Developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux, the Assassin's Creed series celebrates its 15th anniversary this year with Assassin's Creed Mirage. Originally meant as an expansion to 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the overall scale of Mirage is certainly dialled down this time around. Expect a shorter, narratively tighter adventure - which is no bad thing. Not every game has to be an epic. Mirage focuses on a single main character too this year, named Basim - a new recruit to the Assassin's Brotherhood, who unleashes his parkour skills on a beautiful realisation of ninth century Baghdad. From the arid city outskirts to the bustle of the Damascus gates, all of this is brought to life by the Ubisoft Anvil Engine. But to what extent, if any, has the tech evolved from AC Valhalla?
Despite its connections to Valhalla's tech, Mirage is a smaller project overall. Just looking at the install sizes on Series X says a lot: it's a 33GB install - compared to 110GB for Valhalla right now. As scaled back as it is though, the Baghdad area of Mirage is still beautifully designed by Ubisoft's artists. Every district of the city is crammed with detail: between the wells of the dyeing factory, right up to the stables ahead of the Prince's Palace. The use of volumetric lighting is on point, too: at dusk, flare-ups of dust are caught by streaks of light, adding a strong sense of depth. The only blemish is that character detail doesn't hold up: cloth physics only kick in at a certain range, while up-close, something doesn't quite look right in the rendering of the human eye. The world design of Mirage is superb, but the character models filling it out still don't quite hit the same standard.
This applies to every console from PS5 to Series X and X, which leads us to the comparisons. The first bit of good news is that all three consoles launch with the same options. There are two modes - as with Valhalla: a 60 frames per second frame-rate mode and a higher-resolution quality mode at 30fps. PS5, Series X and S are broadly identical in their quality modes. While targeting 30fps, the biggest dividing point is resolution. You get a dynamic 4K on PS5 and Series X, going down at occasional points to 1944p. On Series S we get a still-impressive dynamic 1620p, with a 1512p lower bounds.