assassin's creed mirage
far and away, the weakest the franchise has been in a long, long time, and for reasons that aren't "it's not a big sprawling game" or "it doesn't have the rpg mechanics"
mirage as a game is not fun to play. it's not fun to fight, it's barely fun to sneak. the tools that it doles out to the player are of widely varying quality. working with other people within the world is gated behind spending friendship tokens (literally, it's a physical token and one of your mentors tells you to collect them so you can give them to people in the world for favors.) perhaps the worst sin of all is that it's a stealth game that's not fun when you get caught. losing your followers seems to require you to lure one or two of them into a corner, beat them up, and then and only then find somewhere to hide.
all of this would be forgiveable if it was in service to a good story, but it absolutely is not. nothing about the franchise, the city of Baghdad, or the protagonist is improved or deepened by this experience. your hero, Basim - a major character from Valhalla, here telling his origin story - is the blankest sheet of white paper, a man with no personality or drive beyond wanting to be a hero from the moment he appears on screen. his story is one that's already set in stone (again, because of what we learn in Valhalla) and everything here simply serves to make that story worse. nonsensical, even. this is not a story that needed to be told, and it was a waste of time to tell it.