-to-face with the ultimate decision not just about your own fate but the fate of mankind itself in this expansive star-faring adventure.

Starfield is an open-world first-person shooter (FPS) and role-playing game (RPG) set in a post-Earth future where mankind has spread to the stars and brought all his faults and virtues along for the ride. Player choice takes center stage in this epic galaxy-spanning adventure, where players will create their own custom avatar, buy, build, and modify their own spaceships, build their own settlements, and forge their own way across hundreds of planets on the ground in zero gravity and in space according to their own play style. Players will have to decide between combat, diplomacy, deception, or stealth as they navigate the epic narrative toward its galactic conclusion.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

The first thing that stands out is the new user interface (UI). While it has some similarities to the Elder Scrolls and Fallout UI, it feels very fresh. The circular display in the lower left shows health, O2, and local gravity (as well as adverse conditions, if there are any). Stamina is now displayed as O2, and it depletes if you sprint or try to run while carrying too much mass. This is, of course, affected by gravity in a somewhat intuitive way, but it opens up more player choice than simply making it so you can’t run if you’re over-encumbered.

The first-person shooter controls are very well implemented – the best I’ve ever seen from Bethesda. They’re tight and snappy and give you a sense of accuracy that was definitely lacking in Bethesda’s prior efforts.

Starfield’s skill progression is a pretty clever hybrid of the “do it to learn it” and the “spend skill points to learn it.” You spend skill points to unlock a skill and additional skill points to upgrade the skill, but in between each level, you have to complete a challenge before you’re allowed to upgrade. For example, to get from “Pistols 1” to “Pistols 2” you have to kill 10 enemies with a pistol.

The skill system seems designed for specialization, as there were only enough earnable points to unlock about 12% of the skills on the first play-through.

Eventually, you’ll gain the ability to build a settlement – which is a sort of home base you can use to store things and create a custom set of facilities. This is an optional activity – the game never requires you to build one. If Minecraft, Factorio, and other “builder” games appeal to you, settlement building can be a great diversion from questing.

Getting Around

In one of Bethesda’s more novel decisions, gravity plays a large part in how you’re able to explore. Go somewhere with low gravity, and you can suddenly jump ten feet in the air. Travel to somewhere with high gravity, and your character can barely get off the ground. Boost packs, a kind of power-assisted jump, also open up a lot of vertical possibilities – everything from restoring your ability to jump in high gravity to nearly being able to fly in low gravity.

The world of Starfield is pretty large – there are hundreds of planets orbiting 120 stars and a lot of ways to get around. Once you’ve visited a place, you can usually fast-travel back to it, and you can fast-travel from nearly anywhere. However, getting there the first time can sometimes feel more like a chore than an adventure. Overland, you’re often traversing almost completely empty landscapes for 10-20 minutes at a time. Additionally, Interstellar travel can be almost as bad. You’re often forced to stop off at unexplored star systems on your way somewhere else. Sometimes you get attacked or sucked into a side quest when you go to these places, but just as often, there’s nothing really there, and it’s just a waste of time.

Space is the Place

The spaceship combat controls are straightforward and intuitive. There’s an element of strategy to transferring power between systems – do you want to risk weaker shields so your lasers can do more damage? 

You can upgrade and customize your ships, but it feels like a half-baked experience. For example, nearly every ship comes pre-installed with weapons and reactors that are superior to anything the vendors had to sell. The ship-building interface is about as intuitive as AutoCAD, and for some reason, there is no tutorial explaining how exactly to use it. 

There’s a point in the game where the player is forced to use the shipbuilder to attach some new components to a ship, but the game does nothing to explain how. Of course, the Internet is your friend in this situation, but it’s still a glaring oversight in the design.

Black, White, and Gray

There’s a pirates vs. navy faction questline that defines the whole Starfield experience. It offers mystery, intrigue, exploration, danger, and a huge payoff. However, where it truly shines is the tricky choice at the end. Moral conundrums are a staple of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. In the first games, players had to choose from ideologically disparate factions. It wasn’t a matter of which faction was the most good or the most evil that made the choices hard; that part was obvious. What made the choice hard was whether you wanted your character to be good or evil.

