While I am a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I’m usually at least a couple of years behind the curve when it comes to actually playing the latest entries.

So, just getting around to Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, two years after release, isn’t all that unusual for me.  What IS a little unusual is that, in the process of getting to this point, I had to admit defeat and give up on AC: Valhalla because it was sapping my will to live any desire I had to keep playing it.

That isn’t to say that I don’t like the RPG-formula entries in the series.  I loved both Origins and Odyssey.  Bayek is top three AC protagonists of all time and Kassandra is right up there as well, and both featured a huge hunk of more-or-less-historical scenery to climb all over and drop down upon unsuspecting guards from.  Also Atlantis, which is maybe less historical and more…well, you know, I wasn’t around back then, I can’t PROVE it didn’t exist.

Valhalla, well, there may eventually be cities and buildings to climb?  But I was like a dozen hours into it, and I had done a lot of dice gaming and Viking Rap Battles and sacking monasteries for resources to construct new huts in my outpost and… well, I hadn’t really done any assassinating yet.  A little?  Not much, anyway, and it didn’t seem like any was really imminent.  I’d done a lot of running up to people, screaming at them, and hitting them with an axe, and that wasn’t scratching the stealthy stabby itch.

And it CERTAINLY wasn’t scratching the scaling massive structures itch or the parkour-style chases over rooftops itch.

That’s a lot of words to justify dropping it and moving on to Mirage, but it was absolutely the right choice.  In less than 90 minutes from “Press A to start”, I had gotten the “join the assassin’s guild! we’ll make a man out of you!” introduction out of the way, gotten my own hidden blade, received instructions to go to Baghdad and stab Bad People For Good Reasons, and ridden a camel there to get on with the stabbing.

This is how an Assassin’s Creed game SHOULD start.

I’ve put another eleven hours into it since arriving in Baghdad, the main storyline is somewhere over <gestures vaguely> there somewhere, and I am choosing to ignore it in favor of doing all kinds of side missions where I sneak into places I am not supposed to be and fill bushes and haystacks with the bodies of hapless guards whose last words are almost always been some variant of “hey, what are you doing here?” before they catch a bad case of Knife-In-Throat Disease.

This is also how I feel an Assassin’s Creed game should be played.  It’s a sort of very familiar gaming comfort food.

On the other hand, I’m going well outside my comfort zone in HOW I’m playing it, which is to say that I’m actually taking advantage of the fact that you can use your Ubisoft library through Amazon’s Luna Cloud Gaming service, which works… pretty well, actually!   I’m not sure I’d use it for something that demanded quick reactions, but Assassin’s Creed games are typically pretty forgiving in that respect.

The last time I tried a cloud gaming service was because Google had sent me a free Stadia kit.  That worked pretty well also, though it was a bit blurrier than Luna and considerably more prone to little visual glitches. I’m not sure how much of the improvement I’m seeing with Luna might just be attributable to having a better WiFi setup now, to be perfectly fair.

Even with the better WiFi, the graphics experience is not comparable to a high end PC or modern console.  I’d say you’re getting roughly the PS4 experience, or at least what I remember the PS4 to have played like.  It’s possible I have some overly-optimistic memories of that console.  It’s perfectly playable, at any rate.

There are two big points in Luna’s favor.  Maybe three.  I’ll just start putting down some positives and we can count together at the end.

First, assuming you have Amazon Prime and link it to your Ubisoft account, you can play the majority of the games you own through Luna without an additional subscription.  Obvious omissions are older Assassin’s Creed titles – anything before Unity seems to be missing, and while I do have access to Liberation HD I can’t see Assassin’s Creed III HD.  I don’t own any older Far Cry games, but Far Cry 5, New Dawn, and 6 are all available.

Likewise, you can link in your GoG account.  This is much more hit and miss when it comes to title availability, and I don’t own nearly as many games there, but some showed up.  I don’t remember buying most of these on GoG.  Is there something where Steam games you own link over to GoG?

The big plus here is that you don’t have to buy games on Luna and pray that the service stays around.  You can buy Windows games on other services, play them through Luna when you want, and keep access to them when and if Luna follows Stadia into the afterlife.

Oddly enough, this does NOT link in games I own via Amazon Gaming.  I’ve never actually paid for anything from that service, though, and I typically forget it even exists except on the rare occasions I claim free titles on it.  And it certainly does not connect to Steam or to games you own via the Microsoft store.  There’s a connector to the Epic Games store but that seems mostly there for Fortnite.  None of the games I own via Epic Games show up in Luna.

Second, the real justification for cloud gaming, it’s platform independent and you don’t need a desktop PC or a gaming laptop.  Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is a reasonably demanding game, it’s not going to perform well on an older GPU – especially not an older laptop GPU.  Something like Luna means that you don’t need to upgrade your computer as often.

That segues neatly into pointing out that it also gives access to Windows-only games to Mac users.  Since my daily driver laptop is an M2 MacBook Pro, that’s a big advantage.

I did need to install Microsoft Edge, which felt weird.  Not gonna lie there.  Felt icky.  Luna needs Safari support.

I think it should also work on a tablet or phone, though I haven’t tested it.  I definitely have doubts about how performant the streaming would be over LTE, though.  Maybe it’s fine and I’m just being a boomer.

Not needing to play the games using local hardware also means that the computer in your house is NOT sucking down a ton of electricity, while the computer in some Amazon data somewhere IS.  You’re (at least partially) outsourcing your electric bill to one J. Bezos, and I think he can cover it.

Lastly, if you have a capable gaming PC at home but also want to occasionally play games on the road – or in your living room – both Ubisoft and GoG claim that your save data and achievements will sync back to a locally-run copy of the game.  This has worked for me, in my limited testing, though Ubisoft Connect on Windows regularly complains that it wasn’t able to sync my save and makes me slam the “Retry Now” button a few times.

tl;dr version: Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the best Assassin’s Creed I’ve played in a while and cloud gaming seems like it has maybe kinda almost sorta reached the “it just works” stage.