3/5 ★ – galpalkirk's review of Assassin's Creed: Mirage.

I like Basim. I wish the game was good. I was 42 hours in and had finished every objective in the game when I realized I could phase shift to chain assassinate people. Arguably the coolest feature in the game. I’m sure this had no impact on my enjoyment of it. The combat was ass and not only because I was constantly thinking ”WHY can’t I chain kill people!!!” (whoops). In my defense I never use R3 to focus on enemies in combat, let alone HOLD it down. My flight instinct is too great for me to be attached to an enemy in that way. I wanna move my camera and character freely. They also don’t force you to do it in the scene where they introduce the feature to you (as you are escaping after assassinating Al-Ghul). Meaning I didn’t even do it because I thought they just wanted me to use the normal focus feature which I hate to do. In any case the lack of variation in weapons and animations made the kills dull during combat. The story was nothing to write home about either. It sure felt like an assassin’s creed game. In the most generic sense. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other game in the series. Despite this I do think the ending sequence in Alamut was quite fun. These games have the most insane lore and I was having fun with that. The dialogue on the other hand was boring and stilted. The only dialogue in the game I found interesting was the NPC conversations you could hear from the guards in the background as you run around Baghdad. The way they talk like it’s just another day at the job was very entertaining to me. The shop interactions in this game take forever because you have to go through the RPG menu where you have different options and each one generates a new line of dialogue from each participant. Except your only options are ”I want to buy something” or ”I want to leave” but instead of simply launching into the store you have to go through Basim very suggestively saying ”Allow me to browse your stock” and the other person replying with ”Here’s what I’ve got” or any other variation of that each time. And many times the replies don’t match up with each other. I don’t know how they managed to make such a simple conversation incomprehensible. On the plus side I liked that the game wasn’t unmanagably large. The main story takes about 15 hours to complete. I stopped playing Valhalla after I had played it for 20+ hours and still felt like I had progressed maybe 10% into the story. The issue with games that large is that the main story often suffers because there is no pacing to it. It’s just spread out over a giant map. In Mirage I could focus on the main story and be done with it without feeling like I wasted 100+ hours on a mediocre story. The main downside with having played Mirage is that I now kind of want to keep playing Valhalla because I do like Basim and want to see more of him. Even though I’m sure that’s a very small part of whatever I have left of that game. But hey, I heard you can cuck your own brother as Eivor and get together with his wife so at least there’s that to aim for. Regardless of what I feel about any Assassin’s Creed game it’s at least always fun to assassinate people and I enjoyed Mirage enough to get all objectives and trophies on it. At the very least it let me go through the motions of playing an AC game even if it didn’t do anything new or interesting with it.