Summary
- Assassin's Creed: Mirage successfully brings back the traditional stealth gameplay that made the series great, providing a refreshing and immersive experience.
- The game offers a smaller, more manageable map compared to the larger RPG entries, allowing for a more concise exploration and a more alive and bustling city setting.
- Mirage features a condensed skill tree that focuses on meaningful and useful abilities, avoiding the overabundance of skills seen in the RPG games, and provides a more streamlined progression system.
Assassin's Creed: Mirage proved that there's still life in stealth-focused Assassin's Creed games. While a standalone entry for now, the stealth-centric brand of Assassin's Creed has been receiving strong reviews from fans, and decent reviews from critics. Mirage is the first stealth entry in the Assassin's Creed series since 2015's Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, but did it pay off? All of this is to say, where does the stealth focus of Assassin's Creed: Mirage line up with the RPG styles of games such as Assassin's Creed: Valhalla?
Assassin's Creed: Every Protagonist, Ranked By Their Strength
All of the protagonists of the mainline Assassin's Creed entries are impressive, but who proves the strongest of the bunch?
The real question is whether the modern interpretation of stealth Assassin's Creed can match up to the RPG editions. This article will mainly focus on how Mirage matches, and occasionally surpasses, the three prior Assassin's Creed games. Here are ten things stealth Assassin's Creed does better than the RPG games.
10 A Smaller, More Manageable Map
Navigating Baghdad Is Much Simpler Than Greece Or Egypt
The RPG Assassin's Creed games are known for their gargantuan maps, with huge gameplay odysseys spread out over 60 hours or more. The stealth editions of Assassin's Creed are far more manageable, with maps that generally revolve around a single city, or a couple of smaller cities. This cuts down game time and makes exploration a more concise experience.
Assassin's Creed: Mirage is a love letter to the older Assassin's Creed games, with a tighter map that consists of far less bloat and more individuality. Baghdad feels alive and bustling, unlike many of the locations featured in larger Assassin's Creed games, due to sheer size and asset copying.
9 Stealth Gameplay
The "Stealth" Trilogies Are Called That For A Reason
All Assassin's Creed games feature stealth in some capacity, but the larger RPG games are largely based around combat, rather than the traditional sneaky gameplay of the Assassin's Creed games of old. Due to stealth being an afterthought, it can often feel tacked on in more recent entries in the series.
Assassin's Creed Mirage: How To Get Infinite Throwing Knives
Throwing knives are one of the most useful tools at players' disposal in Assassin's Creed Mirage. Here's how to make sure Basim never runs out.
It's truly refreshing to sneak around in Baghdad, as Mirage firmly plants the player in the shoes of an Assassin. Assassination, gadgets, tailing, and eavesdropping are back, and it's never felt as good as this to be back in the shoes of a Hidden One.
8 A Condensed Skill Tree
An Overabundance Of Skills Can Make Many Of Them Meaningless
To add a progression system to a game the size of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, there needed to be a skill tree that included some additions that felt superfluous at best. Filled with skill points to add fairly meaningless stats to Eivor, Valhalla's skill tree was bloated, to say the least.
Assassin's Creed: Mirage's smaller skill tree is far less focused on statistics and levels, and more so on abilities. It returns to how the skill tree felt in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, with far less bloat, and far more meaningful and useful abilities available after every character level-up.
7 Consistent Characters
The Narrative Takes Center Stage When There Are Fewer Distractions
One of the benefits of having an entire game take place in a single city is that it allows the developers to tell a continuous story throughout. Mirage includes several characters whose stories are told to the player consistently all the way through.
Games such as Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla had many, many characters, but very few of them had the level of character development seen in the smaller Assassin's Creed games. Valhalla, especially, had a habit of showing and dropping many characters after sometimes only a couple of hours.
