Assassin's Creed Mirage is not doing well on Metacritic

And, well, therein appears to be the problem with Mirage.

Mirage is a throwback to the franchise's so-called golden age. It's a welcome return to the late 2000s and early 2010s - a time when playing an Assassin's Creed meant that you couldn't just jump into the middle of a warzone and go demigod on everyone. You actually had to think carefully, blend into the crowd, and plan out your routes, lest be met with much more resistance than you're probably used to seeing. The good news is that the Hidden Blade is back to how it was back then. It's no longer just part of your arsenal - it's THE ultimate weapon that can kill your targets with one shot.

Unfortunately, condensing Mirage's gameplay also seems to have come at the expense of its story. While it's no secret that Mirage was originally a DLC for Valhalla repackaged into a standalone title, it's also painfully obvious that it wasn't built to to tell a bigger story.

Basim's story is the highlight of Mirage, specifically, his humble beginnings and how he eventually became the Loki that we meet later on in Valhalla. But, everything else feels inconsequential to the overarching narrative.

Part of the reason why the earlier Assassin's Creed games were so great was that the story all tied into each other across five games. The real-world sections might have annoyed most gamers, but they were a necessary slog for those looking for a semblance of a story. Mirage has none of that. In a way, it feels too grounded and narrow. Save for learning more about Basim, the story doesn't exactly reveal anything that long-time fans don't already know. Even at its climax, when things take a turn for the crazy, there isn't a standout moment in the story that will make fans go talk about what the hell just happened online.

Those marquee story moments, controversial and "dumb" as they are, are part of the entire Assassin's Creed experience. Mirage having none of them feels like a missed chance.

Thankfully, Mirage delivers on its promise, gameplay-wise. It's a smaller adventure we haven't seen from Ubisoft since 2017. It's more stealth-focused, and you won't unlock any new powers or loot or spend one hundreds of hours juggling between side quests and the main storyline. It's a quick dozen-hour game you can finish in a weekend and still have a lot of time to spare. It's nice to see a game like Mirage in this day and age, which doesn't forcibly shove content down your throat.

By the time you've put down your controller and watched the credits roll on Mirage, you'll feel like you've accomplished something, both in-game and in real life. It doesn't eat away at your life. BUT, we'd be lying if we didn't feel like Ubisoft released Mirage with the intention of using it to test the waters to see if it should go back to more manageable adventures in future installments.

Again, as Black Flag and Origins proved, the established formula had gotten stale. You can't force players to love being boxed into relatively miniscule locales after basically taking them all over the world and letting them dock to whichever island they see on the horizon. It doesn't matter if it's in Paris or London. At this point, Assassin's Creed is as much as an open-world RPG as it is a stealth-action series.

So, where does that leave Assassin's Creed? Well, that all depends on how Ubisoft perceives the numbers.

With a handful of Assassin's Creed games coming, Ubisoft's "throw everything to the wall until something sticks" plan is going to land on a hit sooner or later. However, in an ideal world, we'd love to see Ubisoft mixing these smaller, stealth-focused entries in between the larger RPG-like installments.