https://gamerant.com/assassins-creed-mirage-reviews-scores-roundup-metacritic/
The reviews are in for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, making it one of the lowest-rated titles in the long-running series.
The rating is 77. 77 is the lowest rating a game in the main series of Assassins Creed has received. This means the other games have 78 or up. How in the world is this considered bad? For an entire fucking franchise? Not a fan of the series or anything but I just think it's ridiculous how this is an actual headline! Don't the journalists have nothing else to report on regarding video games and the industry? Layoffs? Toxic people and business practices? Microtransactions?
Nah, instead they go: "pretty good (but not great) game is slightly less good than other pretty good (but not great) games in an overall pretty good (but not great) franchise." Ugh!
Games are rated on a 7-10 scale though where 7 is mediocre and 8 is passable.
9 is good and 10 is great.
So between not completely unplayable and good enough is their score
The headline says it’s the lowest-rated game in the series, not that Mirage is a bad game. The article bases itself on a single data point, which leaves a lot of room for interpreting. Which the author does a little.
But it’s nowhere mentioned or claimed that Mirage is a badly-reviewed game or doesn’t sell well. It’s just the lowest entry so far. And that’s what everybody should take away from that headline, followed by ignoring the hollow clickbaity article altogether.
It's not even the lowest so far, it's the third lowest. Unity and Rogue where rated lower, and I get that. unity was a buggy mess on launch but is my personal least favorite even after they fixed it, and Rogue was basically a black flag expansion, which was fine. I don't think that deserved to be so low cause I found the story great, an assassin defecting to the Templar was exactly the sort of story the series needed to show, that not everyone sees the assassins as the good guys.
Mirage so far is.. ok. I've done a fair share of exploring the map and I can say it's probably only the size of one of Valhallas expansions, which is fine, we paid a fraction of the price they charge for a full assassins creed game. Some assets are reused from Origins, which is fine, we're in the desert again. I'm not sure if it's just the shock of going from a fully leveled Eivor to a skilless unequipped Basim, which I experienced the past 2 games, or if this is generally harder than previous entries. Thr fact they brought back notoriety mechanic that was missing from valhalla, and also brought back the mercenaries hunting you from Odyssey, AND the fact that when you die your notoriety doesn't reduce, and while they brought back the stupid wanted poster mechanic, they are few and far between to rip down, and you need special tokens to bribe the town criers.... I'm liking the new challenge, keeps me on edge, makes me really think about whether I should kill a guard or sneak by.
I thought AC Valhalla was garbage. Honest rating would be 20% as a AC game and 40% as a viking combat game.
This just tells us the rating scheme sucks because a good chunk of the AC series is hot garbage. Most of them since Unity have been mediocre at best.
Origins, odyssey and valhalla have all been good games. Not necessarily assassins creed but good games anyways.
To be fair, just because one article exists doesn't mean other articles can't exist. Not every article has to be of equal importance.
I watched a review video that was praising everything in this game. "Finally another good AC." "The vombat is fun and challenging." "Looks fantastic on the new engine."
Then i watched just some guy playing it and it honestly looks janky as hell. He always got stuck while parkouring, the parkour itself seems like the same press one button to do parkour, but this time it's really jank. There is no weapon variety at all. The combat looks really bad, it looks like the least fun combat in all these kind of games. The world looks really good, but the people in the world the jank ass AI and NPC doing weird shit while looking pretty Bethesda like. I haven't played it, but how this got a 77 or anything above a 5/10 is beyond me.
I mean, valhalla did have every weapon under the sun, sure, but before unity you couldn't even permanently switch your weapon. Swords and hidden blade are all you had, other than utility items like maybe a gun or bombs. In some earlier games you could disarm your enemies and use their weapons, but other than that it was Swords. So with this being a 'return to classic AC' it's actually chill that there's only a couple different Swords and daggers to equip, rather than an arsenal. It's just not what this game was going for. Combat does take a bit to get used to coming from valhalla but I wouldn't say it's 'janky' it's just far more tactical. In valhalla or Odyssey you could murder entire fortresses of dudes like it was nothing in your combat gear, but this is going back to stealth. You wanna take out guys stealthily cause combat is much harder. You need to do your strikes precisely, parry and dodge at the right times, choose which envies to attack in order of threat and ability to take them out. I like it.
There are prince of persia skins for your character and weapons in this, if that’s any consolation to you
Haha same here! I'd much rather have seen a game closer to the Sands of Time games then for them to go back to their 2D roots.
Totally agree, for its day Sands of Time was literally one of the best games you could play.
From what I saw watching a few streams it seemed fine, closer to the original games but still having that slight off feeling of modern Ubisoft games. Seems like a good game on sale for $30
Parkour looks like it's taken at least 3 steps backwards. I always found it so frustrating to repeatedly press up against a wall instead of running up it, or leaping across little gaps instead of just walking the railing, or doing the little run up the wall and fall back down even when it's clearly a climbable surface. It was slowly becoming less common in each game, but this one just looks like pure regression in terms of movement.
