What if we put ALL the fun bits into one game?
Earlier this month, Ubisoft provided Stevivor access to a pre-release build of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a new instalment in the franchise that really leans old school.
During the preview, we stepped through three key moments in the story of new protagonist Basim ibn Ishaq, a returning face from the supporting cast of 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. While Valhalla’s Basim was an accomplished Assassin, Mirage takes us back to his first introduction and induction to the Assassin’s Order in Baghdad.
After a brief, spooky dream of a djinn that surely won’t be relevant later, we’re introduced to a very young Basim on the streets of Anbar, picking pockets and taking odd jobs to get by. Basim is immediately a likable, charismatic lead – he’s smooth and friendly, giving me a sense of optimism that we’ll continue our streak of lovable leads in the franchise. After a slightly awkward walk-and-talk with Basim’s friend Nehal – I kept getting a little TOO ahead of her, and had to jog back to get her walking several times – we proceeded to hop through the markets, relieving folks of their purses. The return of pickpocketing as a useful mechanic, as opposed to the pocket change you could get in Valhalla for bothering with it, is a great change, and later areas reinforced you’d be lifting more than just cash off people in time.
After returning home, a new job from the Hidden Ones themselves sent us to the docks to steal some documents. Moving through the area covertly, ducking or knocking out guards and exploring to find a way in really drove home that stealth would have more weight in the game, compared to Valhalla’s brawl-heavy approach. While I absolutely had a great time smashing my way across England with Eivor, it’s nice to feel a little less like a walking fortress again, actually having to think and plan a way through encounters.
After a successful heist, Basim talks himself up to the Hidden One who posted the job – played by the inimitable Shohreh Aghdashloo, whose throaty voice players may recognise from The Expanse or the Mass Effect trilogy. As always, her voice sounds friendly yet dangerous, making her the perfect fit as Basim’s future mentor. Jumping forward to just that, the next sequence put us in Assassin boot camp.
Still learning the ropes, Basim finds himself in the Assassin stronghold of Alamut practicing his leaps of faith and parkour skills. In an odd shift, the free-climbing of the past few Assassin’s Creed games is no longer present in Mirage; natural surfaces can only be climbed using pre-defined handholds, as opposed to the procedural climbing used in Odyssey and Valhalla that allowed you to clamber up any wall you liked. Given the more condensed, city-focused nature of Mirage it does make sense, but it was a jarring adjustment after years of free-climbing. More than once I found myself hopping at an impassable wall, because I’m so used to the go-anywhere model the franchise has established.
After clambering around the fortress and receiving his own custom swords, Basim finds himself pitted against mentor Roshan in a combat tutorial that walked us through the game’s denser fighting system. Timed blocks and parries are back with a vengeance, and with a reworked control layout to boot. The tutorial throws a lot at you in quick succession, and I found I was still having to remind myself how to fight with all the tools at my disposal through the later sections we played.
Brute force is not really an option in Mirage’s combat, where a few direct hits in a row can quickly spell death for Basim; if you plan to attack enemies head-on, you’ll need the skills to back it up in order to stand a chance. While you may end up becoming a combat demigod as you make your way through the game, a la Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s rags-to-wrathful journey, it’s certainly not the case yet in the sequences we played here.
The final sequence we played through jumped us into the district of Karkh, found within the greater city of Baghdad. Newly minted as an Assassin, Basim is tasked with tracking down an old friend in pursuit of an assassination target in the city. Kong, a trader from Basim’s youth, soon puts you to work tracking down his confiscated wares in exchange for his help. After some more practice sneaking to retrieve Kong’s goods (or in my case, blundering in and significantly thinning the ranks of the city guard), a new objective had us tracking down a target in a restricted area for lethal information-gathering.
It’s an interesting new twist that Basim’s eagle pal, Enkidu, can actually be targeted by enemies while scouting for you in Mirage. This makes taking down archers a priority in any infiltration, and makes the connection between Assassin and eagle feel a bit more substantial to boot, because Enkidu is at risk on your behalf. Rather than just being your spy drone who occasionally shows up in cutscenes, Enkidu and Basim feel like a team working to keep each other safe against their enemies, which is a great improvement to the formula.
Our final mission of the preview sent us to the Bazaar, aiming to track down an item due to be auctioned and use it as a way to identify and get in with our target, The Treasurer. Moving around the Bazaar gave us multiple avenues of investigation to figure out where the item was, where the Treasurer could be, and most importantly WHO they were. While there were certainly ways to go in noisy, taking the time instead to explore the quite large area, identify paths, entry points and barriers to overcome felt like a much more fulfilling solution to the problem.
There were items to be pickpocketed, conversations to be overheard, notes to be read — and all of them lead to different clues in the overall mystery. There were even paths I hadn’t considered that made themselves known as I progressed through (“if it’s being auctioned off, can I just… try bidding on it?”) that I didn’t expect the game to present. The whole sequence was engaging and exciting, feeling like an actual mystery for me to solve, rather than a series of checkpoints to run to.
At the end of our preview time with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, I found myself excited to see more of the game. During our time in Karkh, the number of shiny new icons on my map made it challenging to keep myself on-task to take down The Treasurer. For any players who get that tingly feeling in their brain from checking things off on a big map, Mirage is ready to provide. The more contained nature of the game’s map means every corner of the city has some new item, interaction, treasure or mission for you to check out – gone are the journeys between points of interest, because everything around you is interesting. I’m looking forward to getting to know Basim even better come October.
You can expect Assassin’s Creed Mirage from 5 October on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4 and PS5.
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Assassin's Creed Mirage5 October 2023PC PS4 PS5 Xbox One Xbox Series S & X
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