izigame.me

After a long time, finally an Assassin's Creed that does look like Assassin's Creed!
This game feels like it was made for me in all its decisions, looks like a plain old simple fun Assassin’s Creed again. This game is perfect for the gamer who doesn't want that 100 hour game but is just looking for something simple and to the point.
My wife just says it looks like an Aladin movie.
My wife’s boyfriend on the other hand says it’s perfect for the mobile gamer who has never played a real game in their life and also for those who have absolutely zero standards.
As a man who committed many war crimes in Iraq and fought alongside many devout Muslims I became obsessed with the first 4 centuries of Islamic history, so this game was my fever dream. The fact my boy Al-Jahiz (who low-key discovered natural selection years ahead of time) got a shout out in the game is incredible. My only sadness is not getting to see Imam Ahmad ibn hanbal!
Every time l've tried to research medieval cultures in the middle east, I found nothing but fetishised orientalism or complete nonsense. Even if Mirage isn't perfect, it really means a lot to have a game actually trying to show off an idea of what Baghdad might have been like without just being sexy bellydancers and evil muslims. The thing I love most about Assassin's Creed generally is the chance to deeply immerse myself in a historical period and setting. So I greatly appreciated finally returning to the Middle East, which I wish got more attention given that it is where the roots of the series were first planted (both as games and the historic Order of Assassins). I absolutely loved the aesthetics and design of ancient Islamic architecture and find this recreation of Baghdad so beautiful. The colours, ceramic tiles patterns, overall warmth, gardens, and markets are all so wonderful.
I’ve played every single game in the series, and it’s clear to me that Mirage is head and shoulders above many of the previous installments. First off, the game feels smooth to control and move about in. Basim is responsive, with a range of motions that make him feel fluid in any situation. The game is also beautiful, faithfully capturing the historical beauty, density and architecture of Baghdad. The city is always varied and interesting, unlike the others where buildings felt haphazardly copy-pasted.
The game is also enjoyably focused on a single city, which few games in the series manage to such an extent. Mirage also has a focus on the Hidden Ones and Basim’s journey with them, resonating with the series’s themes and ethos. The game is fundamentally about being an assassin, which is missing in far too many of the series’s most acclaimed entries (especially Black Flag and Odyssey/Valhalla). The game’s skill tree is streamlined, though it could use some updates to ensure every skill is relevant. Mirage’s parkour is also realistic without losing its speed and fluidity, which is a balance missing from the other games, particularly Unity.
Mirage’s combat is serviceable, but it is fundamentally a stealth experience whose moment-to-moment gameplay is on par with the genre’s greats. The Ezio games and Black Flag have a confusing focus on open combat and loud weapons like firearms which may befit a pirate but have no place in an assassin’s toolkit. Though Assassin’s Creed II does well in terms of its conspiracy, Mirage’s central mysteries - the Djinn, Roshan’s hiding of information, and Nehal’s whole deal - intrigue and grip more than those in any other entry.
The return to the old AC formula was definitely felt. I became addicted to the game from how much I was enjoying the gameplay. It takes everything the first games did good, without being so boring, and everything the latter games did good, without being so bloated. It feels like the perfect hybrid of the new RPG styled games with the old fashion AC stealth gameplay you remember. It is beautiful in its simplicity. The story was simple, nothing special, and the protagonist was largely plain, but I was actually quite happy with that. It was refreshing to just play as a (for the most part, before the end) generally straightforward and professional Assassin without too much interpersonal or emotional baggage, in some ways similar to Altaïr in the first game. The smaller contained scope felt really nice, I enjoyed having a few relevant tools to play with and approach situations. I don’t always like the RPG games mechanically, or gigantic maps full of busywork tasks, so it was very nice to have a game that backed away from those elements to focus instead on stealth and movement.
It had a lot of pieces that I’d love to see incorporated moving forward. Parkour was pretty good, stealth was good, combat was pretty fun. I also thought the structure of the main quests was done really well, or at least better than the other “ancient” games as far as it concerned uncovering clues about your targets. I hope they can keep that up while making it a little more organic in the future. I think it does a good job balancing the gameplay of classic AC with the RPG elements introduced in Origins. All around it feels like there's a little bit of something there for everyone.
I think there’s a future where they follow the II-Brotherhood formula, where one game is geographically larger and involves smaller cities and countryside, and the follow up takes the player to a capital city that is related to the region but was not within the region of the main game. The stories can be connected, etc, but that formula could really work as it did for II-Brotherhood, and, kind of, how they’ve done it for Valhalla-Mirage. Valhalla was a peripheral-to-assassin story that focused on the western/northern European world of the Middle Ages, and brought the player to major cities of the time in that region. Then Mirage covers the other, eastern part of the medieval Mediterranean by focusing on Baghdad and placing the player among the assassins for whom you set up the outpost in Valhalla. It could work going forward too!
I’m still amazed by all the press materials for a year about everything this game was gonna be and you still have people amazed how it isn’t a massive RPG game. I think that this game's campaign before release was probably the most honest that Ubisoft had been in years. Everything that had been shown or said turned out to be true and yet some people still critisize the game for something it never promised. To be frank people sh*t on this game way too much when this is the objective truth. The game is as good as advertised. It’s just people always keep their hopes too high expecting masterpieces each and every time. AC mirage is far from perfect but it’s an AC game which sticks to its basics and does a pretty great job.
People who are negative about it will be negative about the next game, it doesn’t matter to them. I think the issue when it comes down to this fan base is that Ubisoft cannot quell different peoples tastes in these games. Some want another AC4, some want another Unity, Brotherhood, and or Valhalla. We had several years of RPG games and Mirage was going to be a smaller game to pay homage to the older ones; this wasn’t going to be a blockbuster game.
I still think it’s going to be an underrated entry when people look back at this era. I don’t think it’s a flawless game by any stretch of the imagination, but so many things just perfectly click. Baghdad is beautiful, Basim feels seamless to control, and the simple formula of going from assassination to assassination is addictive. Even when the story stumbles, the gameplay helps carry the weight. In summary, Mirage is one of the best the series has to offer, and I sincerely hope that Shadows has some of what makes this entry so great. Overall, it has my favorite gameplay since Unity, and did a lot of the things I’ve wanted the series to do more of for a long time, so I found it to be a very pleasant surprise.
9/10