Just Like an Aging Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed Mirage Gets Back to Basics

By Garrett Martin | October 4, 2023 | 7:01am

Video Games Reviews Assassin's Creed

Just Like an Aging Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed Mirage Gets Back to Basics

2023 marks the 15th anniversary of Assassin’s Creed, and in that time Ubisoft’s historical science fiction franchise has become perhaps the most impenetrable series in the history of games. Not counting spinoffs, there have been 13 Assassin’s Creeds since 2007. Counting spinoffs, there have been 29 games in that decade and a half, and since several of those spinoffs have stories that directly tie in to the main series, they shouldn’t all be ignored by the completionists out there. (I don’t know, check Wikipedia to see which of them you should play; I certainly haven’t touched ‘em all.) Beyond sheer numbers, the central storyline running throughout the whole damn thing hasn’t gone off the rails so much as it never even made it onto them in the first place; the very first game started with a twist beginning that introduced a modern-day setting that was never hinted at during its promotional cycle, and since then Assassin’s Creed has built out an increasingly convoluted story about ancient aliens, millennia-spanning conspiracies, and an eternal war between assassins and Templars (including earlier secret societies that predate both historical groups), mostly within the meta framework of people from today interacting with a simulation of the past. It’s even turned the very real, very weird Voynich manuscript into a regular MacGuffin. Videogames!

Assassin’s Creed Mirage wants to roll all that back just a little bit. Initially conceived as DLC for 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Ubisoft decided to turn it into the next mainline installment, but one that was purposefully scaled back from the excess the series has become known for. If you haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed in, oh, 15 years or so, know that it hasn’t just become the most confusing of games, but also one of the chief poster children for maximalism as a design aesthetic. The last three games—Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla—have been especially defined by a “more is more” approach, with a heavy amount of role-playing mechanics crashing down on top of the standard Ubisoft open world formula. Their stories took dozens of hours to complete, and if you wanted to find and do everything they had to offer, you were looking at 100 hours or more.

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Between that length and the pure volume of games sporting the Assassin’s Creed name, this unlikely hit has become utterly hostile to new players. Trying to pick up an Assassin’s Creed game for the very first time in 2023 is as daunting and confusing as getting into Guided by Voices or The Fall: there’s no clear entry point, so why even bother?

Well, I would say you should bother because, despite all of that (and also because of it—Assassin’s Creed is manifold), this is one of the best series of games I’ve ever played. No, I haven’t finished even half of them. Yes, I started wincing every time one does a predictable, stereotypical Ubisoft thing as far back as Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. These games aren’t perfect—they’re not even great, except for a few—but their utter confidence and unwavering commitment to being exactly what they’ve always been is admirable. Inspiring, even. Assassin’s Creed knows what it is, and goddamn it’s going to be that every single time. Even when it tries to be less “that,” as with Mirage.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage wants to take it back to both 2007 and the 9th century. Set in Baghdad during a time of unrest for the Abassid Caliphate (which, spoiler, ruled much of the Middle East for 500 years, from 750 to 1258), it echoes the franchise’s original setting, when Altair was pranking around the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. There’s almost no sign of the Animus, the VR device that’s been the central point of the modern day storyline since day one. Mirage pretty much puts us fully in the past, playing as a member of a pre-assassin group known as the Hidden Ones, and trying to track down a shady cabal of five fascists known as The Order (not that Order) who want to rule from behind the scenes and who all wear different variations on what looks like Agamemnon’s death mask. (They’d totally hang out with Klytus from Flash Gordon.) Our guy is a poor thief turned neophyte Hidden One named Basim Ibn Ishaq, who you may or may not know as one of the villains from Valhalla. Turns out he was a pretty solid dude in his younger days, before he learned he was somehow the reincarnation of the ancient alien who inspired the Loki myth.

Assassin's Creed Mirage

That’s not the Basim we meet in Mirage. He’s a petty thief in Anbar picking off coin purses from all the swells in town, until a fateful night involving a visit from the Caliph and the wrong end of a knife. Basim splits town and winds up with the Hidden Ones in their secret mountain hideout, where he learns all the tricks of (proto-)assassination. After what amounts to a two hour (or so) tutorial (short for these games), Basim heads to Baghdad, which is where the bulk of the action goes down.

Baghdad is split into four main sections, each with its own secret Hidden Bureau, where Basim chats up his elders for storyline missions and chooses optional side-quests from whatever 9th century Baghdad considered a bulletin board. On the ground (and rooftops) Mirage feels like almost every Assassin’s Creed you’ve ever played; Basim dashes throughout the city, seamlessly climbing up buildings, using ropes to zip up to the rooftops, and hurling his body in every direction with little care for his own health. (For the first time there are poles throughout the city that he can use to basically vault himself from spot to spot; I think I did it twice in about 20 hours of play.) When Baghdad’s finest are on his tail, Basim has to not just hightail it away from them but also try to break their sightline before hiding and waiting for them to stop searching for him. If he breaks any laws in plain sight of others, his “notoriety” level will go up, and he’ll have to rip wanted posts off walls (or bribe a town crier) to get the heat off his back. This is all basic, foundational Assassin’s Creed business, and if you’ve been playing these things as long as I have it’ll all be second nature.

