re: Assassin's Creed Mirage is now out; IGN 8

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Everyone says the return to the old school early AC days for combat/assassin/stealth/parkour is a lot of fun

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This is what I'm looking for.

Odyssey and Origins were really good, but they got way too far away from what AC is with Valhalla

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I still cannot, for the life of me, understand how they haven’t done feudal Japan AC.

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Ghost of Tsushima was about as good of a game as you could have done for that era.

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I still cannot, for the life of me, understand how they haven’t done feudal Japan AC.

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2024, can't wait for that one.

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Valhalla was the first I played since 2. It was fun but godamn did it have a ton of content

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I skipped Valhalla because I did not want to fall into the odyssey trap. Where i love a game then start to hate it before I am even halfway through because it is just too much

20-25 Hours would be about perfect. Immortals Fenyx Rising was about 25 hours of gameplay for me and I liked it a lot but was starting to grow tired of it around that 20 hour mark but just powered through to 25 and finished the story

20 seems like the sweet for the ubisoft style

Is there still an ongoing present-day storyline that doesn’t make any sense?

I'm about 2 hours in and digging it. Feels like early AC games.

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But games with 50-80 hours need to try hard to not be repetitive and be 50% fetch quests. They need to balance themselves between variety and not being overwhelming. They also need o be truly open world (go anywhere do almost anything)

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you just described that Hogwarts game. My god...what a terribly repetitive slog.

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care to go into more detail? is it reminiscent of the AC2 era combat?

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No, not at all. It reminds me more of Aragami 2

I get that Mirage is not a game where can walk into the front door of an enemy encampment and murder the entire population. I've played every single Assassin's Creed there has ever been aside from the titles exclusive to portable consoles and mobile.

Basim dies in like 3-4 hits. All melee combat is done via the R1 button. You press it for a light attack and hold it for a heavy attack. You parry with L1. You dodge with X. Enemies will typically do one of two things: Charge at you and glow yellow and charge at you and glow red. If they charge at you and glow yellow, you can parry. if they charge at you and glow red, you have to dodge. You have a stamina bar that depletes after 4-5 sword swings and takes forever to recharge.

There's a lock-on mechanic.

The combat is fine for 1 on 1 fights, but it breaks down quickly in fights with 2 or more enemies.

That's fine. Again, I understand the point is to make brute force much less viable, but lets say you are caught by a guard. The same thing happens that happens in older games. The guards will ring an alarm bell and suddenly you are swarmed by 10-15 guards in the immediate area just like the old games. In the old games, you at least had a fighting chance, but in this one, it's much more frustrating to engage with the enemies, and you just want to run away, hide, and then come back later.

The stealth mechanics in Mirage are not deep enough to consider this game to be a full fledged stealth game. Assassin's Creed games have never tried to be full fledged stealth games for this reason.

I agree with a good bit of what you said about the combat (don’t like light and heavy both on R1 and I also wish there was more diversity with weapons/enemies). That being said I’ve been really liking what they did with the different tools and being able to upgrade/customize them.