If we didn’t already know that Assassin’s Creed Mirage started life as a DLC add-on for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the HUD would have given it away: it’s virtually unchanged from the aforementioned previous entry in the series. The map icons have been replaced with ones more appropriate for the new protagonist and setting, but everything else during our extensive hands-on preview was exactly the same, right down to the font. And though this was a pre-release build, with less than a month to go before release it seems unlikely to change.
This isn’t a complaint, to be clear. Obviously there are more important things to discuss here than the typeface being used in the conversation system. But it betrays the fact that Mirage isn’t really the back-to-basics reset for the series that many die-hards are hoping for. Sure, it pays homage to the first game by being set in the Middle East and sporting a rekindled emphasis on investigation mechanics, and you are actually playing an Assassin this time, but make no mistake: Mirage is essentially ‘More Valhalla’. And considering how much Valhalla we already have (too much, frankly, hence Mirage’s back-to-basics marketing) that’s going to be a tricky proposition for a lot of people.
It’s not customary to be too critical during a preview, given that we are evaluating a small slice of an unreleased product, but it seems appropriate to put Mirage’s marketing as a sort of spiritual re-imagining of the 2007 original into some kind of context. That said, Mirage is so much better than any of Valhalla’s DLC expansions that it’s hard to disagree with it being spun-off into a standalone title. The DLCs were an endless slog of diminishing returns, padding out an enormous game that already had far too much padding.
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