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 during the iPhone 15 keynote in 2023, the others being Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, and Death Stranding Director’s Cut. We already have reviews for them and now it’s time to take a look at Mirage.
Mirage is the thirteenth entry in the Assassin’s Creed series and launched on PC and consoles late last year. It has been described as a return to the series’ roots, telling 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. However, Mirage isn’t the first Assassin’s Creed game on iOS, but it is the first mainline series game rather than a spin-off made for mobile.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is available on both iPhone and iPad, with minimum requirements being iPhone 15 Pro/Max on iOS and iPad with M-series chip on iPadOS. Unlike the other games mentioned earlier, Mirage is not yet available on Mac, but you can buy it once on iPhone or iPad and play on either platform with synced saves.
The game is around 15GB in size when downloaded from the App Store to an iPhone 10 Pro and then once launched, it downloads to 3GB or more. The strange thing is that when the size of the game was checked fully downloaded and installed on the phone, the iPhone reported only 3GB of space used on the device.
Mirage can be downloaded for free from the App Store. However, you can only enjoy gameplay for 90 minutes, after which you will have to make a $25 in-app purchase to continue playing. The game also has other cosmetics and gameplay items that can be purchased in-game for $10-$15.
in-app purchases
One immediate annoyance with the game is that it requires you to create a Ubisoft ID to play, rather than simply 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 about visuals and performance. The game was tested on an 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 didn’t stand out much on other platforms either. Having said that, the game still looks quite good, especially on PC when all settings are turned up. As usual for AC games, Mirage is based on Ubisoft’s own Anvil engine, which is also used for the company’s other titles.
On the iPhone, Mirage offers the user three visual presets, namely low, medium and high, with medium being the default. The settings adjust a number of parameters globally, without allowing the user to manually go into the specifics like the PC version.
Starting from the High preset and moving to Medium decreases the LOD or level of detail in distant objects, as well as reduces the density of objects farther away from the camera. The game also switches to simpler geometric meshes for certain objects like 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 reduces the LOD for distant objects, makes geometry near the camera even more blocky, reduces shadow resolution even further, and also removes some textured decals from the environment.
high Medium Low
Compared to the PC version of the game running on maximum settings, the high preset on iOS looks pretty good, with the only major difference being texture resolution, which I’ll explain in a minute. The mobile version has lower quality shadow maps even on the high preset and not all objects cast shadows. Still, the mobile version looks pretty good even on the lowest settings, which doesn’t look bad while playing unless you stop and look.
The only odd thing I noticed was the character’s eyes in cutscenes, which looked quite dead due to improper animation. This wasn’t a problem on other platforms, so it may be a bug or a performance-saving feature.
By far the biggest visual problem with the mobile release is texture resolution. Regardless of the preset, textures on the iPhone have the same resolution, i.e. they are uniformly low resolution and blurry. This is an understandable compromise because even though texture resolution is not governed by GPU performance, it does require video and/or system memory, which the iPhone has very little of.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone runs at quarter the resolution of the display, which on an iPhone 15 Pro means 1278 x 590. This is the game’s output resolution, but internally it renders at an even lower resolution and then is presumably upscaled to the number above with MetalFX. We don’t know what the exact internal rendering resolution is or which variant of MetalFX Ubisoft is using, if at all. There are some dimming artefacts in the form of sizzling 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 noticeably blurry on the iPhone, Assassin’s Creed Mirage doesn’t run at a significantly lower resolution. So while the game looks a little soft, it’s far better in terms of rendering resolution than the other two titles. This is why the low-resolution textures particularly stand out as the rest of the game can be quite sharp.
In terms of performance, Mirage is locked at 30FPS on both iPhone and iPad. However, even on the default Medium preset, the game struggles to achieve this performance target. High may be largely unplayable outside of a few select regions, so this option is best left for future devices.
But even the default Medium preset chosen by Ubisoft often struggles to maintain a playable frame rate, with long frame time spikes that can be quite detrimental to the game’s flowing parkour-style movement. The most reliable way to reduce performance is to enable the Eagle Vision feature, which lets the player see enemies and key objects through walls and increases the load on the GPU by rendering objects off the normal view frustum. Frame rates can drop quite a bit in this mode, making stealth sections a bit tricky.
The game also struggles to stream assets while running which results in traversal stutters. At one point the main character simply froze while walking, not because the game itself was frozen as the camera could still move, but rather the character was stuck in the middle as the engine waited for the next area to load into memory. I don’t think this is a memory bottleneck issue but rather a CPU bottleneck issue as the iPhone CPU could not keep up with the demands of the Anvil engine which is known for not utilizing multithreading properly.
Whatever the reason, playing the game can be quite annoying, unfortunately often at the worst times when you’re either engaged in combat or running from enemies. Switching to the lowest preset relieves some of the strain on the GPU but doesn’t do much to improve the CPU situation.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone renders at the native ultrawide aspect ratio. However, this is achieved by cropping the top and bottom of the display from the native 16:9 aspect ratio rather than expanding the horizon, the way it’s handled on the PC version and other previous iOS AAA games. However, cutscenes are rendered 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. Whereas the controls on the Resident Evil games and Death Stranding were terrible and borderline unusable, the controls within Mirage aren’t too different from what you’d find on a normal mobile game, meaning they’re still limited to what you can achieve on a touchscreen but are quite usable as well. Of course, a controller is still your best option and my Xbox Wireless Controller works perfectly over Bluetooth but unlike other AAA releases on the platform, you’re not forced to use it.
Another nice feature is the presence of HDR, which works brilliantly on the iPhone 15 Pro’s OLED display. This feature was very rare 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 one hand, the game looks good except for the blurry textures, has good touch controls, decent HDR, and doesn’t take up too much space on your device. And while that was outside the scope of this review, the gameplay is good too.
On the other hand, the performance can be quite poor, usually when you need it the most. As it is, Ubisoft needs to further cut down the game’s visuals to make it easier on iPhone hardware as the current version of the game seems more optimized for iPads. Thus, I cannot recommend spending money on the game in its current state on iPhone. Still, the first 90 minutes are free, so you can download it and see for yourself if it’s something you can enjoy playing.
