When playing open-world games, especially ones with fun mechanics and enjoyable moment-to-moment gameplay, I find myself actively avoiding the main storyline, which will bog me down in dialogue and cut-scenes. Instead, I revolve toward the in-world activities and side-quests, which give me more of the mechanics and less of the fluff around it. In this sense Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the perfect game for me, because it has great gameplay and a completely forgettable story.
ACM is an open-world stealth action game that lets loose the player in 9th Century Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid Empire. Broadly, the player is tasked with a series of tasks such as stealing items, gathering information and – naturally – assassinations strung together by a story of mysterious hidden forces.
Starting with the positives, the gameplay in ACM is really top notch. The protagonist, Basim, moves fluidly through the world in some of the best parkour the series has seen. Assassinations are weighty and satisfying and the player is offered a range of fun tools to help bamboozle guards and reach their targets.
ACM has shed the enormous skill tree of Valhalla for a stripped down but far superior alternative. It has fewer choices, but each has a meaningful impact on the strength and abilities of Basim. Options range from improving Basim’s situational awareness to additional combat manoeuvres, but the game really hits its stride when you unlock the variety of tools at your disposal.
Basim can use a blow dart that puts guards to sleep, traps to knock them out and fireworks to distract them. Once they are all unlocked Basim feels like he has a powerful arsenal at his disposal, making it fun, exciting and achievable to complete his goals entirely undetected.
I personally enjoyed that most activities contributed to overall progress. Completing side-quests (“contracts”) yields experience points. Looting rewards Basim with resources that can be used to improve his gear. This pairs well with the tight mechanics, as it makes pretty much any engagement with the game’s world meaningful.
The gear system is dramatically pared back too, for the better. The player can collect a variety of armour, swords and daggers, but each can only be upgraded three times (to add perks and improve stats). This further contributes to a more streamlined, focussed experience – as opposed to the RPG loot chaos of Valhalla and Odyssey.
Mirage also looks fantastic, from the outfits to the architecture. Baghdad is lovingly recreated in a way that makes me really feel like I know the city. Sadly the same cannot be said for the facial animation, which suffers from the same static dullness of previous titles in the series.
While all of the above makes ACM a pleasure to play, the same cannot be said for the story. At best, it can be completely ignored and at worst it is boring nonsense. The story beats come quick and shallow, with characters introduced and killed off before any substance can be developed. There are very few characters who are present through the whole narrative, and of those most are uninteresting. There is no greater indication that a narrative has misfired than [MINOR SPOILERS] a character betrayal supported by dramatic music and cinematography that leaves the viewer thinking “Am I supposed to be feeling something here?” Moments like that are in abundance.
Perhaps the most irksome aspect of the story is that its entire payoff is actually just an explanation of questions raised in Valhalla (which I did play but have mainly forgotten). It makes no effort to give the necessary context for its grand finale, and kind of left me with a feeling as if it’s just been revealed that Vader is Luke’s father – if Darth Vader had not been mentioned before.
I’ve looked into the wider story of Assassin’s Creed as a result of playing Mirage and I actually kind of like it. It definitely strays very frequently into batshit sci-fi insanity, but it’s fun in a way that complements the efforts at historical accuracy of the main parts of the games – if deployed correctly. I would have had no objection to ACM being tied into the wider narrative, had it been done in a more inclusive and interesting way.
In a sense though I actually liked the lightweight story, as I could blast through the cut scenes (which have skippable lines of dialogue) and just get back to the killing. I appreciated the purity. It gives the player the tools and a fun world to use them in, and then leaves them largely to their own devices. However, there is definitely something to be said for slowly building up a despicable villain over time and then having the opportunity to put an end to their evil by your own hand – a device used in the series’ earliest games but only weakly attempted here.
Overall Mirage is a great package for a certain type of player (like me). Despite it’s lacklustre narrative, it works best when it gets out of it’s own way, gives an objective and the tools to tackle it and allows the player to just play.
JH 