I don’t know how they managed to perfect the parkour in Unity then proceed to discard that system for inferior ones in every game since
Perfected is a stretch. I still play unity a lot for the black boxes, and it has a ton of misreading input issues, but they were definitely on the right track with beautiful animations and good transitions. The problem with Mirage is that its literally just Valhalla under the hood, having been originally planned as a dlc campaign. Valhalla being a viking sim with the worst fucking stealth system in the entire series and no parkour to speak of in rural Viking Age England.
This game is a huge miss for Ubisoft and might actually sink them as a whole. They're currently back against the wall financially speaking, having canceled a plethora of games to save money, and cannot afford to be fucking up their flagship titles this bad. Wish I would miss them, the early Ubi games like R6 Vegas, Splinter Cell, The Settlers, and Ezio trilogy basically shaped my childhood.
I'm really enjoying it. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it the most fun I've had in AC since black flag? Probably yes.
And considering it's not even a full priced game, even better!
Did you like Unity? Because I’m in the minority that didn’t like Unity. Love to hear someone’s opinion who says “most fun since Black Flag”, man that game was awesome
I need to keep a save file around 10 hours into Black Flag. That game is fun once you’re free roaming with a somewhat upgraded ship but man is it excruciating to get to that point
Any updates to your experience? I'm interested in getting it but I'm wary they've made some bad additions or half baked elements.
Is it truly a throwback to the older games?
Why no love for Valhalla?
I'm playing out of sync. I did Valhalla Odyssey and now I'm playing through origin. I enjoyed a lot of Valhalla. I can see how they tweaked and polished from origins. I think I preferred the scenery in Odyssey and maybe the story and people. Valhalla had best fighting and slo mo. Graphics were outstanding and voice acting was pristine by Valhalla.
Valhalla is a nice action game but it’s no AC game. Especially the stealth part and name-sake Assassination gameplay take up too little space. And the skill tree they copied from PoE is just ridiculously overloaded - symptomatic for Ubisoft‘s approach to the whole game: it’s so convoluted.
I really enjoyed Valhalla but as an AC entry it disappoints.
The first 10 hours or so of Valhalla are great too. Learning the new systems and making your first parts of the settlement are pretty engaging. It's the other 60+ hours that become a slog. You quickly realise that the main quest chain that was kinda outstaying its welcome is what you can expect for every single kingdom. Yeah, there's some variety, but they're really a slog to get through. The settlement upgrades were pretty good, but your mainly unlock things that would have been 'free' in other games. As the gear system leans towards microtransactions nothing you unlock is really mind-blowing. Especially as you'll have to raid yet a other generic copy-and-paste monastery for the materials to upgrade.
If we look back to a game like ACII's Villa upgrades, they provided access to things that would be behind a perk point today. I remember grinding out my capacity upgrades etc. There was direct tie from my effort to the upgrade. With Valhalla, and the other recent games, I feel like I've got to gring out the lootbox/heka chest(or whatever the premium currency is in a particular game)
That's not to say Mirage is perfect. I really hate the token system and it feels so tacked on. I am enjoying being stealthy again though. I used a cheat trainer to add in one hit kills to Odyssey a while back and it improved the game so much.
Oh there's no stealth. I basically just run around melee fighting everything. Valhalla was great for double spearing. Odyssey was a giant club and origin seems to be swordfish.
Fair enough
Valhalla has easily the worst combat of the three full on RPG AC games. Long attack animations every other time you finish an enemy off whilst all the others stand there patiently, for example.
Then there's the unbelievably terrible barred doors that are absolutely everywhere (they are in mirage as well) which is the shittest, lowest effort puzzle they could have ever thought of and they repeated it every fifteen feet. Good luck maintaining stealth whilst you have to go back outside and circle the building looking for a hole in the wall to shoot an arrow through in a completely plausible and not at all deliriously stupid way.
Then there's the offensively shallow side missions, the barely having anything to do with assassins for the vast majority of the shockingly bloated game, the sheer bugginess (tall grass used to disappear when I got close to it, all the way through the game), spending twenty minutes finding a chest that you spotted with your bird only to discover it's impossible to access until you're on or have completed a specific story mission. Having to wait for your raiders to open bloody chests, despite them being buggy idiots who will stand around ignoring you for five seconds before moving towards it as slowly as possible - all this, including three horrendous barred doors, in the middle of a Viking raid, because a Viking is incapable of breaking open a door somehow. Awful.
I love assassin's creed, I've played all of them. Valhalla ruined the RPGs.
Yeah I didn't mind that. Probably would have preferred to turn off the finishers.
Barred doors are awful. I agree. Bugs are bugs. Sane thing all Ubisofts have had. Did you play the original. Buggy mess.
Yeah some weird mechanics. I don't mind some of it. Hates others
I liked Origins a lot and thought Odyssey got much better mechanically even if the story wasn't quite as good, but Valhalla took a lot of those improvements and ruined them. It felt like Origins/Odyssey had vision behind them whilst Valhalla was just another one that had to be made, full of inconsistency and poorly considered choices.
What on particular didn't you enjoy?
I tooke ages to get into Valhalla. Then towards the end I just wanted to be finished with it. But I did all the dlcs and I had it on hard mode. The weapon choices were more fun. Was using scythe's at the end.
