Assassin’s Creed Mirage is meant to be a back to formula and a homage to the first game; with the classic social stealth assassinations and parkour the series was built on. Ubisoft Bordeaux’s first game developed is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which follows the story of Basim Ibn Ishaq, a thief from the streets tortured by haunted dreams and visions of a djinn. Djinn/jinn are often alluded to in the Qur'an and stories like One Thousand and One Nights as sentient beings that occupy the space between the spiritual and the physical world. The story takes place during the Ninth Century Golden Age of Islam in Baghdad.
Basim meets Roshan and is mentored by the Hidden Ones to become a Master Assassin. He will journey to Alamut, much like Altair traveled to Masyaf to train to become an Assassin among his peers in the order.

Upon his return to Baghdad and the surrounding desert and towns, Basim will utilize his parkour skills to seamlessly traverse through the four districts of Baghdad. To the southeast, the trade region of Karkh, to the north the industrial Harbiyah district, and to the west the scientific district of Abbasiyah which contained the House of Wisdom, in the center the gardens of the Round City or Madinat As-Salam. Basim will seek out side contracts, tools, and assassination targets at the Assassin’s bureaus. The menu in the game will allow Basim to chart out his investigation by collecting vital clues and assembling them in a chart that makes investigations and missions easy to track based on district and targets. It is through this research that Basim is able to stalk and identify his targets before going in for the kill. Mirage also presents the return of social stealth, Basim will have many skills and tools that will allow him to stealthily take down targets using both new and familiar abilities from the series’ past.

Basim will utilize many tools that are incredibly useful for maintaining stealth, ditching pursuit from guards, or eliminating enemies either in combat or in stealth. You will be able to freely choose which tool you unlock, so picking a tool that suits your skills and playstyle will be key for early gameplay. I’ll start with the most useful tools I found helpful in the game. The throwing knife is particularly useful in taking out enemies when targeting the head. The torch will allow you to illuminate dark caves and underground corridors, or light things on fire and cause explosions. The smoke bomb is the perfect tool to confuse enemies from a quick escape or distraction, but can also be upgraded for more offensive capabilities. It can easily become the most powerful tool by extending the duration and circumference of the smoke area, because of this you can instantly assassinate each target within the smoke cloud. So it’s perfect when you’re outmatched and don’t want to run away. Some gadgets will be able to cause fear and make your enemies flee, or modified to be explosive/flammable. The noisemaker is a handy tool for distracting enemies with a small sparkling explosive. The trap is a tool that can be placed and act as a proximity mine essentially knocking down enemies for long periods of time that can also be modified for deadly use. The final tool is the blowdart, which can put targets to sleep from range. This is far less useful than the throwing knife but can be upgraded to enrage enemies into attacking their own people or simply poison them. Each tool has its own special use and once I had them all, I felt like a true Master Assassin when I had them upgraded and I was capable of anything.

Some might think that after upgrading skills on the skill tree, which is mostly for extra tool capacity, more focus bars, more tool slots, and the Chain Assassination ability the game would have you overpowered. This is not true as Basim was designed to be more of an Assassin than a Spartan Warrior or Viking Warrior. While he can hold his own in combat by dodging, parrying for a follow up attack capable of killing some enemies, it only takes a few hits to cut through Basim’s leather gear and cloth robes and render him dead. The Chain Assassination ability allows Basim to stealth kill one target then press a button to instantly throw a knife at the next target. Perfect for taking out pairs of guards on patrol or a quick and powerful way to enter combat with multiple enemies from a position of stealth. Using the focus bars that you upgrade via the skill tree, Basim can perform chain kills using the Assassin Focus ability. The more bars you have, the more enemies you can kill in sequence. Think Splinter Cell Conviction and Blacklist’s “Mark and Execute” ability. The player can mark targets (up to five when fully upgraded) and then he will quickly dispatch them, teleporting around as the Animus glitches to render his speed and ferocity at times. For me, this breaks the realism that I enjoy from parts of the series but is nevertheless really cool to see in action.

