Assassins Creed Mirage Is One of the Games of all Time

[Music] playing every new Assassin's Creed game when they first come out is kind of like binge watching a TV series that you've already seen before it's been a while since you've last seen it but you can still remember what's coming and what's going to happen and there's a sense of comfort found in that familiarity but you also more or less know what you're in for and there's a low chance of being shocked and surprised got your ass and really that's the case with this whole series even if they eventually did seem to run out of ideas and someone at Ubisoft started picking random themes out of a hat and then pairing them with this iconic franchise for each new game which is why I guess we started off with Jerusalem and Italy and then found ourselves in ancient Egypt ancient Greece and then the Middle Ages with those more recent entries either way though it's definitely become a series that's got a bit of a Personality Crisis you know if taking on Norse gods in valhala wasn't any kind of indicator but that's all about to change maybe with a just released Mirage the latest entry in this long and tied franchise and maybe one that actually might help to bring things back to its [Music] roots and I can honestly say that after playing it for 15 or so hours that it's definitely one of the Assassin's Creed games of all time that doesn't make sense tell me what you know the story follows returning character bassim who had a pretty big role in Valhalla and this goes back to his origins in bdad before he even became an assassin and back at a time when the Brotherhood called themselves the hidden ones yeah back when their old motto used to be silent but deadly this is Child's Play anyway during the game's opening bassim is just a lowly Street Thief pulling off side gigs for the hidden ones and like a desperate fan boy Keen to work his way into their ranks and he gets that chance early on here after he and his friend try to unsuccessfully steal an important Relic from some rich Tyrant looks heavy we'll never get it out of the palace then I will just have to take what is inside 20 minutes later driven out of town by the locals as a result of this he's then recruited by the hidden ones and trained by them which makes up the next agonizingly slow hour so of the whole prologue B time for combat training a prologue which is just kind of annoying to be honest considering they still feel the need to include this drawn out tutorial you know in a series which has been around Gamers longer than Mountain Jew has Ste I've seen enough but it does Also Serve its purpose in trying to establish the backdrop in the cast a lineup of mostly serviceable but kind of forgettable characters and apart from bassim and his immediate circle of buddies none of them really linger around long enough to make that much of an impact have patience I mean it's not like being Bros with the Vinci or hanging out with old mate Blackbeard in Black Flag let's just put it that way anyway eventually Basim is sent back to Baghdad with his allies to track down the key members of the order a group of masked figures that formed the 1% of baghdad's elite and a real bunch of sios doing nasty things for their own personal gain property stolen Merchants extorted foreigners tormented things like slavery murder creating AI art the works yeah really sick bastards dangerously sick people and these figures become the main assassination targets Al long we're trying to build up these fledgling bureaus around the city and really increase the hidden one's presence and J man imagine that an Assassin's Creed game actually focusing on Assassins for once [Music] the doctor is dead Ubisoft have been pretty transparent with the fact that Mirage is going to be much more of a throwback to how these games used to be before the recent entries where they turned into these full-on Alman history borderline fantasy RPGs and in a lot of ways this is the most stripped back rudimentary Assassin's Creed game they've made in a long time and as someone whose favorite game in the series is Brotherhood well that's kind of like J B's music to my ears please use your voice this means there's no male or female character options there's no meaningful dialogue choices there's no romance and no appearance customization outside of just what kind of colors the limited amount of armor you can wear is going to be there's only a handful of weapons to use as well and they're not level based or given these absurd Buffs or effects either I also appreciate too how one of them is literally just the sands of time Dagger from the original Prince of Persia remake which is kind of fitting in way considering the first Assassin's Creed was supposed to be a Prince of Persia sequel that's true making money is also a much simpler Affair too and in fact most of it is going to come from pickpocketing people on the street for their hard-earned trinkets a process which is able to earn you hundreds of dollar dues even within minutes you know if you've got the patience to get the hang of that mini game there's no ship combat either in fact there's no ships at all because the only city you explore here is Baghdad and to put the size of that City into perspective it's apparently around 2 2.5 km squ whereas for comparison the entirety of Valhalla was over 140 being that the city is also so small means that word is going to get around the b in of feris Deeds which brings along the return of the notoriety system where you've again got to go around ripping down wanted signs and paying people off to stop slandering you in public a mechanic which I don't even