Figuring out who’s behind those masks in The Order (and, um, killing them) is the main goal, and Mirage turns that into a series of detective cases cleanly broken up into multiple steps. You’ll need to suss out what prominent Baghdad citizen is behind each mask, searching for clues by breaking into their homes and headquarters and ransacking their offices, and then assassinating them one by one. It’s all very straight-forward and fairly simple, but it’s an engine that will keep you going, if, like me, you find the idea of slaying your way through Baghdad’s bureaucracy to be inherently compelling.

Each Order member has underlings of their own you’ll need to track down for information, and after killing them and finding those clues you’ll know who to go after. So you’ll have to break into the stronghold of, say, the harbor master, and find the captain who has the key to the room where the harbor master is hiding, and then use that key to get into the room and kill the harbor master, who’ll then be like “oh damn dawg, you gotta go after the tax collector next.” You’ll do that with treasurers, local law enforcement, university presidents, I don’t know, maybe dog catchers, school board members, comptrollers… seemingly everybody in Baghdad’s government, no matter how minor their position, is a part of this conspiracy. Who cares: kill ‘em all.

This mystery structure makes Assassin’s Creed Mirage feel a bit like a procedural. Work your leads, question subjects, unmask the bad guys, slash their throats: watch The Assassin on CBS, Thursday nights at 10 p.m. Eastern / 9 Central. It’s a repetitive structure that works, and it kept me hooked through the end of my playthrough. It’s as ironclad a piece of familiar comfort as climbing up the tallest tower you can find, dramatically staring at the sweeping urban panorama before you, and then swan diving into a cart full of hay as an eagle howls out its proud cry.

Mirage streamlines the unwieldy, distended behemoth these games had turned into across the board. You don’t ever have to use a boat, outside of one mission where you row it like 50 feet. You don’t have to invade any fortresses with a squad of like-minded roughnecks. You don’t have junior assassins (sorry, Hidden Ones) working underneath you that need to be sent on off-screen missions just to raise their invisible stats. Your own stats are split across three short skill trees, and there are only a few pieces of armor or weapons that can be unlocked across a playthrough. All the RPG clutter that has beefed these games up to unsustainable levels have been whittled down, and Mirage is all the better for it. Best of all, you can polish the whole thing off in under 20 hours, if you don’t spend time on sidequests and optional biz.

With Assassin’s Creed Mirage Ubisoft set out to reestablish the true heart and spirit of this series. It’s not the best Assassin’s Creed game—it might not make my top third, even—but it’s the purest, most quintessential Assassin’s Creed game in well over a decade. In fact, it feels like the game Ubisoft originally hoped to release all the way back in 2007, even if the earlier time frame removes whatever minor contemporary relevance the first game had when it came out at a time when America’s endless wars in the Middle East were still relatively young. (This story is pretty much an all-Baghdadi affair, with no meddling Christians from the West mucking things up for everybody.)

The biggest problem with Mirage is one plaguing this entire sector of the games industry right now. This kind of big budget blockbuster—what the industry calls “AAA” games—feels so stagnant that it’s almost retro at this point. 15 years in and Assassin’s Creed Mirage is immediately recognizable as a continuation of the original game both aesthetically and mechanically. Yes, it’s a much smoother and more user-friendly experience than 2007’s debut, but despite the 11 (or 27) games and 15 years in-between, it doesn’t feel like much time has passed. Compare that to a game released 15 years before the first Assassin’s Creed: most 1992 games would probably feel archaic and unplayable to somebody who started playing games in 2007. The current model of AAA games took root during the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era of the mid ‘00s, and even though fads and innovations like VR, mobile games, esports, and games-as-a-service have all imperiled AAA’s dominance of the games industry, they’re still the games that get talked about the most by both the games press and the most passionate members of the games audience. And AAA games almost universally feel old today. They’re games made largely by and for dads, and that’s one reason why a game with as unique and particular a viewpoint as El Paso, Elsewhere feels so much more vibrant and important today, even though it explicitly references even older games from the early ’00s. Mirage might make Assassin’s Creed more accessible for newcomers, but it also makes this series feel exactly as old as it is—and maybe more so.

But hey, I’m just here to play a game. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is most definitely a game, and one that more-or-less does just what I expected it to do. Sure, it’s old hat and well-worn and all those other cliches, but there’s warmth in something this familiar, this workmanlike. When Basim talks to a shopkeeper in Mirage, they’ll often greet him by saying “well-met.” It’s a goofy bit of old-time speak but it’s also a fitting response to Mirage, which is yet another solidly designed, thoroughly enjoyable, predictably weird, unoriginally off-the-wall Assassin’s Creed game. May they make 13 (or 29) more.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage was developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux and published by Ubisoft. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It’s also available for Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way.