How much mileage you get out of this is really going to depend on whether or not you have nostalgia for the early era of Assassin's Creed. As someone who put probably around a hundred hours into Assassin's Creed 1 because it was one of the only games my 11-year-old monthly allowance could afford, it was a fun stroll down memory lane. Until I gave up on the franchise after Unity, my Christmas mornings were always spent playing the latest Assassin's Creed, and in truth, I miss the era before the franchise lost its focus and adopted the 100 hour RPG format, where you'd spend 30 hours as a sexy Italian man awkwardly jumping around big cities stabbing comically over-written evil dudes in the back of the head.
And Mirage is, at its core, an homage to that era. For better or worse, it's an old-school Assassin's Creed game. We're finally back to stabbing a lot of very evil men and standing sheepishly next to some random civilians while a guard stares right at you and begrudgingly mutters: "hmm, must've been the wind." In all honesty, the fact it's so unapologetically a love letter to the first game and the Ezio trilogy made this my favourite Ubisoft game in years. It's short, sweet, relatively fun and refreshingly simple, something Ubisoft's obsession with icon-filled maps, cluttered UI, awful dialogue and repetitive combat has completely forgotten over the years.
Of course, the old Assassin's Creeds were far from perfect, and this isn't any different. It really lags in the middle, the controls and stealth mechanics are janky and the story is very much pulled from the conveyor belt of generic Assassin's Creed tripe. Listen, the futuristic stuff kinda went hard in 2007, but they need to abandon it now because I can't spend any more time listening to a medieval story of intrigue and mysteries where the answers are literally always "yeah, the magical space gods did it, lol." But it's a nostalgic little adventure if you too spent many a Christmas morning as a kid tucked up playing Assassin's Creed for an hour before heading off to see family and friends. I don't think it'll continue being able to coast off nostalgia alone if this is AC's approach going forward, but for now, it's a welcome little stopgap on the path to Spider-Man 2.
And Mirage is, at its core, an homage to that era. For better or worse, it's an old-school Assassin's Creed game. We're finally back to stabbing a lot of very evil men and standing sheepishly next to some random civilians while a guard stares right at you and begrudgingly mutters: "hmm, must've been the wind." In all honesty, the fact it's so unapologetically a love letter to the first game and the Ezio trilogy made this my favourite Ubisoft game in years. It's short, sweet, relatively fun and refreshingly simple, something Ubisoft's obsession with icon-filled maps, cluttered UI, awful dialogue and repetitive combat has completely forgotten over the years.
Of course, the old Assassin's Creeds were far from perfect, and this isn't any different. It really lags in the middle, the controls and stealth mechanics are janky and the story is very much pulled from the conveyor belt of generic Assassin's Creed tripe. Listen, the futuristic stuff kinda went hard in 2007, but they need to abandon it now because I can't spend any more time listening to a medieval story of intrigue and mysteries where the answers are literally always "yeah, the magical space gods did it, lol." But it's a nostalgic little adventure if you too spent many a Christmas morning as a kid tucked up playing Assassin's Creed for an hour before heading off to see family and friends. I don't think it'll continue being able to coast off nostalgia alone if this is AC's approach going forward, but for now, it's a welcome little stopgap on the path to Spider-Man 2.