think has been in the series since the third game ah just like old times even the side missions are a lot more limited being mostly the contracts you carry out for the hidden ones and I think there's barely a dozen of these in total these involve going around assassinating people stealing something important or just protecting or escorting someone I will write a poem in your honor wa whoa slow down Egghead finally and what I think is the best approach of all is that this one is a lot more grounded in reality oops there goes gravity there's no more weird mythical creatures to hunt down and kill anymore like the sort of thing that featured heavily in valhala Odyssey and Origins your M this time around is a camel and all this made me realize is that we don't don't have enough ridable camels in video games these days he truly an elegant creature for a more civilized age there is a subplot of bassim being haunted by these gin creatures which is about as far out there as it gets but the momentto moment story in the setting is much simpler and even almost kind of historic and if you told someone that this was a remaster of the first game given the backdrop itself and just how basic the gameplay Loop is I reckon you could probably convince them stubborn bastard in fact there's even a setting in the visual options that replicates that original filter from Assassin's Creed ah just like old times it's kind of funny to me as well that they're calling this era for the series phase three like they're trying to replicate the whole phase approach that the Marvel films have it's even got a splash screen when the game loads up showing all the protagonists from all the various games which is kind of similar to that Marvel logo at the start of all those crappy [Music] movies but it does make sense that if this is the beginning of a supposed new arc for the franchise that they'd go back to when things were a lot simpler I mean even the skill points page is a perfect example of how Back to Basics this one is looking like an actual bunch of skills you know as opposed to a constellation of unlockable abilities that they had in Valhalla and overall I can't tell if this is a really good idea on ubisoft's behalf or just incredibly lazy but either way though I really appreciated a game that had some kind of consideration for my time and there is something definitely kind of peing about a campaign that really only takes 12 or so hours to get through you know as opposed to 40 or 50 starts to make sense when you consider that Mirage was originally intended to be DLC for Valhalla because that's what it often feels like at times it's like a glorified expansion visually Mirage is definitely a bit of a mixed bag and it's really hard to notice any kind of visual Improvement in a series that's had the same kind of art style and overall aesthetic for more or less a decade at this point it's also probably the result of all these games using different versions of pretty much the same Eng engine which means it always has that sort of Ubisoft look to it where things look acceptable just not always remarkable the best moments in the game are again during sunrise or sunset with the way that light can catch through trees or reflect off water and mud and again the overall amount of detail in the city is really impressive with there just being an insane amount of props and NPC activity to give it the feeling of being this bustling Metropolis different areas of the city all have a distinct theme and feel with the more prestigious and upper class districts being cleaner and more heavily started and look at that they even managed to add in a monastery based off fortnite [Music] players and then the desert outside the city is predictably Barren and lifeless I mean yeah I don't know what I was expecting there but the small Havens in the form of an oasis here and there adds some much needed color and life into these otherwise dead empty spaces there's no loading screens either outside of those moments when you have to fast travel and once the game loads in the whole city is your entire sandbox which does go a long way for that immersion Factor when you can run from one side of the map to the other in one sitting yeah just don't time it what is really distracting though is like the kind of inconsistency with some of the character models and I don't know if this was Ubisoft trying to be meta and having characters look like they came from the PS3 era but some of these really do stick out to me I know it in my ripe old bones that he waits for me to die a starvation or Worse go out of business you expect and can almost excuse random NPCs for not being super detailed considering them more just supposed to be moving props but if you're interacting with someone you'd kind of Hope there'd be a higher level of Polish and often even just for bassim himself like sometimes the guy looks really well modeled and has a high amount of detail but then at other times when he's in certain types of light he looks positively last gen it is unwise to judge someone by how they look you ever see that episode of sefel where Jerry dates that girl who looks completely different depending on the lighting of the room yeah well same deal I could go either way you're telling me this has always been a bit of an issue with these other games too where the Jer position between the way the environment looks in comparison to all these various NPCs can often just be really staggering and I do think in some regards that it's almost a bit of a step back from even some of these previous games I feared the same as to how it performs though well it seems to run pretty well with