We got a look at Assassin's Creed Mirage at Ubisoft Forward today, finally seeing our stabby hero, Basim, in action. And while Basim shows off a few familair tricks of the assassin trade, we also get to see some of his new skills. And there's one that looks pretty OP, at least to me.
The gameplay trailer above starts off with a quick kill and then a neat evasion move, where Basim grabs a wooden structure and collapses it to form an obstacle between him and his pursuers (at 0:35). Immediately after this we see his ability to swing himself around the corners of buildings, which is also very cool.
After taking a mission from a notice board, Basim heads to the palace to kill a captain who abducted a rebel spy. He attempts to use his bird, Enkidu, to scout out the palace but a marksman makes that impossible, so Basim heads in using stealth, first blending in with some locals, then using a blowdart to non-lethally take down a guard, then just straight up killing the guard who comes to investigate his sleeping friend. Some creeping through the flowers follows, a noise-maker to distract one guard, a knife-throw to take out another, and then quick climb to the marksman's perch to stab him, which allows Enkidu to locate and mark the captain.
So far, pretty standard, enjoyable assassin stuff. But then things get a little weird. Basim has an ability called Assassin's Focus that allows him to target multiple enemies before launching an attack that will take them all out. We got a glimpse of this power last month but now we really get to see it in action, and it's... kinda like using a cheat code.
I assumed you'd target a few enemies and Basim would leap between them, kinda like Batman does when he's on a roll. Stomp the first one, zip over and eliminate the second one, then maybe do a flip to take out the third one. But, no. Basim just sorta teleports from guy to guy, stabbing them to death:
Assassin's Creed Mirage"
He literally dematerializes and then reappears right in front of each of the three enemies like a ghost (at 5:46 in the video). A very stabby ghost. Being able to just beam from one enemy to the other, like the Starship Enterprise was having a transporter room malfunction, seems like a bit of a cheat.
On the plus side, it's not like you can just use Assassin's Focus indiscriminately. At the same point in the gameplay breakdown video, the developers explain "It's not something you can use at will. Basim will need to perform stealth skills to fill up his Assassin's Focus gauge and use this ability."
So, Basim may be a murderous ghost capable of teleporting right in front of the people he wants to kill, then kill them, then evaporate like mist, but at least he can't do it all the time. You're gonna have to be a stealthy human if you want to turn into a stabby ghost.