Now that I’ve covered some of the overall features and ideas explored in the game, let’s get into what makes this game special and what perhaps holds it back in some ways. First off I think the game is graphically held back by being spread across last generation platforms. The game looks and runs fine but in the past each Assassin’s Creed game was a showcase of incredible graphics, gameplay, and densely packed worlds to explore. The game does return to form with social stealth being central to gameplay. It is nice to see the return of stealth based assassinations for a game named Assassin’s Creed, other entries have lost sight of the core of the gameplay and have turned into Pirate/Spartan/Viking simulators over Assassin gameplay. This game ditches the complex RPG mechanics that level gate enemies and areas and allows you to stealthily assassinate whatever enemy you can just as the classic games allow. Sadly there are only a few animations for combat and assassinations and they are not as smooth as previous games. Enemies will often pause and allow Basim to strike the hidden blade into them. The combat is sadly not a return to form and is pretty much what you can expect from Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla just slightly modified to be a little less hack and slash. Perfectly timed dodges and parries can open up instakill opportunities for Basim or a chance to get in some key slashes. The older Assassin’s Creed games allowed the player to time their parries and attacks into smooth animations eliminating enemies just as Batman in the Arkham series or Talion in the Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor/War series. Unfortunately the game does not offer an evolution of more combat but feels like a slight modification of the newer games bland Soulslike combat.

Ninth Century Baghdad is a beautiful city and time period to explore from the markets, rivers, deserts, and towering structures. The city is perfect for parkour across the rooftops, swinging from beams, sliding over/under things, and climbing tall towers. There are new interactions like pulling down scaffolding to create a barrier between Basim and the guards chasing him. There is also a pole vault that can be done between rooftops. Sadly, these interactions are few and far between so I only did it a handful of times during a single playthrough.

The codex highlights the culture of Baghdad, serving as a resource to learn about the history of the people, locations, poetry, literature, and art showcasing the Golden Age of Islam. During one of the missions, Basim will meet a poet in the House of Wisdom named Arib Al-Ma'muniyya. Arib is a famous artist known for being a poet, composer, singer, and courtesan. This opens up the opportunity to explore the art and culture of the era from poetry, art, music and more. I found myself excited to discover all the historic locations and unlock the historical context in the codex and learn more about Baghdad and its people, which for a Catholic raised American Palestinian, was quite an exciting education on Islam.

Basim is an interesting character and his journey from Street Rat to Master Assassin was exciting and a dream come true for someone like me to enjoy in Assassin’s Creed Mirage. I feel like the game rushed a lot of the storyline to be more about executing targets than about learning who Basim is. In other games we lived Ezio Auditore da Firenze’s life, from the dull moments, the vengeance, the laughter, the romance, the fun, all of it. Now we did get to experience that over three games but my point stands. Basim goes from zero to hero in a short cutscene and some short training sequences. I wanted to explore his life in the slums, his upbringing, more than just joining the creed out of desperation. The djinn could have been used more as a frightening gameplay mechanic, stalking and haunting the player. We don’t necessarily understand why this djinn is tormenting Basim and the story does little to explain this. As a result of all this we don’t learn much about his personality other than he can be charming and brash at times. He feels like he is underutilized and capable of so much more, yet no one manages to see that in him. I still enjoy him as a character but would have loved more depth for him and the overall story.

There is no modern day story happening in this game, which since Desmond is no longer involved feels very irrelevant and disappointing for those that enjoyed the science fiction and modern day storytelling of the early games.

This is a promising step forward for the franchise and likely an experimentation into would these classic mechanics that honor the original Assassin’s Creed be something players are interested in now? I say 100% yes, but this falls as a halfhearted attempt at what could be an incredible reinvention and a massive step forward for the series. That being said, I played the game to completion, explored every location and all the side quests, and I enjoyed every bit of it. The game was of the appropriate length and size and was quite refreshing in a world full of open world fatigue. I highly recommend Assassin’s Creed Mirage even though it falls a little short of my expectations.

I’m including a shelf with some of my personal screenshots to share my experience with Assassin’s Creed Mirage below. I hope you enjoy it. As always share your thoughts in the comments below.