Highlights
- Assassin's Creed Mirage is focused on bringing back stealth gameplay and emphasizes its stealth mechanics throughout the game.
- The assassination missions in Assassin's Creed Mirage are a highlight of the game and should serve as a blueprint for future entries in the series.
- Players have freedom in how they approach and execute their targets in the assassination missions, allowing for unique outcomes and making players feel like powerful assassins.
When Assassin's Creed first leaped onto the scene back in 2007, it immediately stood out from the rest of the AAA market thanks mostly in part to its big focus on stealth-based gameplay. While games like Thief and even Ubisoft's own Splinter Cell had been knocking it out of the park when it came to big-budget stealth titles, Assassin's Creed was on a whole new level, but unfortunately, the Assassin's Creed franchise seems to have lost that core part of its identity with its recent RPGs. Fortunately, Assassin's Creed Mirage is here to bring back stealth in full force.
Practically every element of Assassin's Creed Mirage has been seemingly built around its stealth mechanics in one or another. Combat is more skill-based, encouraging players to avoid it where they can and stick to stealth, and the layout of most environments embraces stealth with open arms. But by far the best example of this is Assassin's Creed Mirage's assassination missions, which are a true highlight of the entire game and something that should be carried forward in every subsequent Assassin's Creed entry.
Assassin's Creed Mirage's Assassination Missions Should Set the Blueprint
Assassination missions used to be the biggest highlight of the original set of Assassin's Creed games, essentially being the big set pieces that players work towards. After tailing some informants, pickpocketing some important documents, and doing some scouting, players would be given the climactic assassination mission. Here, they're tasked with sneaking up to a target, dispatching them, and escaping the scene, preferably doing all while staying completely unnoticed. It may not be the most exciting gameplay loop in retrospect, but at the time these assassination missions felt like big payoffs.
Toward the end of the original Assassin's Creed series formula, Ubisoft tried to expand on these assassination missions in some pretty big ways. Starting with Assassin's Creed Unity and continuing through to Syndicate, players were given several different ways to approach an assassination mission, ranging from multiple optional objectives, different ways to infiltrate a location, and a slew of varying ways to take out their target and unseen. But when the series underwent a refresh in 2017 with Assassin's Creed Origins, those assassination missions became much less of a focus, with RPG elements instead taking center stage.
Designed to be a throwback to the series' roots, Assassin's Creed Mirage embraces stealth fully once more, and that also means the triumphant return of large-scale assassination missions. Coming at the end of each chapter, Assassin's Creed Mirage's assassination missions feel like big payoffs once again. The basic objective of Mirage's assassination missions see players sneak into a location, find their target, lure them out, kill them, and escape the scene of the crime, but much like Unity and Syndicate before it, players have a few different ways to go about completing these objectives.
Assassin's Creed Mirage's assassination missions give players quite a bit of freedom in how they take out their targets, with most missions having at least a handful of ways to infiltrate the location, lure out the target, and dispatch them, and players can mix and match a variety of these different options to produce some pretty unique results. For instance, the very first assassination mission in the game sees players try to lure out an Order of the Ancients merchant from a crowded and restricted bazaar.
Players can cause a ruckus by starting a little merchant riot, or they can find a way to break into the Order member's office, and then once revealed, they're given free rein in how they take them out. Though the options certainly aren't limitless, they go a long way in making the player feel like this all-powerful master assassin, and this general structure should act as a blueprint for the series moving forward.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
