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 However, much like your high school history book, the game aspires to be a historical reference.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.

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