6 Tactical Gameplay
The Consequences Of Combat Are Front And Center
With Mirage returning the series to its roots with a slower and more methodical stealth approach to combat, tactical gameplay has never been more important. Planning targets, marking enemies, and a stealthy approach was what made smaller Assassin's Creed games more immersive and made the player feel like they were truly in the shoes of an Assassin.
Assassin's Creed: The Parkour Mechanics Of Every Game, Ranked
Assassin's Creed Mirage is a return to the Ubisoft franchise's parkour roots, and it is among the best.
With the emphasis now returning to stealth and tactics, Assassin's Creed: Mirage takes the series' focus from enemy-based difficulty and back to approach-based difficulty. It adds up to make Basim feel far more lethal and professional than Eivor, Alexios/Kassandra, or Bayek ever were.
5 Combat Immersion
Combat Intensity Was Sorely Missing In The RPG Trilogy
Speaking of immersion, Assassin's Creed: Mirage provides immersion in combat that returns the player firmly into the boots of an Assassin. Basim is quick, light on his feet, and deadly. He also dies extremely quickly. This lack of bulk behind his movements really adds to the sense of immersion Mirage provides the player with.
The combat feels less designed for facing multiple enemies at once, and more like a last resort, with Basim being far better adapted to sneaking and fighting in quick bursts before disappearing into the shadows. A group of enemies often feels like a guaranteed death in Mirage, and the game is all the better for it.
4 Shorter Story
Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, And Storytelling In General
Seeing out the player completion rates in a game such as Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is an unsurprisingly painful task for players who are long-time fans. With very low story completion rates, many players never got to experience the great ending to Odyssey's story, partly due to its length.
Assassin's Creed: Every Game, Ranked By How Long They Take To Beat
Assassin's Creed is one of the best franchises gaming has to offer, but the different entries in the series take varying lengths of time to beat.
Assassin's Creed: Mirage returns the games to a more manageable 20 or 25-hour runtime, which is a far more realistic number for players to commit to. A shorter story also means fewer characters to keep up with, making the story far easier to follow.
3 Gadgets
The Tools Of A Hidden One Are A Joy To Experiment With
The gadgets featured in older stealth-based Assassin's Creed games were part of what made the series special. Think of games such as Assassin's Creed 2 with the hidden gun or the glider, or Assassin's Creed: Revelations with the hookblade. These unique mechanics made the games stand out in what was a crowded stealth game market.
Mirage finally brings gadgets back to Assassin's Creed, and they've never felt better. Smoke bombs, noisemakers, and blow darts all make a triumphant return, and it's easy to forget how much they helped make Assassin's Creed feel like Assassin's Creed. Well, they're back, and more effective than ever.
2 Less Grinding
Sometimes It's Nice To Just Hop From Mission To Mission
Many players will remember the huge forced grind that took place in games such as Odyssey and Valhalla. At around the halfway point of the story, players are forced to take part in open-world activities for around 15 hours. It was a huge stopping point for many, as the amount of repeated content simply got too much for some players.
Stealth-based Assassin's Creed games drop the mandatory grind and are subsequently much better for it. The completion rates for older games alone can attest to this. Forced grinding in a story-based experience is the best way to kill the momentum of that story.
1 Living The Assassin Fantasy
The Game Makes Players Feel Like Batman...erm, Basim
With Assassin's Creed: Mirage, players finally return to the boots of a true Assassin. The last three RPG entries in the series have focused on a pre-Assassin, a Mercenary, and a Viking respectively, and players have finally come full circle to play a true Hidden One.
The lore of the Assassin Order and the main character learning the ways of an Assassin were what made the first few games in the series great. Seeing someone learn about the Order and finally don the hood and Hidden Blade as a member was what made them so intriguing. Ultimately, it's this reason that truly makes the stealth games better than the newer RPG releases.
Assassin's Creed: Mirage
- Released
- October 12, 2023
WHERE TO PLAY
- Developer(s)
- Ubisoft Bordeaux
- Platform(s)
- PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- Genre(s)
- Action-Adventure
