Minjun S. reviewed Assassins Creed Mirage

This is the first Assassin's Creed since Syndicate that I actually finished, and the reason is simple: it's twenty hours long and it isn't an RPG.

Baghdad is dense in the way the early cities were dense. You can cross most of it on rooftops without touching the ground, the crowds matter again, and the investigation structure gives you an actual reason to stand still and listen to people. After three games of clearing question marks off a map the size of a country, being handed one city and told to learn it felt like a gift.

It is not a great game. The story is thin, Basim is less interesting here than he was in Valhalla, and the stealth is a decade behind anything Ubisoft's own Splinter Cell team was doing. But it's the right size, it respects your time, and it remembered what the series was for.

An A for being the correction the series needed, not for being excellent.