Vidjama Gmaes Work

Ass Creed.

To start off, I have to complain. I wanted to play this game on my computer but I could not because Ubisoft. There was a bug when I tried playing with a controller where the camera would break every time I started moving. Incidentally I have not seen anyone else complaining about this, so maybe it’s so rare literally nobody else has had it happen. I don’t care, the game was unplayable on PC for me. I ended up playing on my Series S and took so many videos that I actually broke the Series S record feature so I only have video up to a certain point. I know it’s not the controller because I used the same controller on the console.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a nice break after playing several massive bloated RPG AC games with their level grind and ridiculous gear progression. Don’t get me wrong, I thought Origins was exactly what the series needed to reboot itself. But three in a row? I never got far into Odyssey or Valhalla because other games kept distracting me.

The big question everyone wants to know is; is Mirage really a return to roots? Eh, not so much. It’s definitely a call back to the earlier games where you had your sword, your dagger, and your wits about you. It’s nice not to have to worry about gear score, levels, and other things. There’s far more of an emphasis on stealth and surveying the landscape, not to mention planning your mode of infiltration. You can still kick the shit out of everyone, but it’s riskier against bigger groups. Oh and the game isn’t 80 hours.

Mirage puts the player in the role of Basim, one of the side characters from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla I didn’t meet because I didn’t get that far. Or I forgot, I literally haven’t played the game since the first Christmas event. You join the Hidden Ones because of course. The game takes place entirely within Baghdad as you hunt down the five members of The Order that are busy doing evil things in Baghdad. Planning world domination, poisoning political enemies, getting sand in the potato salad. Really sick shit. The only problem is nobody knows their real identity, at least for now. It’s your job to dox and incite a campaign of harassment against the members of the Order until they fall on your blade in a horrible accident.

Baghdad being the sole city makes Mirage much smaller than previous titles, however the city of chock full of stuff to do and you don’t quite look at the map in horror realizing the sheer number of collectibles you’ll be asked to hunt down. There’s a big investigation board that fills up as you progress, giving a good idea of how far along you are in the story and making things feel like they’re really wrapping up once you get to the end.

There are a bunch of little distractions here and there, like the obligatory synchronizing with the towers. You’ll be looting chests to upgrade your six or so swords and daggers as well as your outfit that carries its own bonuses catering to your style of play. Committing crimes in public causes your notoriety to increase which just means you have to tear down posters or give bribes to bring your wanted level down. And wow are the people of Baghdad dirty snitches and rats who will call you out to a guard at a moment’s notice. Half the time they start going wild when I definitely did not kill someone in their line of sight. Why am I fighting for these rat bastards again? They’d sell me out for a piece of bread. The kind with olives in it.

Combat is pretty simple once you start fighting. Enemies either attack with a bright glow or a red glow, meaning you can parry them or not parry them. You won’t be getting too invested in the combat and it’s incredibly simple. Eventually you’ll be able to jump over enemies with red attacks and attack them from behind. Like I said the combat is not the highlight of the game. Outside of your throwing knife that can be upgraded to dissolve enemies on death, which is one point where the game gets into disturbing body horror. Oh my god.

But there are some problems. This is a very Ubisoft game, meaning the tutorial will pester you to no end in some areas. For instance if you get your hands on skill points the game will never let you forget it by plastering the ugly ass number on the corner of your UI, even if you can’t buy the cheapest upgrade. And it will stay there until you spend it. Accuracy of your ranged weapons and jumping can still be a pain in the ass sometimes as Basim either targets on someone a half mile away in the other direction or does a 90 degree jump in the direction you are clearly not facing. Also you can’t turn off chromatic aberration and some other graphical turds and what kind of asshole does that in 2023?

My biggest gripe with Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the gear chest puzzles, which boil down to frustrating experiences in finding obscure spots to hit points that the game may or may not acknowledge. It doesn’t help when I’m pointing my throwing knife at the weak spot and the game is just like “nah you missed.” There’s nothing to make me care less about these puzzles than shifting around a building for ten minutes trying to find the single angle I have to position myself at to aim a throwing knife through the window to realize I don’t have any because I can only carry a few at a time. I hated anything to do with throwing knives being required. I warmed up to them as the game progressed, but they still felt like a big waste of my time.

But I did enjoy my time playing Mirage. The lower playtime let me finish the game before I got tired of it, the characters are interesting and I won’t be rude by unfairly comparing them to the peak of assassins. Ezio. All in all it took about 22 hours to finish and I got most of the collectibles. I suggest paying the $17 and getting access to the game for a month. I can’t imagine wanting to come back and replay it, and by the time you would it’ll be dirt cheap anyway. Or wait until Black Friday in a month when it’ll probably be $30 somewhere. That’s the way the Ubisoft rolls.

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