Assassin's Creed Mirage received a bit of glowing praise from the die-hard AC fans who still had faith in Ubisoft's new design model for their flagship franchise. And I do not blame them for such a reaction -- a "return to form" of sorts following three lite-RPGs (with Valhalla having a particularly mixed reception to its open-world/exploration design) was wanted by MANY. But to me, the promises of Mirage being "classic" AC was in gameplay alone, for this game suffers many shortcomings in story-writing, quest design, and overall plot.

I suppose this is something to expect with a low-budget game that costed $50 (base) on release, but the point stands. If I was paying an undiscounted amount for this game, with the content/story on offer, I would much rather be paying around $25. Not to discredit the good things this game does, which it does do over the bad, but the fact remains that Mirage is quite below the standard of quality for Assassin's Creed.

Let it be known that I actually enjoy the newer AC games.

With Valhalla, I had a particularly incongruent completionist mindset to it that soured my own gameplay experience, so when I decided to play the game with minimal handholding, choosing when and where I wanted to chase the little gold/blue/white overworld collectible icons. This made exploration much more fluid, and less checklist-based, making the world of Valhalla feel quite enthralling. The skill progression system and gear system, though? Ugh... the stories of each arc were fun, and definitely not poor all the time, I will say.

The same can be said about Odyssey and to a lesser extent Origins, where I struggled with their rigid design philosophies. Leveling in both of these games is annoying, and in Odyssey if you want to remain on-level for the quest missions, you absolutely MUST do all side-quests in an area before moving to the next. And even then, you still might be underleveled. Thankfully, Odyssey's side-quests are of a good quality (I particularly love the apothercary questline in one of the areas north of Megaris).

This is all to say that Mirage sees all these aspects that many are split on with modern AC, and pledges itself that it will be a return to the old games -- to AC1, AC2, AC: Brotherhood, and AC: Revelations. As someone who LOVES these games to DEATH, I was skeptical, but when I finally caved and bought this game on sale on PlayStation 5 almost a couple weeks back now, I started my journey.

Mirage started like any other AC game, giving us a background story for the assassin Basim. It was fine, serviceable, but ultimately more of the same origin story that we've come to know from this series. It was incredibly short, but I will let that slide considering the budgetized nature of this experience.

After a lengthy segue into the world of Baghdad, Mirage formally begins. And after having played through the main story and 100% completed the game, I feel that I have a valid perspective to stand from. I enjoyed Mirage's core gameplay, but as for its different "arcs" in the different regions of Baghdad boiled down to the same exact mission design over and over. The contexts were different, but the manner in which you gathered clues did not impress. In fact, this game almost never impresses, outside of its visual qualities and the amazing detail of Baghdad.

Karkh, Jarjaraya, Harbiyah, Abbasiyah, and the Round City all have their own stories to them, but the methodology of uncovering each area's Order of the Ancients rep is, to say the least, incredibly lacking. Past AC games had flair to them when you uncovered villains. They had fun, memorable, and dramatic missions, like the flying device mission in Venice or Orcacoke in AC4, or all the amazingly well-designed assassination missions of AC Unity and Syndicate. Here, they try to maintain those unique assassination missions, but they come off as less than inspired copy-pastes of Hitman: World of Assassination levels. The methods in which you lure out the target are heavily scripted and are usually one of only two options, and the targets themselves have little (if any) character worth note. Overall, the story design, mission design, writing (especially for dialogue), and even the reveal at the end of it all did not combine together to produce the most cohesive result. To me, Mirage is probably the worst story out of all of AC.

Not irrefutably disastrous, mind you, but so same-y and so boring that it ends up being a disappointing slog through it all. I mean, I could give less of a crap about the Order of the Ancients already, but here they are in their most boring and contrived form yet, seeming more like an amateur group of bumbling egoistic and idiotic criminals than proto-Templars.

But the things that Mirage does right are great, to tell the truth. The saving grace of this game was its actual gameplay mechanics... whereas the gameplay of moving from mission to mission was disappointingly one-note, the actual stealth behind this game is SO FUN to pull off once you have a full kit. Permadeath mode is a MUST-PLAY for anyone after they beat this game...

The skill system is very basic, but I do not care about that after a game like Valhalla, lol. Simplicity is what I wanted. But the real fun lies within absolutely decimating a fortress of soldiers using your overpowered tools and assassination tricks. The different outfits you can rock while doing all of this makes it even more power-trippy. Even on Master-Assassin difficulty, I rocked house after slipping in the first few hours for a little bit. If I can do it, so can you.

And at the end of the day, I got the platinum trophy for Mirage. It was a hassle, as many of the trophies were either bugged or exceedingly unspecific, but I felt the need to master it because I wanted to extract EVERYTHING I COULD from this game. Call it getting my money's worth, I guess.

This simultaneously involved completing/gatheringall collectibles, gear, historical artifacts, and side-quests. This game's checklist-based collectible system is nearly the exact-same as Valhalla's, but it persists throughout the game in a much less obnoxious and intrusive manner. Collect stuff if ya wanna, but like I did with Valhalla, I highly recommend you take it as it comes. Unless you like forcing yourself to collect everything in an area before doing something, I recommend gathering them when you want to once they appear on the compass. Doing that makes the eventual road to gathering everything easier, as you have been chipping away at everything in the game up until that big chunk of the road to 100%.

But still, past the great core gameplay, Mirage boasts the worst story in the series. It's not shorter than Rogue, but it is DEFINITELY not as interesting. Its mission design, dialogue writing, and story writing is incredibly sub-par and the worst the series has seen. Thankfully, if you understand that this is a budget title, then the concessions in standards of quality make sense. But, if you really wanna play Mirage despite the VERY disappointing story, don't buy it for more than $25.

Here's hoping AC: Shadows brings back the great quality. I just don't want it to be another collectathon-slog a-la AC: Valhalla.