Assassin’s Creed Mirage is the latest AAA title to be released for iOS and iPadOS. It’s the last of four major games announced at the iPhone 15 keynote in 2023. The others are Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, and Death Stranding Director’s Cut. We already have reviews of that and now it’s time to check out Mirage.
Mirage is the thirteenth installment in the Assassin’s Creed series and was launched on PC and consoles at the end of last year. 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 CE, who was a supporting character in the previous game, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. While Mirage isn’t the first Assassin’s Creed game on iOS, it is the first in the main series and not a spin-off, made-for-mobile title.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is available on both iPhone and iPad, with minimum requirements being iPhone 15 Pro/Max on iOS and iPad with an M-series chip on iPadOS. Unlike the other games previously mentioned, Mirage isn’t available on the Mac yet, but you can buy it once on iPhone or iPad and play it on both platforms with synced saves.
The game is around 10GB in size when downloaded from the App Store on the iPhone 15 Pro and then downloads another 3GB or so once it launches. Strangely, when checking the size of the fully downloaded and installed game on the phone, the iPhone reported that only 3GB of space was being used on the device.
Mirage can be downloaded for free from the App Store. However, you are limited to 90 minutes of gameplay. After that, you’ll need to make a $25 in-app purchase to continue playing. The game also includes other cosmetic and gameplay items that can be purchased in-game for $10-$15.
An immediate annoyance with the game is that you have to create a Ubisoft ID to play, rather than just being able to log in with your Apple ID. The current version at the time of testing (1.0.9) also occasionally gave an online server error when logging in, which was doubly annoying.
Moving on, let’s talk about the 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.
In terms of visuals, Assassin’s Creed Mirage wasn’t exactly groundbreaking even on other platforms. That said, the game still looks pretty good, especially on PC with all the settings turned on. As usual with AC games, Mirage is based on Ubisoft’s own Anvil engine, which is also used for the company’s other titles.
On iPhone, Mirage offers the user three visual presets viz. low, medium and high, with medium being the default. The settings globally adjust multiple parameters without the user having to manually delve into the details like on the PC version.
Starting with the high preset and moving to medium shows culling of the LOD or level of detail on far away objects, with reduced object density further away from the camera. The game also switches to simpler geometric meshes for certain objects, such as trees, building railings, and other clutter in the scene. Shadow resolution is also reduced, resulting in softer, blockier shadow maps.
Going from medium to low further reduces the LOD for distant objects, makes geometry even closer to the camera blockier, further reduces shadow resolution, and also removes certain texture stickers from environments.
Compared to the PC version of the game running at maximum settings, the high preset on iOS matches up quite well, with the only major difference being texture resolution, which I’ll get to in a moment. The mobile version also has lower quality shadow maps, even at the high preset, and not all objects cast shadows. Still, the mobile version looks pretty good even on the lowest setting, which isn’t noticeably bad while playing unless you stop and stare.
The only strange thing I noticed was the character eyes in cutscenes, which looked pretty dead with incorrect animation. On other platforms this wasn’t an issue, so it could be a bug or a performance saving feature.
The biggest visual issue with the mobile release is the texture resolution. Despite the preset, the resolution of the textures remains the same on the iPhone, i.e. they are uniformly low resolution and blurry. This is an understandable trade-off, because even though texture resolution isn’t determined by GPU performance, it does require video and/or system memory, of which the iPhone has very little.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on the iPhone runs at a quarter resolution of the screen, which on the iPhone 15 Pro means 1278 x 590. This is the output resolution of the game, but internally it is rendered at an even lower resolution and then scaled up to the above number probably using MetalFX. We don’t know what the exact internal display resolution is or what variant of MetalFX Ubisoft is using, if at all. There are some disocclusion artifacts in the form of hissing on background objects while foreground objects move in front of them, indicating a temporary upscaling solution.
However, unlike Resident Evil 4 or Death Stranding, which were mostly blurry on the iPhone, Assassin’s Creed Mirage doesn’t run at a significantly low resolution. So while the game looks a bit soft, it is much better than the other two titles in terms of display resolution. This is why the low-resolution textures especially stand out, as the rest of the game can be quite sharp.
In terms of performance, Mirage on both iPhone and iPad is locked at 30 FPS. However, the game struggles quite a bit to hit this performance target, even on the default medium preset. High can be quite unplayable outside of certain areas, so that’s an option best left to future devices.
But even Ubisoft’s chosen default medium preset often struggles to maintain playable framerates with long frametime spikes that can be quite detrimental to the game’s smooth parkour-style movements. The most reliable way to reduce performance is to enable the Eagle Vision feature, which allows the player to see enemies and important objects through walls and increases the load on the GPU by requiring objects to be rendered out of the typical truncated view. The frame rates in this mode can be quite poor, making the stealth sections a chore.
The game also has trouble streaming assets while running, resulting in traversal stuttering. At one point the main character simply froze while running, not because the game itself was freezing because the camera could still be moved, but the character got stuck mid-run while the engine waited to load the area further into memory. I don’t think this is a memory bottleneck, but rather a CPU bottleneck, as the iPhone’s CPU couldn’t keep up with the demands of the Anvil engine, which is known for not using multithreading properly.
Regardless of the reason, the game can be quite annoying to play, unfortunately often at the worst times when you’re engaged in combat or meant to run away from enemies. Switching to the lowest preset does relieve some of the pressure on the GPU, but doesn’t do much to improve the CPU situation.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone is displayed in its original ultra-wide aspect ratio. However, this is achieved by cropping the top and bottom of the screen from the original 16:9 aspect ratio rather than widening the horizons as this is done in the PC version and also in other previous iOS AAA games . However, the cutscenes are displayed in 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 the controls. While the controls of the Resident Evil games and Death Stranding were atrocious and unusable, the controls within Mirage aren’t much different from what you’d find in typical mobile games, which is to say they’re still limited to what you can achieve on a touchscreen but at the same time quite usable. Of course, a controller is still the best option and my Xbox Wireless Controller worked perfectly over Bluetooth, but unlike the other AAA releases on the platform you’re not required to use one.
Another good feature is the presence of HDR, which works spectacularly well on the OLED display of the iPhone 15 Pro. This feature was sorely lacking in Death Stranding, but it’s good to see that Ubisoft hasn’t skimped on it.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about Assassin’s Creed Mirage on the iPhone. On the one hand, the game looks good, apart from the blurry textures, it 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 decent as well.
On the other hand, performance can be quite rough, usually when you need it most. As it stands, Ubisoft needs to cut back further on the game’s visuals to make it easier on the iPhone’s hardware, as the current version of the game seems more optimized for the iPads. As such, I can’t recommend spending money on the game in its current state on the iPhone. Nevertheless, the first 90 minutes are free, so you can just download it and see for yourself if it’s something you enjoy playing.