everything maxed out on the PC for me anyway and learning times were brisk without any serious glitches the only thing that became a real issue though and seemed to get worse the more that I play it was micro stuttering that's where the game would periodically just freeze for like a second or so during gameplay and this became really disruptive the further I got into the game as it started happening during pivotal moments and even during important [Music] [Music] gameplay apart from that though I had one crash to the desktop in like the 15 or so hours I played it and none of the main or side missions bugged out so make it that what you will wait a minute [ __ ] now when it comes to the game play mirage's got a much more sensible grounded approach to the parkour stealth and combat parkour is about the same that it's always been where all you really need to do is hold down a single button and then every surface in the game becomes pretty much climbable but for some reason this does feel like some of the most unresponsive parkour controls yet because I still find that despite it seeming obvious as to what I'm trying to do the game somehow finds a way to do something else entirely jumping where I didn't even want to as an example though I do find it hilarious how you can jump off a 10 story high building in these games and simply walk it off with a minor limp for like 5 Seconds still fast as [ __ ] boy plus I also find it really frustrating how you can't ever simply just drop off a [ __ ] Ledge in these games your character's always got to quickly grab onto the nearest object you can find to stop himself from falling just kind of made me realize how cuddling so many modern gabes have become here that it won't even let me fall to my death and all they really need to do to fix this is include a single button that lets your character free fall and ignore grabbing onto nearby surfaces as it is though you've got to hold down the drop button where you slowly fall from ledge to ledge which is so slow and can even outright compromise you during stealth moments as for the stealth well there is a much bigger focus on it in this game and it is actually kind of surprising how well it works most of the time with a lot of the areas you have to navigate being really welld designed in the sense that you're given lots of opportunities for cover into Ambush enemies even just that simple trick of hiding in tall grass and whistling to attract someone's attention it still works wonders in clearing out the pack what was that noise I'd say that I probably spent 70% of the campaign sneaking around and staying out of sight here and I often kind of forget that Ubisoft are the same people who made the Splinter Cell games so it's nice to see that they've really taken the stealth DNA that's part of their brand and injected it back into a series that solely needed it because the last few games man they really did lose their way in that regard what I appreciate the most though is that you're actually playing as an assassin first and foremost being a warrior second and the vast majority of the story is about you tracking down the various members of the order searching for Clues from the Shadows only heading into the light to finally strke them down you'll spend entire missions just going around and investigating Clues perhaps a little token of my appreciation will jog your memory EES dropping on conversations and pickpocketing people to make sure all your ducks are in a row come we talk us swear and then finally once you're sure you've got your man or woman only then can Bim go in for the kill and even then the hit itself gives you a really open-ended approach to how you expose them and finally take them down for instance for one of the targets you can help a nearby Merchant get back his confiscated box of anime and in return he helps you sneak into the compound in plain sight basically putting you right in front of the person you need to kill and it's just been such a long time since you can outright assassinate someone and kill off an important antagonist without having to go through like a 15-minute long boss fight that feels like a bad Souls like encounter just like old times most of them are just bad people doing bad things they're not demons or Gods hiding in plain sight they're just normal humans abusing their power who need to be brought to justice so to actually play the part of an assassin again it's a good feeling see what Avenues present themselves be reactive but patient and trust your instincts I will K you having said that though it seems they still couldn't resist putting in all those overpowered toys and gadgets which remove a lot of the threat of actually getting caught and discovered so you still got tools like the smoke bombs the throwing knives sleep darts are now even like a bit of an explosive mine that knocks back enemies and stuns them completely stings the nostrils combat is also Back to Basics where there being only a light and a heavy attack with enemies more or less using the same moves light attacks can be parried but heavy attacks have to be dodged and that's really all there is to it perfect par is going to often set someone up for an instant kill and eventually you can dodge roll over someone's heavy attack to hit them from behind you've also got a finite amount of stamina which drains from dodging and attacking and once this thing runs out well it's like trying to deflect a sword with a pair of oven Ms I am still a bit pissed off that there's no color blind options for the light and heavy attacks because both of these look like the same color to me initially which really makes it confusing