2.5/5 ★ – GothZombie's review of Assassin's Creed: Mirage.

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, despite its attempts to redirect the series back to its traditional roots, is painfully mediocre in almost every department. Its greatest consistency is that in everything it does right, there is always an inescapable looming fault to counteract it. Its historical setting manages to provide some wonder in its exploration, yet despite some inherently unique characteristics, it fails to capture any sort of significant cultural and atmospheric difference from its RPG predecessors (in fact, its world feels substantially under-explored in comparison to Ancient Egypt, Greece, and many other settings earlier in the series). Like its predecessors, the visuals are beautiful, yet without much flair in its world design, its graphical fidelity is rendered conventional to an absolute fault. Thankfully, the movement and parkour is an improvement over Valhalla’s, but when using that game as a foundation, there’s only so much Mirage can satisfactorily achieve when they simply speed-up that game’s sluggish animations. Even in its attempts to bandaid Valhalla’s uninspired movement, it overcorrects by making the player so sticky that it is not just frequently annoying, but leaves the player character with little natural flow and momentum — as opposed to something like Unity’s effortlessly fun (and stylish) traversal. The game also retains one of Valhalla’s other worst traits: the auto-generated cutscenes, which boast some of the industry’s most embarrassing character animations and lip-synching. Having cutscenes that are outclassed by some of the series’ earliest entries, let alone by games from over 20 years ago, is an egregious example of Ubisoft’s cheap quantity-over-quality manner of development in the early 2020s. Because of this, the story is never allowed to effectively convey the emotions and ideas that it wants to — consistently overshadowed by distractingly stiff and poor direction — and made even worse by the hit-and-miss performances from the cast. Admittedly, most of the script is already tainted by the most tired, paint-by-numbers tropes of the series, revolutionary concepts that once boasted a punk-edge that are now toothlessly regurgitated for the sake of brand recognition, but at brief intervals in the story there are moments of mystery, drama, and even a surprisingly successful twist, that would’ve done wonders for the experience had they not been carelessly kneecapped by the game’s crude design. These inept attempts to recreate elements of the series’ past also carries over to the combat. At the very least, the game does offer enough tools and features for the assassin-fantasy to be realised on occasion, and is even complemented by an infrequent quest that allows for a rather epic array of stealth, assassinations, and all-out battles. Yet, the lack of a consistently polished “cool factor” in its animation and direction leaves these recreations as less a faithful return to form, and more of a tragic reminder of how far this series has fallen astray. Thankfully, the game does at least retain the series staple of having a strong musical score; this time offering one that is an appreciated blend of both Origins and Unity’s styles. Yet, this stands as perhaps the game’s most consistently strong feature. The rest is fundamentally flawed right down to its desperate conception as a nostalgia-bait “love letter” not to itself, but to the series’ past. And if that isn’t a reminder that the Assassin’s Creed we once knew and loved is all but gone, then I don’t what is. Platform: PS5 Playtime: 19 Hours