I feel with combat you could play around a lot more. Odyssey was best story. But I also just didn't like how dark Valhalla was
For one it's way too big, it overstays its welcome by a large amount.
I despise that someone - an important character - is kidnapped, and then I spend absolutely ages before I can do anything about it. It's set up like we need to rescue them urgently, but we end up spending half the game before doing it. I can't remember the name of the woman who kidnapped this person, but it seemed like there'd be a lot of info around her and that she would be interesting, but I don't remember if there was because there was like thirty hours of gameplay between meetings with her.
Also the whole gods link is just clichéd and boring. Drop it and get back to assassin stuff. As if the games weren't long enough already.
That's the biggest issue actually. It's not that it's too long, the combat is annoying but it isn't the worst ever, the barred doors are a scourge designed by a psychopath with no concept of what fun is, but the real issue is that it doesn't respect your time. It takes as long as it can get away with to do everything, it's stuffed with superfluous rubbish and some of the shallowest side quests I've ever experienced in a game. It forces you to gather outrageous amounts of resources to upgrade equipment and then really expects you to care at all whenever you find a new piece of armour even though it being at all useful to you is on the other end of upgrading for hundreds upon hundreds of resources AGAIN. It relies on cheap drug excuses to get away with giving people magic fucking teleporting powers in the middle of combat for more artificial difficulty instead of designing a satisfying fight.
I completed all the DLCs in Origins and Odyssey, I never finished Valhalla. I did the basim bit towards the end and went "oh for fuck sake, it's not finished!?" and just uninstalled it.
I could've gone on forever about how disappointing this game is back when I'd been playing it more recently, but unfortunately this is all I can remember as the game is pretty forgettable.
Agree. It just kept going. It could have been half the size. Yeah was a bit confusing with her and she didn't bring much to the story and was almost instantly vanquished. Agree with those barred doors. Most games seem like that with upgrades but I agree with that. I got one piece and I think I had it all the way through.
Fair enough. Thanks for letting me know
Don't get me started on the different "endings" of the game. Such a strange choice, considering that if you want the whole Assassin's Creed story, you'll have to pay it again, it just watch the different endings online.
I didn't know it had multiple ending to be honest, because I didn't finish it. I did the basim bit towards the end and just uninstalled in disgust when I realised it was still going.
I loved unity, but I think it had a lot to do with the coop. wonder how it would hold up if I played it again
Somebody on here the other day was reminiscing for the good old days of Unity and I had to really bite my tongue.
Unity was only bad due to QA launch issues and a weak Romeo and Juliet story. The gameplay, black boxes, and tight detailed city was the best direction for the game to go and instead they threw it out the window for an open world RPG. "You were this close to greatness" and all that.
Even though it went back to its roots I felt the sheath was near impossible. I even went back to black flag to see if I can still sheath in it. I had no issues in black flag but in mirage I just can't seem to sheath around without someone finding me. Story not bad, parkour is hit or miss which does feel more like older Assassin Creed.
It's because the game is just mechanically Valhalla, the worst stealth iteration in the entire series. You would try to bow someone from a tree, hood up, completely unseen and the moment he dies the random soldier behind 3 walls 200 feet away knows exactly where you are and now you're in combat. Trying to go back to their roots using the same engine as Valhalla was a major misstep.
I assume you mean sneak or stealth, a sheath is what covers a sword or dagger, basically a non rigid scabbard
Good, Ubisoft lost the way since *Revelations.
*I do think AC3 is awesome, aside from the ending of course.
Absolutely disagree. Literally added "boat game" on every sequel. People clearly enjoyed that. I know I did. Will get a sea shanty going
Never really felt the boat stuff. Guess I’m more of a purist when it comes to AC. The Ezio trilogy is still the best AC experience for me.
Not sure what purists means in this sense. I did enjoy Venice and black flag., 3 was pretty good too.
They need to reinvent it though. New consumers and new people coming on board. I'm glad they push new ideas. We would complain if it was stale. Complain if it's new
You only had to do the boat bit in ac 3 like 2 times? There was a load of boat content but most of it was optional from what I remember
Assassin’s creed lasting as long as it has is remarkable. They’ve never been good games and only became marginally better over time.
Edit: feel free to downvote, your tastes are bad and you should feel bad.
Hard disagree. The best games were the Ezio trilogy and Black Flag. And a lot of people hated Black Flag because it wasn't a game about an Assassin, but it had all the best mechanics from the previous games plus the best ship gameplay and it had an excellent voice cast.
Unity was great, after they fixed it. But the series nosedived after that.
I agree, every ac game is a copy of it's former. it was good once when the idea was fresh but today, a game so repetitive doesn't pass for me and every story is the same only a different location.
A research team investigate a guy from some country who had a bad childhood, had the same hawk with same abilities - climbing of thousands of high buildings, infiltrating or raiding villages, has a ship that helps him get to these villages. And do it over and over again.
Oh, and don't forget the millions of collectibles that are really hard to find since the map doesn't help you with that.
Never been able to finish a single game of ac