for me to tell which is which but it's a mostly acceptable combat system which by Design goes to absolute [ __ ] when you're attacked by by multiple enemies because the game is trying to enforce some sense of realism and encourage you to not engage enemies or at least it wants to make you think that way and I say that because it's still far too easy to just drop a smoke bomb in a group of crowded enemies and then assassinate them all while they're stunned one by one or maybe hit someone in the leg with a throwing knife which staggers them and sets them up for an easy kill hold on you're dead it's also got that move where you can perform a takedown and then instantly hit someone nearby with a throwing knife for a follow-up kill and there must be some sort of unwritten law that says that this move has to be included in every Ubisoft game even aside from that like just pegging dudes with the sleeping dots can get rid of a few wouldbe attackers in an instant and then upgrading these tools makes them even more effective like the smoke bomb can be upgraded to more or less memory wipe whoever it hits or the sleeping dots so that its effects are infinite instead of lasting only a couple of minutes hey but playing this game on the Bas difficulty mode you more or less turn into bus and Wick and they really is no challenge to either the stealth or combat in fact it's actually kind of laughable just how easy it is to run rings around the AI hard mode on the other hand does make things a bit more punishing you get seen a lot quicker when you're trying to sneak around it enemies hit a lot harder during combat there's only a maximum of three healing items and they can disappear pretty quickly if you're getting into scraps and trading blows with enemies every couple of minutes but that kind begs the question as to like what incentive is there for me to fight fair and actually try to engage enemies with proper parrying and dodging if the alternative is I can just drop a smoke bomb in their face stab them all in the chest before they even realize and not even take a single hit Dam it what's going on got your ass either way though for people familiar with that whole Assassin's Creed combat Loop you know the one they've been using for the better part of a decade now this ain't exactly going to push your limits or capabilities as a gamer and in fact to make it even easier they've added added in this Focus mode which kind of feels like the marking system from Splinter Cell convection convection and to make it even easier they've added in this Focus mode which feels like the marking system from Splinter Cell conviction combined with all those multiple takedowns you could do in Arkham Knight you unlock this feature pretty early on in the game and basically how it works is that bus SIM can tag multiple enemies at once and then chain assassinate all of them in a row before they can even react in game you're basically just teleporting from enemy to enemy and it is so immersion breaking that it's not even funny the way the devs described this was that bim's movements are so fast that apparently the animist can't even keep up with him which is why it seems to glitch out and show him all teleporting around but this is the same animus that can somehow remember a distant distant ancestors entire lifetime vividly and replicated it perfectly but I mean look compared to the ridiculous amount of unlockable abilities and Buffs you could get in Valhalla I'll take this one with welcome arms and as the famous saying goes you can control the buttons you press so the game is perfectly playable with or without it [ __ ] if I had to sum up what playing Assassin's Creed Mirage is like at the end of the day well then I'd say that playing through it is like taking a warm bath it's not as life-changing or therapeutic as an ice bath and certainly not quite as comforting or reassuring as a hot one just kind of sits somewhere in the middle as a perfectly valid acceptable experience I've never given numerical scores in my videos simply because I don't know how you can really put a plain number on something but if a seven out of 10 is the okay score for a video game well then this is the most okay game I've ever played just kind of hard to quantify what the whole experience is like without me saying something that could be completely interchangeable for any of the last dozen games they've made but I guess at the end of the day if all you really want is a new location to sneak around in and more people to stab in the back well then I guess on some level that makes it good and it's still just kind of funny to me that the best way the Assassin's Creed series can differentiate itself at this point is to Simply replicate its Origins as a side piece to the Assassin's Creed game they're making that I am actually interested in the one they're making that's said in feudal Japan this will be a nice interim though again with every new Ubisoft game I cover I'm realizing more and more that we're less likely to ever see blood Dragon 2 oh now

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 425,673

Keywords: assassins creed mirage, ac mirage, assassins creed mirage gameplay, assassins creed mirage review, ac mirage gameplay, assassins creed, ac mirage review, assassins creed mirage trailer, ac valhalla, assassins creed mirage combat, assassins creed mirage walkthrough, assassins creed mirage theme, ac mirage combat, ac mirage ending, ac mirage walkthrough, assassins creed 2, assassins creed valhalla, ubisoft, altair, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: mRwhziiJFtQ

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2023