Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the latest AAA title released for iOS and iPadOS. It’s the last of four major games announced during the 2023 iPhone 15 keynote, the others being Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, and the Death Stranding Director’s Cut. We already have reviews for those, and now it’s time to take a look at the Mirage.
Mirage is the thirteenth entry in the Assassin’s Creed series and was released late last year on PC and consoles. Described as a return to the series’ roots, it follows the story of a thief-turned-assassin named Basim Ibn Ishaq living in Baghdad in 861 AD who was a supporting character in the previous game, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. While Mirage isn’t the first Assassin’s Creed game for iOS, it’s the first mainline game rather than a side title aimed at mobile.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is available for both iPhone and iPad, with the minimum requirements being an iPhone 15 Pro/Max on iOS and an M-series iPad on iPadOS. Unlike the other games mentioned above, Mirage isn’t available on Mac yet, but you can buy it once on iPhone or iPad and play on both platforms with synced saves.
The game is about 10GB in size when you download it from the App Store on the iPhone 15 Pro, and it downloads another 3GB or so after launch. Strangely, when checking the size of a fully downloaded and installed game on an iPhone, it only reported 3GB of space on the device.
Mirage is free to download from the App Store. However, you are limited to 90 minutes of gameplay, after which you must make a $25 in-app purchase to continue playing. The game also has additional cosmetics and in-game items that can be purchased for $10-$15 in-game.
The immediate annoyance with the game is that it requires you to create a Ubisoft ID to play, instead of letting you sign in with your Apple ID. The current version at the time of testing (1.0.9) also occasionally threw an online server error when trying to log in, which was doubly annoying.
Moving on, let’s talk visuals and performance. The game was tested on the iPhone 15 Pro, which, along with the Max variant, is the least powerful mobile device that can currently run this game.
Visually, Assassin’s Creed Mirage wasn’t exactly groundbreaking on other platforms either. Still, the game still looks pretty good, especially on PC with all the settings. As is usual with AC games, Mirage is based on Ubisoft’s own Anvil engine, which is also used in the company’s other titles.
On the iPhone, Mirage offers the user three visual presets, viz. low, medium, and high, with medium being the default. Settings adjusts multiple parameters globally without allowing the user to delve into the specifics manually like in the PC version.
Starting with a high preset and moving to medium shows the removal in LOD or level of detail in distant objects with reduced object density further from the camera. The game will also switch to simpler geometric meshes for certain objects such as trees, railings on buildings, and other clutter in the scene. Shadow resolution is also reduced, resulting in softer, blockier shadow maps.
Going from medium to low further lowers the LOD for distant objects, brings the geometry even closer to blocking the camera, further reduces shadow resolution, and also removes certain texture decals from the environment.
Compared to the PC version of the game running at max settings, the high preset on iOS holds up pretty well, the only major difference is the texture resolution, which I’ll get to in a minute. The mobile version also has lower quality shadow maps even at a high preset, and not all objects cast shadows. Still, the mobile version looks pretty good even on the lowest settings, which isn’t noticeably bad when gaming as long as you don’t stop and stare.
The only odd thing I noticed was the characters’ eyes in the cutscenes, which looked quite dead with inappropriate animation. This was not a problem on other platforms, so it could be a bug or a performance saving feature.
By far the biggest visual issue with the mobile version is texture resolution. Despite the presets, the texture resolution on the iPhone remains the same, meaning they are uniformly low and blurry. That’s an understandable trade-off, since even though texture resolution isn’t driven by GPU performance, it does require video and/or system memory, which the iPhone really doesn’t have.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on the iPhone runs at a quarter of the display resolution, which on the iPhone 15 Pro means 1278 x 590. This is the game’s output resolution, but internally it renders at an even lower resolution and is then upscaled to the above number. probably with MetalFX. We don’t know what the exact internal rendering resolution is or what variant of MetalFX Ubisoft is using, if any. There are some disocclusion artifacts in the form of splatter on background objects as foreground objects move in front of them, suggesting a temporal upscaling solution.
However, unlike Resident Evil 4 or Death Stranding, which were particularly blurry on the iPhone, Assassin’s Creed Mirage doesn’t run at a significantly lower resolution. So while the game looks a bit soft, it is much better in terms of rendering resolution compared to the other two titles. This is why low resolution textures stand out, as the rest of the game can be quite sharp.
In terms of performance, Mirage is locked to 30 FPS on both iPhone and iPad. However, the game struggles quite a bit to reach this performance target, even at the default medium preset. High can be completely unplayable outside of select areas, so this option is better left for a future device.
But even Ubisoft’s chosen default medium preset often struggles to maintain playable frame rates with long frame time spikes that can be quite detrimental to smooth parkour-style movement. The most reliable way to reduce performance is to enable Eagle Vision, which allows the player to see enemies and key objects through walls and increases the load on the GPU by having to render objects outside of the typical truncated view. The framerate in this mode can be pretty bad, so the stealth section is a bit of a chore.
The game also has issues with streaming assets while running, resulting in traversal stutter. At one point the main character just froze while running, not because the game itself froze because the camera could still be moved, but the character just got stuck in the middle of running because the engine was waiting to load the area ahead into memory. I don’t think it’s a memory bottleneck problem, but rather a CPU bottleneck problem because the iPhone CPU couldn’t keep up with the demands of the Anvil engine, which is notorious for not using multithreading properly.
Regardless of the reason, the game can be quite annoying, unfortunately often at the worst moments when you’re either fighting or wanting to run away from enemies. Switching to the lowest preset will relieve some GPU load, but won’t improve the CPU situation much.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone renders in native ultrawide aspect ratio. However, this is achieved by cropping the top and bottom of the display from the original 16:9 aspect ratio instead of expanding the horizon, the way the PC version has been handled, as well as other previous iOS AAA games. However, cutscenes are rendered at 16:9, resulting in distracting black bars and transitions every time you play.
One thing that Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iOS does surprisingly well is control. While the controls in Resident Evil and Death Stranding were abysmal and almost unusable, the controls in Mirage aren’t too dissimilar to what you’d find in typical mobile games, meaning they’re still limited in what you can achieve. tactile, but at the same time quite usable. Of course, the controller is still your best bet, and my Xbox Wireless Controller worked perfectly over Bluetooth, but unlike the other AAA versions on the platform, you’re not forced to use it.
Another good feature is the presence of HDR, which works spectacularly well on the iPhone 15 Pro’s OLED display. This feature was sorely lacking in Death Stranding, but it’s good to see that Ubisoft didn’t skimp on it.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone. On the one hand, the game looks good except for blurry textures, has good touch controls, good HDR and doesn’t take up too much space on your device. And while it was beyond the scope of this review, the gameplay is also decent.
On the other hand, the performance can be quite rough, usually when you need it most. Currently, Ubisoft needs to make more cuts to the game’s visuals to make it easier on iPhone hardware, as the current version of the game seems to be more optimized for iPads. So I can’t recommend spending money on a game in its current state on an iPhone. However, the first 90 minutes are free, so you can download it and see for yourself if it’s something you can enjoy.