Conclusion

I really like Assassin's Creed Mirage. While the story isn't as intricate as in other titles, and the parkour isn't as advanced as in AC: Unity, the game really brings home the essence of Assassin's Creed. You are introduced to the concept of being an Assassin, their motivations, and their commitment to the cause. The game features a vast and bustling city where your actions have consequences; witnesses may report your kills, and NPCs engage in conversations related to the story or missions. Despite the less advanced parkour system, the city is expertly crafted, proving that enjoyable traversal doesn't solely depend on parkour mechanics.

Ubisoft removed some of the RPG elements that were present in previous titles of the series. One notable change is the elimination of the experience points and leveling system. Unlike some of the recent Assassin's Creed games, where players could level up their character by gaining XP and unlocking new abilities, Mirage focuses on a more traditional approach to gameplay. This means that you don't have to worry about leveling up and can focus more on the core stealth mechanics and mission progression without the complexities introduced by RPG elements. The game puts a greater emphasis on stealth, strategic gameplay, and exploration, reminiscent of previous Assassin's Creed titles.

In terms of technology nothing has changed compared to AC: Valhalla. Ubisoft's "AnvilNext 2" game engine is used again, which takes advantage of DirectX 12 and brings the historic landscapes to life with lots of detail. I really have to applaud the map designers, who did a fantastic job creating a believable city. As our screenshots confirm, the scenery looks great and textures are always crisp. Shadows look fantastic; geometric detail on the characters is excellent, most world objects look good too. There's some areas where the floors are flatter than expected, flatter than in Valhalla, too, which is usually a sign of rushed development. During all my testing I didn't encounter any crashes or noteworthy issues though.

While achieving high FPS was a bit problematic in AC: Valhalla (Nov 2020), things have changed a lot—new, more powerful GPUs are available. The game itself also has slightly lower hardware requirements. While an integrated benchmark is available, we picked a custom test scene in the main city that includes typical activities and a mix of busy and lighter areas. The game's own benchmark focuses on a flyby, which is unrealistic, because you will never encounter such view distances during actual gameplay. Only Intel has released game ready drivers for AC: Mirage, but we didn't spot any issues on NVIDIA or AMD.

Achieving 60 FPS using maximum settings at 1080p Full HD requires only a GeForce RTX 3060, Intel Arc A770 or Radeon RX 6600—very reasonable. Fluid gameplay at 1440p is in reach for RTX 4060, RX 6700 XT and RTX 2080 Ti. If you are looking for 4K60, then you'll need at least a RTX 4070, RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 7900 XT. Your hardware is weaker than that? No problem, thanks to being an Intel sponsored title, you get support for all the important upscaler technologies: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. What's also supported is using the upscaler's image enhancement features without upscaling (i.e. DLAA). In a first, this is possible with all three upscalers! Unfortunately there is no support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation, Reflex or FSR3 Frame Generation. But considering that the game runs pretty well on modern hardware this is a non-issue in my opinion.

There's plenty of settings to fine-tune the graphics performance to your hardware requirements. Only the low end of the hardware spectrum will suffer a bit, because the scaling from "Ultra" to "Very Low" isn't that significant. Visually the game still looks pretty good on the lowest setting, but the performance gain is only around 30% vs maximum. Our performance results show surprising results for the RTX 4060 Ti, which punches well above its weight. Usually we'd expect the card to offer performance slightly below RTX 3070. Here it beats even the RTX 3070 Ti (at 1080p). It's not a VRAM issue, because there is no difference between RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB and 16 GB, not even at 4K. Another surprising result is that the gap between RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT is pretty big. My theory is that AC: Mirage does rendering in a way that really benefits from the larger cache on the GeForce 40 cards, and that also explains why the RX 7700 XT gets penalized a bit more—it has a smaller cache than RX 7800 XT. Intel Arc cards ran flawlessly, without any rendering issues or crashes. Congrats to Intel for being the first GPU maker to release game ready drivers—their driver team is really pushing it.

VRAM requirements are very reasonable. At lowest settings a 4 GB card will be sufficient, but there will be quite some pop-in. For maximum settings a 8 GB card is a good choice, but that also means that cards with more VRAM, which are the ideal pairing for 4K, won't be able to benefit from their larger VRAM pools.

There has been some drama about the fact that Assassin's Creed: Mirage uses Denuvo, while the press review builds don't use it. All our testing was done with the public release version on uPlay, which has Denuvo. I'm surprised that anyone is shocked by the inclusion of Denuvo in the game—all major Ubisoft titles have it. Still, vote with your wallet if you don't like such copy protection mechanisms.