Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts. But there’s one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn’t shift with the stream’s eddies. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you’ll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. It’s an arresting sight, one of the many that litter Ubisoft’s latest open-world stab ’em up, Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Set in the years preceding the Viking-flavoured Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Mirage puts you in the foot wraps of pickpocket-turned-hitman-in-training Basim Ibn Ishaq. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join the Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against the Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad’s upper echelons of power. While both clandestine groups operate in the shadows and kill people, Ubisoft is at pains to stress that your extrajudicial murders are honourable, whereas the Order’s are dastardly. In part, this is because you do this on behalf of the people, though it’s not worth interrogating the game’s morality too closely, as, thanks to Mirage’s pickpocketing mechanic, you can rob the people blind, even stealing jewellery from the nurses working in the Baghdad hospital’s burns ward. Suffice it to say, murderers in hoods: good; murderers in masks: bad.
If you’re acquainted with the series, this may all sound familiar. Almost every entry in the series opens with a character getting caught up in the centuries-spanning tussle between The Hidden Ones and The Order – later The Assassins and The Templar. Mirage may even look like a regressive step in that it is a conscious effort to hark back to the original game, both in its Middle East setting and simplified toolset. You could even say it is less ambitious, as 2007’s Assassin’s Creed had three cities to explore, and Mirage only has one. But Basim’s adventure gains much from its tighter focus.
Recent games in Ubisoft’s mega-series became bloated with extras. Assassin’s Creed Origins introduced stats-laden gear akin to The Witcher 3, pushing you to harvest resources to upgrade your boots to get an extra 25% sound dampening on your footsteps. Its sequel, Odyssey, came with a shifting frontline in the war between Athens and Sparta, throwing your killer out of the shadows and into large-scale battles. And in Valhalla, you commanded a longboat on castle raids, collected materials to expand a village, and did many things that don’t fall under the cowl of being an assassin. Ubisoft doesn’t do away with all of this in Mirage, but what it keeps better fits into your job description of “anonymous murderer”.
With a gentle hand, Ubisoft guides you toward stealth play. Mirage has simplified combat, stripping out the various weapons the developers added in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, leaving you with just a sword and dagger. You can still take on numerous enemies at once, but it is easy to become overwhelmed, and your health – which doesn’t automatically regenerate – can be stripped away in just a few hits. You also have a new attack, Assassin’s Focus, effectively a superpower, but you can only use it if you’re unseen. By holding the right thumbstick, you can pause time and target nearby enemies, creating a chain of silent kills that play out with the tap of a button. Further enforcing the quiet life, you can only recharge this new move with undetected assassinations.
The big battles of Odyssey and raids of Valhalla are gone, but in their place is the ability to hire people in the city to help you. When faced with a target hiding behind the walls of a heavily defended villa, for instance, you may find a well-placed group of mercenaries willing to start a distracting ruckus to draw the guards’ attention, letting you sneak in unnoticed. It’s a more natural fit for the larger-scale combat of the previous games without moving too far from the Assassin’s Creed mission statement.
In returning to its roots, Ubisoft has made a more focused Assassin’s Creed, one that those with limited time have a hope of completing. And in setting all the action in a single city and its surrounding countryside, the team has packed its sidestreets with fascinating snapshots of life – such as heated hagglers bickering in the bazaar, musicians drawing a crowd beside a mosque and pigeon fanciers feeding their birds on a rooftop aviary. Ubisoft lets down the liveliness of its world with a well-trodden story, but after a string of formless open-world games, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a stab in the right direction.
