Assassin's Creed Mirage (2023)

Even though I don't understand why this game exist, I actually enjoyed it more than I thought.

But Ubisoft... Please get your shut together. You can't keep doing average at best games. You had rights for Star Wars and Avatar. Two big francises. Average games.

Assassin's Creed Mirage. You own IP. Again. Average. Meeh. Not baddish.

I'm gonna play Prince of Persia The Lost Crown next. My hopes are high this time.

I don’t know if this game gets better but it makes a very bad first impression. Stealth feels awful, combat feels awful, climbing and free running feels awful and the wanted system feels unnecessarily punitive because it’s next to impossible to actually locate posters you need to remove to reduce the heat on Basim. Everything also feels very unintuitive, something I think is the opposite I felt with games like AC: Odyssey. I really wanted to enjoy this because it’s supposedly only 16-20 hours long, but its initial impression has really soured me on continuing through with it. Disappointing.

And I say that having found something to enjoy in every AC entry.

Another game that drops the frame rate to 30fps during cutscenes. This is not inherently a problem in and of itself, because 30fps is fine for a cutscene where the player has no input. But it’s the way they handle the transition that’s the problem. Because the game is running at a higher frame rate than that, the cutscene starts at 60fps. The game then forces the cutscene to drop to 30fps. During that transition the cutscene is running at a whole host of frame rates between 60 and 30 (or 120 and 30, etc.) .

When doing so the perceived effect is severe slowdown and video stuttering. Once it hits 30fps it smooths out, but the points in the video when it’s rather slowing down or speeding up cause a ramping that is very noticeable and annoying. Star Wars Outlaws solved this with a menu option to unlock cutscene framerate, preventing that transition and maintaining a smooth framerate throughout. Mirage would benefit from such a setting.

It seems console players experience the same, noting visual stutter during cutscenes, but since they don’t have the tools to test what’s happening they seems to be left not fully understanding why a game that runs very smoothly at 60fps suddenly tanks this way (based on forum posts I’ve found).

People were nostalgic for this climbing and parkour system? People missed not being able to climb any surface, and your protagonist constantly jumping or climbing in the wrong direction? People are fascinating.

I've lost count of the number of times Basim has jumped left or right instead of forward, the direction I'm pointing. Or the number of times he randomly climbs a wall instead of climbing or leaping from objects in front of him. I really didn't miss this kind of climbing jank with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, and I'm amazed people wanted this back. I used to put up with it because it was all we had in AC games, and much of the rest of the games were compelling. But going backwards like this after the progress in the last three games feels awful.

I would have given it 3.5 stars if I could, but I don't think its deserving of 4 stars.

I enjoyed it as a brief distraction, and it is still Assassin's Creed, a franchise I really like. But I think I'm one of the few people who likes the spooky alien tech stuff in the narrative and there was little of it here worth commenting on. The overall narrative was not especially memorable, and both the villains and Basim the protagonist were a bit bland. Basim is much more interesting in Valhalla than here, and I would have liked to see more of how he got there, rather than just an abrupt summary at the end. He feels like a very generically good guy until right near the end.

Gameplay-wise, I think its serviceable but not amazing. It's a good utilization of the stealth mechanics in the AC series, but I don't think it iterates much on what's come before, more just polishes and consolidates.

Ultimately its fine and I had fun, but I don't think I would ever replay it.