When faced with a target hiding behind the walls of a heavily defended villa, for instance, you may find a well-placed group of mercenaries willing to start a distracting ruckus to draw the guards’ attention, letting you sneak in unnoticed. The big battles of Odyssey and raids of Valhalla are gone, but in their place is the ability to hire people in the city to help you. Further enforcing the quiet life, you can only recharge this new move with undetected assassinations. By holding the right thumbstick, you can pause time and target nearby enemies, creating a chain of silent kills that play out with the tap of a button. You also have a new attack, Assassin’s Focus, effectively a superpower, but you can only use it if you’re unseen. You can still take on numerous enemies at once, but it is easy to become overwhelmed, and your health – which doesn’t automatically regenerate – can be stripped away in just a few hits. Mirage has simplified combat, stripping out the various weapons the developers added in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, leaving you with just a sword and dagger. With a gentle hand, Ubisoft guides you toward stealth play. Ubisoft doesn’t do away with all of this in Mirage, but what it keeps better fits into your job description of “anonymous murderer”. And in Valhalla, you commanded a longboat on castle raids, collected materials to expand a village, and did many things that don’t fall under the cowl of being an assassin. Its sequel, Odyssey, came with a shifting frontline in the war between Athens and Sparta, throwing your killer out of the shadows and into large-scale battles. Assassin’s Creed Origins introduced stats-laden gear akin to The Witcher 3, pushing you to harvest resources to upgrade your boots to get an extra 25% sound dampening on your footsteps. Recent games in Ubisoft’s mega-series became bloated with extras. But Basim’s adventure gains much from its tighter focus. You could even say it is less ambitious, as 2007’s Assassin’s Creed had three cities to explore, and Mirage only has one. Mirage may even look like a regressive step in that it is a conscious effort to hark back to the original game, both in its Middle East setting and simplified toolset. Almost every entry in the series opens with a character getting caught up in the centuries-spanning tussle between The Hidden Ones and The Order – later The Assassins and The Templar. If you’re acquainted with the series, this may all sound familiar. Suffice it to say, murderers in hoods: good murderers in masks: bad.Īn arresting sight … a dye factory in Assassin’s Creed Mirage. In part, this is because you do this on behalf of the people, though it’s not worth interrogating the game’s morality too closely, as, thanks to Mirage’s pickpocketing mechanic, you can rob the people blind, even stealing jewellery from the nurses working in the Baghdad hospital’s burns ward. While both clandestine groups operate in the shadows and kill people, Ubisoft is at pains to stress that your extrajudicial murders are honourable, whereas the Order’s are dastardly. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join the Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against the Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad’s upper echelons of power. Set in the years preceding the Viking-flavoured Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Mirage puts you in the foot wraps of pickpocket-turned-hitman-in-training Basim Ibn Ishaq. It’s an arresting sight, one of the many that litter Ubisoft’s latest open-world stab ’em up, Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you’ll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. But there’s one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn’t shift with the stream’s eddies. Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts.
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