Leaping off a rooftop to dig a concealed dagger into the neck of a hapless guard, smoothly running across the rooftops of a middle-eastern city, the ledge attack; yep, we’re partying like it’s 2009 again, when Ezio Auditore di Firenze first unleashed the true potential of the series withAssassin’s Creed 2. Except it’s not 2009; it’s actually 2023 and I’ve just watched the first gameplay trailer forAssassin’s Creed: Mirage. It’s clearly tapping into nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of Assassin’s Creed, when the series was about parkour and quiet kills and sneaky-stabby action rather than damage-spongey enemies and trying to imitateThe Witcher 3.
It’s nostalgia-bait in other words, and the 95% Likes/Dislikes rating on Youtube suggests that it’s worked for most people, but not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated to see Assassin’s Creed move away from the RPG-lite stylings that have shaped its last three games. I guess my hope was (and still is) that itmoves into more of a forward-thinking playful assassination sandbox direction like Hitman. But what I’ve seen here looks an awful lot like ‘Assassin’s Creed Revelations but with prettier graphics.’
My big issue with the trailer is that I saw absolutely nothingnewthere—the same old stealth kills, the conveniently ‘sticky’ parkour, I think I spied Basim sitting on a bench at one point to ‘blend’ with the environment. Everything is incredibly backwards-looking, harking back to the style of combat in the beloved Assassin’s Creed games of yore. Going back to the roots is cool and everything, but isn’t the complete lack of forward-thinking ideas a little alarming? Where’s the stuff that shows us the series is taking inspo from the series’ rootsas well asmoving forwards?
RELATED:10 Best Assassin’s Creed Villains, Ranked
At one point, I hoped the trailer was going to go into a whole ‘here’s a bunch of different ways you can approach your objective’ thing, which would’ve been neat. Basim is chatting to some guy about breaking into a compound, and his buddy suggests he “could bribe the guards to look the other way.” Basim then responds by saying “I shall see what flavour best suits me,” before reverting to type and spending the rest of the trailer literally doing the same shit we’ve seen Ezio, and Altair, Edward Kenway, andthat guy no one likes from Assassin’s Creed 3do a million times before.
I was hoping that that moment in the trailer was where the game took us on a little tour of the different possibilities and avenues of approach available to a player, rather than a ‘classic Assassin’s Creed’ highlight reel.Can youactuallybribe the guards, or did they just put that in there to show that Basim’s too cool for bribes and is gonna just stab his way in there instead?
What about finding multiple ways into the building? Could there be opportunities to cause distractions to the guards so you can sneak in? Poisoning the water supply so a guard collapses and others rush to his aid? And what’s wrong with good old-fashioned disguises and outfits to work your way into the building? I’ve been waiting for years for this series to expand its stealth and assassination repertoire, but what I see is still fundamentally the same action game (with a smidgen of stealth) as it was years ago.
Don’t get me wrong: all the animations, the smooth combat moves, the parkouring look like the smoothest rendition of those things we’ve seen, but all that just feels like spit-and-polish without meaningful new substance. Yes, it’s cool that you can do all those things you’ve always done in Assassin’s Creed, but beyond the graphics, I didn’t see a single sign there that it’s going to attempt to do new things. One news article excitedly pointed out that the ability to dye your clothes different colours is returning to the series (something we haven’t seen since Syndicate in 2015), but are these superficialities really something to get that excited about? It kind of feels like Ubisoft is concealing a lack of innovation behind a veneer of pretty graphics and colours (which, in fairness, is par for the course with the publisher).
I hope this is just part of the marketing strategy here. Clearly, people buy into nostalgia, and that trailer had it in spades, so maybe the next trailer will be the one where they start digging into the details to show us what’sactuallynew. Maybe Ubisoft is first reassuring us that Mirage clearly isn’t an Origins, or Odyssey, or Valhalla, before taking the great leap forward to show us what this game willreallybe about. That’s a start, I guess, but if they don’t show us something new in the next trailer, then I’m concerned we could be looking at a game that’s stuck too far in the past.
NEXT:10 Games To Play If You Like Assassin’s Creed
