Assassin's Creed Mirage review – a stripped-back stab in the right direction

Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts. But there's one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn't shift with the stream's eddies. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you'll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join the Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against the Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad's upper echelons of power.