With each successive game in those series, the writers messed with that formula by populating opposite factions with equally awful people. By Fallout 4, every faction was evil in some way. By contrast, the factions in Starfield are morally distinct. For instance, the pirates aren’t misunderstood heroes fighting for freedom, and the navy isn’t a group of secretly corrupt warmongers; you know exactly which side you’re choosing when you make the choice. This is a much-needed return to form for anyone sick of being asked to choose between the proverbial turd sandwich and giant douche.

The Bethesda CTD Shuffle

An RTX 3090 should have had zero difficulty running this game in 1080p without HDR, but there are still areas of the game where performance visibly bogs. Crash to desktop (CTD) frequency was about what we’ve come to expect from Bethesda – about 15 to 20 times during about a 40-hour playthrough. The only other major performance issue or bug encountered was that multiple lines of dialogue or other audio would run concurrently – sometimes, it was impossible to make out the one you were supposed to be listening to.

In Summary

The main plot of the game is imaginative, if a little predictable. Without offering any spoilers, the most noteworthy aspect of it is the way they managed to incorporate the concept of “New Game+” into the central narrative. 

There’s a spark of discovery that hasn’t been evident since Oblivion, where you notice something as you walk past on your way to the next part of your mission and think, “Hey, what’s that?” and two hours later, you’ve had so much fun exploring you’ve almost forgotten about your original mission. You can “just follow the dot” if that’s all you want, or you can dive in and get lost in an enormous game world.

Starfield is a worthy addition to the Bethesda family of celebrated first-person RPGs and manages to simultaneously represent a return to form and something fresh. It’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it because of the woke elements, but it’s undeniably a good time.

WOKE ELEMENTS

While the woke elements in Starfield initially got a lot of press, they are not terribly distracting, and you can play a good portion of the game without them being thrown in your face or reinforced.

Trans Agenda:

• Character creation is 99% typical fare, with the exception that there’s now a non-optional pronoun selection requirement. You are forced to select preferred pronouns in order to continue, which includes the choices “he/him, she/her, ” and ” they/them.” No “zey/zim” or “clown/clownself” silliness, thankfully – at least not as of the release version. The game will no longer use female pronouns for your female avatar without being explicitly told to do so. As seldom as this actually comes up in the game’s dialogue, it would have been just as easy to never use pronouns to refer to the player character at all. Although subtle, this is absolutely an intentional encroachment against players who will not answer that question in real life because of the matter of conscience that it represents. 
• While this is more of a comment about the community than the game, it bears mentioning that when a modder attempted to provide players the ability to skip this dialogue question, there was immediate vitriolic backlash. Nexus Mods instantly de-listed the mod, and the gaming press spent several subsequent days tripping over themselves trying to outdo each other with virtue-signaling declarations that anger and hatred were self-evident in the mere desire not to be forced to select pronouns and that such a desire was objectively bigoted. Perhaps Google just hid all of the contrary opinions, but there were no apparent publications or platforms that considered the possibility that not wanting to promote egregious self-harm and the destruction of women’s private spaces also comes from a place of compassion for fellow humans.

Gay Agenda:

• Companions, which are non-player characters (NPCs) that fight alongside you, are largely optional but required for certain parts of the game. Some companions have romance options as you establish a relationship with them. Unfortunately, this isn’t like Total Recall, where they only ask you once what your sexual preference is. The game will repeatedly offer up same-sex romance options if your companion is the same gender as your player character. In one playthrough as a male character, the main male companion dialogue offered roughly five times as many opportunities to “[Flirt]” compared with that of the main female companion. If Bethesda really added a pronoun option for the purpose of supporting player choice, they should also add a choice that disables non-preferred romance options.
• Romantic relationships make up only a small part of the game’s story threads, but the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships between NPCs is about 3:2, and the heterosexual relationships are all defined by some sort of toxicity.

Anti-Capitalism:

• Giving specific examples would involve spoilers, but suffice it to say that when the game explores the subject of capitalism, every executive business leader is painted as a greedy, unempathetic, murderous sociopath who lacks self-awareness. At least when Outer Worlds did this, it was tongue-in-cheek. Here, it’s as though the writers take it for gospel that that’s what every large business is actually like.

The post StarField first appeared on Worth it or Woke.