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.
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.
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.
Good, maybe they’ll put this IP down for a while and give us some more Splinter Cell!
There are prince of persia skins for your character and weapons in this, if that’s any consolation to you
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
Dunkey said the map and lore are great, but the parkour and combat are not.
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