Set in ninth-century Baghdad, this latest iteration of the murderous mega-series has cleared out recent bloated extras, leaving you with just a sword and dagger
Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts. But there’s one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn’t shift with the stream’s eddies. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you’ll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. It’s an arresting sight, one of the many that litter Ubisoft’s latest open-world stab ’em up, Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Set in the years preceding the Viking-flavoured Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Mirage puts you in the foot wraps of pickpocket-turned-hitman-in-training Basim Ibn Ishaq. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join the Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against the Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad’s upper echelons of power. While both clandestine groups operate in the shadows and kill people, Ubisoft is at pains to stress that your extrajudicial murders are honourable, whereas the Order’s are dastardly. In part, this is because you do this on behalf of the people, though it’s not worth interrogating the game’s morality too closely, as, thanks to Mirage’s pickpocketing mechanic, you can rob the people blind, even stealing jewellery from the nurses working in the Baghdad hospital’s burns ward. Suffice it to say, murderers in hoods: good; murderers in masks: bad. Continue reading...
http://dlvr.it/SxDV9Q