I have begun a book on Henry Avery, which posits a theory as to what happened to him after the Gunsway Heist. Apparently? He became a spy. Maybe. I’ll keep you updated.
Having survived this past week, and all of the rain, let us see if, I dunno, I can do something productive this next week.
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage Review
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, in some ways, represents the best of what Assassin’s Creed can be.
I should back up.
In 2020, Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, a game in which you play as a Norseman (or woman!) invading England in the 9th century and getting involved with the secret war between the Assassins (or the Hidden Ones, as they were called then) and their enemies, the Order of the Ancients. In this story, our protagonist’s brother, Sigurd, on the way back from Constantinople, brings back a couple of Hidden One friends, one of whom is Basim ibn Ishak, who becomes an important character in the storyline, both to the historical Plot and the modern day one.
As he’s such an important character, Ubisoft knew fans would be interested in more stories with him. Someone in the company pitched an expansion to Valhalla about his backstory, though very quickly, they decided it’d be better as its own game, albeit one that’s much smaller than the past three they’ve produced.
The result: a game set in Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age. It’s the first game in the series since 2015 (!!!) in which you actually play as an Assassin/Hidden One for the majority of the story, jumping around Baghdad, investigating and hunting down high-profile targets in the Order of Ancients. Almost all of the action is relegated to the city and its surrounding area. And it’s good! It’s really good!
This was often pitched to fans as a throwback: not only did it move the setting back to the Middle East, where the first game was (albeit, a few centuries later, in the Third Crusade), and a back-to-basics approach, with fewer of the complicated game elements and mechanics. The castle of Alamut even looks quite a lot like the fortress of Masyaf in the first game.
Because there’s less running around in the wilderness, there’s some overhaul to freerunning, so while it’s not as precise as, say, 2015’s Syndicate, it is a lot better at that sort of thing than Odyssey and Valhalla. It’s loads of fun to climb, jump, pole-vault, and slide around the city of Baghdad, and I rarely had problems with movement, though it did occasionally happen.
Stealth is so much better than it was in the previous game. One of the problems I had with Valhalla was that there was no motivation to be stealthy, as it was very wonky, with enemies sometimes detecting you when they shouldn’t, and so it was always easier to just… you know, run in, axes flying. In this game it almost always works, and so sneaking around is doable even if you’re not a hardcore player–but it is difficult sometimes. It’s a nice challenge.
And to encourage the player to approach things like an Assassin, they’ve made combat much simpler, though also more difficult. Unity also tried to do this, but in that game, the combat is garbage and I hate it. Here, while it’s very difficult, I didn’t dread combat as much as saw the advantages of avoiding it. I didn’t ever die in combat! I enjoyed it a lot, and I didn’t feel like the game was cheating to hurt me, as in Unity. I also found creative ways to escape it, which was also fun.
Finding stuff is kind of difficult sometimes? In past games, using viewpoints will unlock what all the collectibles are in a certain area, but in this game I wasn’t sure if I had to physically find treasure to have it marked on the map? In the late game, there’s a shop you can go to which will mark this stuff for you, though, so I didn’t mind too much.
Eagle Friend Enkidu is not as helpful as Ikaros and Senu, though more than Synin. That being said, in the later game it’s common to come into areas where the game tells you to use your Eagle Friend to scout out an area, only for it to have a Marksman who will not allow you to use your Eagle Friend because he’ll shoot at Enkidu. That’s a bit frustrating.
The story, though, is why I keep coming back to these games.
I really like that we have a story set in a place and time I know very little about: the Golden Age of Islam. I like the authenticity to such details as having the call for prayer go out at certain times of day if you’re by a mosque. I love that the characters all slip into Islamic references, prayers, and greetings in dialogue, when in the earlier days of the series, all the main sympathetic characters would be inexplicably irreligious, even when set in a place like the Middle East or the Italian Renaissance.
And it isn’t as if this setting is idealized, like the Islamic world in this period was a utopia. It wasn’t; there was slavery, inequality, prejudice, and corruption. But that’s so much of history, and there’s a lot of cool stuff here–the House of Wisdom, the Bazar, the splendor of the palaces and mosques. It’s all so cool!
The game also shows the Hidden Ones/Assassins as an established group, when so many of the games depict them on the brink. That means that they’ve got communities established and a way of doing things, and the game gets to build on what we already know to show how the Hidden Ones are slowly becoming the Assassins. A chunk at the beginning is Basim’s training at Alamut, meeting other Hidden Ones and building those relationships. I wish those relationships would have amounted to more in the story, and I’m sad about that, though I do like that he clearly has different relationships with the different members of the Brotherhood.
Basim’s teacher Roshan has a lot of question marks on my end. Not because she’s badly written–she’s not–but I have some questions on how she knows so much, and what happened to her between this and her short appearance in Valhalla. There is a spin-off novel about her, which I will try to track down, though I sincerely hope that they didn’t shunt off all the important answers about her to supplementary material, because I hate that.
Other, non-Assassin characters could also use some work. There’s Ali ibn Muhammad, the leader of the rebellion against the caliphate, who is an ally of the Hidden Ones, even though they don’t like him very much for his own ego and brutality. He doesn’t actually have much to do with the resolution of the Plot, which feels a wasted opportunity, like he was put in the story to prove that the writers knew what was going on at the time the game takes place (the Anarchy at Samarra).
The main pitfall I’m afraid of is that I don’t know if any of these threads will be followed up in any meaningful way. This game, and Valhalla, set up quite a lot that revolve around a certain set of characters, and I cannot think of how those characters will be used going forward. Basim being important in the modern day storyline… well, what does he have left to do, if the next game is about feudal Japan?
Still, even if it doesn’t contribute much to the overall storyline, it’s a really good game. It’s deep enough to give you lots to do, while also being compact enough that it’s not overwhelming or all-encompassing. It’s rewarding for long-time fans, though not so deep that newcomers will get lost. And it’s loads of fun to play, which is arguably the most important thing for a video game.
Fantastic game. I love it.
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