The core pillars of the Assassin's Creed franchise have always been stealth, parkour, and combat, all wrapped up in a neat historically accurate bow. While there are obviously many more facets that make up an Assassin's Creed game, these core features have remained vital to the franchise since its very beginning over 15 years ago, and they are features that Assassin's Creed Mirage fully embraces with its whole being.

Designed and marketed as a return to basics for the franchise, Assassin's Creed Mirage really hones in on all of these core series pillars, and does its very best to evoke that classic Assassin's Creed feeling, which some fans believe has been sorely missing since the start of the Assassin's Creed RPG era back in 2017. But while Assassin's Creed Mirage does feel like a faithful throwback to the series' roots, that doesn't mean it reaches the heights of the franchise's golden age, as its parkour still can't beat Assassin's Creed Unity's.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage's Parkour Still Pales in Comparison to Unity

Assassin's Creed Mirage's parkour is undoubtedly a step up from the last few RPG entries, but admittedly, a lot of that might be due to the new game's more confined setting. Parkour in Assassin's Creed has taken a bit of a back seat in recent years, with the RPGs having gigantic maps that often have a lot of open space in them, meaning that players simply aren't parkouring as much as they used to. With Assassin's Creed Mirage taking place in just one city, and that city being full of structures and obstacles, players naturally have to rely on parkour much more, and as such it feels a lot faster than those recent installments.

That being said, Assassin's Creed Mirage's parkour is still pretty good. Though climbing buildings can still feel a little tiresome, Mirage's rooftop sprints are often quite a bit of fun, with some flashy animations playing every time the player dives over a waist-high obstacle, slides underneath a crack in a wall, or uses a pole to reach an adjacent rooftop. Assassin's Creed Mirage's parkour pretty much nails what it set out to do, giving players the feel of the original games' parkour while adding in some modern quality-of-life improvements like flashier visuals and a more intuitive control scheme.

But while Assassin's Creed Mirage's parkour is definitely a step up from the last few RPG entries, and almost certainly an improvement over the first few games in the series, it still doesn't hold a candle to Assassin's Creed Unity. Though it may have gotten an abysmal critical reception at launch thanks to some infamously awful bugs and a bit of a dull story, Assassin's Creed Unity is now widely believed to be one of the better entries in the franchise - at least when it comes to parkour.

Over the last few years, fans have been revisiting Assassin's Creed Unity, and many have shared their amazement at just how well its parkour holds up today. Clearly one of the developer's biggest focuses, Unity's parkour features some of the most fluid animations ever seen in a video game, with the player-character smoothly transitioning between multiple different forms of movement depending on the structure or object they're interacting with. And while it isn't quite perfect, Unity's introduction of the "parkour up and down" control scheme led to the most intuitive parkour system in the entire franchise. Packaged alongside the gorgeously realized city of 18th century Paris, Assassin's Creed Unity's parkour is still the best in the series, and though Mirage's isn't bad, it doesn't come close to reaching those heights.

Assassin's Creed Mirage is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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