Basically a school rating system where 60 is nigh failure.

It's not even the lowest so far, it's the third lowest. Unity and Rogue where rated lower, and I get that. unity was a buggy mess on launch but is my personal least favorite even after they fixed it, and Rogue was basically a black flag expansion, which was fine. I don't think that deserved to be so low cause I found the story great, an assassin defecting to the Templar was exactly the sort of story the series needed to show, that not everyone sees the assassins as the good guys.

Mirage so far is.. ok. I've done a fair share of exploring the map and I can say it's probably only the size of one of Valhallas expansions, which is fine, we paid a fraction of the price they charge for a full assassins creed game. Some assets are reused from Origins, which is fine, we're in the desert again. I'm not sure if it's just the shock of going from a fully leveled Eivor to a skilless unequipped Basim, which I experienced the past 2 games, or if this is generally harder than previous entries. Thr fact they brought back notoriety mechanic that was missing from valhalla, and also brought back the mercenaries hunting you from Odyssey, AND the fact that when you die your notoriety doesn't reduce, and while they brought back the stupid wanted poster mechanic, they are few and far between to rip down, and you need special tokens to bribe the town criers.... I'm liking the new challenge, keeps me on edge, makes me really think about whether I should kill a guard or sneak by.

Origins, odyssey and valhalla have all been good games. Not necessarily assassins creed but good games anyways.

I mean, valhalla did have every weapon under the sun, sure, but before unity you couldn't even permanently switch your weapon. Swords and hidden blade are all you had, other than utility items like maybe a gun or bombs. In some earlier games you could disarm your enemies and use their weapons, but other than that it was Swords. So with this being a 'return to classic AC' it's actually chill that there's only a couple different Swords and daggers to equip, rather than an arsenal. It's just not what this game was going for. Combat does take a bit to get used to coming from valhalla but I wouldn't say it's 'janky' it's just far more tactical. In valhalla or Odyssey you could murder entire fortresses of dudes like it was nothing in your combat gear, but this is going back to stealth. You wanna take out guys stealthily cause combat is much harder. You need to do your strikes precisely, parry and dodge at the right times, choose which envies to attack in order of threat and ability to take them out. I like it.

There are prince of persia skins for your character and weapons in this, if that’s any consolation to you

At least there's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown coming soon.

I don’t know how they managed to perfect the parkour in Unity then proceed to discard that system for inferior ones in every game since

Valhalla has easily the worst combat of the three full on RPG AC games. Long attack animations every other time you finish an enemy off whilst all the others stand there patiently, for example.

Then there's the unbelievably terrible barred doors that are absolutely everywhere (they are in mirage as well) which is the shittest, lowest effort puzzle they could have ever thought of and they repeated it every fifteen feet. Good luck maintaining stealth whilst you have to go back outside and circle the building looking for a hole in the wall to shoot an arrow through in a completely plausible and not at all deliriously stupid way.

Then there's the offensively shallow side missions, the barely having anything to do with assassins for the vast majority of the shockingly bloated game, the sheer bugginess (tall grass used to disappear when I got close to it, all the way through the game), spending twenty minutes finding a chest that you spotted with your bird only to discover it's impossible to access until you're on or have completed a specific story mission. Having to wait for your raiders to open bloody chests, despite them being buggy idiots who will stand around ignoring you for five seconds before moving towards it as slowly as possible - all this, including three horrendous barred doors, in the middle of a Viking raid, because a Viking is incapable of breaking open a door somehow. Awful.

I love assassin's creed, I've played all of them. Valhalla ruined the RPGs.

Valhalla is a nice action game but it’s no AC game. Especially the stealth part and name-sake Assassination gameplay take up too little space. And the skill tree they copied from PoE is just ridiculously overloaded - symptomatic for Ubisoft‘s approach to the whole game: it’s so convoluted.

I really enjoyed Valhalla but as an AC entry it disappoints.

I feel like people have somehow already forgotten the dark ages of unity and syndicate