Assassin's Creed Mirage review: Does rehashing the past succeed?
13.10.2023 - 09:37
/ radiotimes.com
Once a yearly staple in the gaming world akin to the likes of Call of Duty and (the artist formerly known as) FIFA, Assassin’s Creed has cooled its boots in recent years, and the latest, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, comes three years after the franchise's last outing.
That Viking-centric game was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and it was the third in the rebooted series of titles that changed the gameplay up and lent heavily into open world and RPG mechanics.
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While these games have their fans – this writer being one of them – and Valhalla was positively received upon release, it has started to receive more backlash from some as time has gone on.
Chief among the complaints is that the series no longer felt like Assassin’s Creed – a valid criticism to a degree – and so in comes Mirage, a game that takes the franchise back to its roots by putting the player in the bustling historic city of Baghdad and bringing back the focus on stealth.
The scale of the game has been considerably lessened (another complaint of Valhalla was how needlessly big the map was), and inspiration was said to be drawn by looking back at the debut of the series back in 2007.
As a fan of the games since the second release, the idea of going backwards instead of forwards didn’t appeal. Is rehashing the past, despite being a core tenet of the franchise, really the right approach?
This was the first game that I didn’t pre-order since I became an AC fan, and it was barely on my radar since it was sandwiched between the likes of Starfield and Spider-Man 2.
By the time this style of Creed game bowed out with Syndicate in 2015, I was ready for a change, and the idea of traipsing across another map doing the same kind of things was not one that garnered much excitement.
But positive buzz around Mirage drew me in, and it turns out that buzz was earned – to an extent.
To get the negatives out of the way, while Basim is a likeable enough protagonist, his story hardly feels like one worth telling.
It doesn’t help that the character – first seen in Valhalla – has strong links to the Norse mythology plots that weighed down the previous game, and made the DLC content such as Dawn of Ragnarok agonisingly dull at times.
Thankfully, there are no trips to Asgard on the horizon here, though. And, character origins aside, Basim acts like those who came before him. There isn’t much to him, really — he wants to join the order of The Hidden Ones, and soon enough he does just that.
It was a smart move to essentially rush through his assassin training, with it all being done and dusted very early on. But he’s charismatic and serviceable, and there is a fun energy to him that helps