Review game Assassin's Creed: Origins?

Minor story spoilers.

Assassin's Creed Origins isn't the best installment of the franchise (the best is still Brotherhood, and Ezio story arc), but it comes pretty close. The game has some really great features, but also have some really glaring problems.

Before I get into the details, I thoroughly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys open world and/or stealth games. It's by far the best game I've played in 2017 (probably also the game I put in most hours).

The good:

Egypt is an absolute wonder to explore. The map is huge, almost 70 hours into the game, I still have about 1/3 of the map didn't touch. The scenery is diverse. The visual is so beautiful, especially considering there's no loading time from one area to another. Egypt is so alive, from great cities to lush river banks to oasis to to olive groves to scorching deserts to pyramid to tombs to underwater ruins to Roman villas to aqueducts… The land is full of people and vivid wild lives.

• There're so many things you can do in each area and there's always something out there to explore. Your exploration will always get you some kind of reward. While the game can't compete with Skyrim, but most definitely better than ME: Andromeda. I think for the 60 something hours I put in, at least half of those time I didn't follow any quest, I just explore, check out the next “question mark” on the map, discover new locations.
• Compare to previous Assassin's Creed games, individual side quests are very well designed, especially consider the sheer amount of side quests available. There are very few “go there, kill X number of people" filler quests. majority of the quests create some kind of connection between Bayek and the people he's trying to help. Many have surprising twists. Although, they are not as sophisticated as Witcher 3 quests (few games can reach that level), you can tell the designers sure aspired to create something similar.
• A lot of minority characters. This is perhaps the first game in Assassin's Creed Franchise that features more POC characters than white characters. Bayek was probably Berber (or the ancestor of modern Berbers), his wife Aya was mix race between Greek and Egyptian. Many supporting characters they met alone the way are people of color. It is really nice to see “brown" people become heroes of the story.
  The RPG element is well designed and learning new skills are rewarding. The leveling up pace is great, not too fast, but never too slow.

Now the bad:

• My biggest problem with this game is with its story line. And I suspect the story was written very differently featuring Aya, not Bayek as protagonist, and probably have a lot more Roman involvement. But either because the scope was way to big and they have to cut or other unknown issues, the game went through a major overhaul, limited scope to Egypt, rewrite a big part of the story, make Bayek the protagonist (player character). And we end up with a poorly structured rushed story.
  The incident where Bayek lost his son was so poorly planned out.
  Bayek's guilt was never properly explored.
  the story is written with a twist, an emotional confrontation between Bayek and Aya, but oddly the game never build on it.
  The beginning of the game is incoherent and confusing.
  The ending of the game is rushed.
• Aya's stories are less developed and yet seemed to have (or at least intended to have) more depth.
  Main story is really bad. Ok, maybe not as bad as Unity, but probably worse than AC 3 (Haythem and Conner's storyline). The story dragged too long during early quests, the twist is so obvious it's not really a twist, and the second half of the main story is pretty much a chore. I think the problem is that the game was limited to Egypt, but you can't tell a good story about Cleopatra and her era without involving the Romans.
• Yes, you get to do some quests in Rome, but the quest is so rushed there's just no historical gravitas to it. You don't feel like being part of the history, the mission felt that Ubisoft just want to check a box.
  The story quality notably get worse towards the end. The ending is such a rush. It’s almost as if the writers run out of time and can only give you the bare bones of what happened. There's very little sense of accomplishments. So yeah, Bayek and Aya established the original Brotherhood of Assassins… I don't feel very excited about it. Compare to Ember the animated short which depicted Ezio's final days, that short story is so much better than this entire game.
• Both Bayek and Aya are not very interesting people, which is such a waste of opportunity to create some memorable POC characters. There's no chemistry between them, and because their relationship never felt real, their eventual separation didn't feel very meaningful either.
  In fact, there really aren't any interesting people in this story. Compare to… Da Vinci from Ezio's storyline, various American founding fathers you get to meet in Conner's storyline, every other famous person during Victorian era that Jacob and Evie end up helping out… Most people you met in Egypt just aren't all that interesting.
• Not a lot of interesting historical figures to interact with. This is perhaps more of a critique of my own ignorance of that part of history. Perhaps if I know more, I'd recognize more familiar faces. That being said, Mark Antony didn't show, young Octavius didn't appear, Cicero and other major senators didn't show, Brutus and Pompeii made brief appearance and didn't play any meaning role in the game. It almost feels that half of the history (and half of the game) is missing.
• The side quests, well individually fun to play, as a whole they aren't really connected to the main quest or each other. Each area has some sort of quest strings, but since you don't really need to do them one after another, it's very easy to get side tracked and completely forget about it. The entire game lacks coherent design that connect everything Bayek does.
• Very few actions have actual in-game consequences. Different from previous AC games (and other Ubisoft open world games), clearing barracks and outposts no longer “free" an area. Other than clearing the outpost for the sake of clearing it and get some nice EXP and item reward, there’s zero reason to clear any of the outposts. And even if you kill all the soldiers inside, the outposts will not be “freed". It'll always remain restricted area. And eventually soldiers will pop back.
• Aya’s chapter is significantly worse than Bayek's main line quests. Like Witcher 3, the game allows you to occasionally control a secondary protagonist: Aya. Most of her missions are naval missions, which are kind of boring (can't compare with Blackflag’s satisfying naval battles). When she had to go on missions, her skill sets are limited, her weapons are weak (compare to fully upgraded Bayek weapons). It feels like the game forces me to use a weaker clumsier character in some of the crucial battles, while I have devoted hours to level up Bayek (and his weapons). Compare to Ciri, who has her own skill set and can be just as powerful as Geralt, Aya feels weak and lacking.
  And the game is pretty heavy handed to promote Aya and trying to make empowering statements about women can be just as capable as men. But instead of telling me this, why don't you make Aya powerful and fun to play as?
• Interestingly, Aya seemed to have a better character growth arc than Bayek, but the story never really get into her character. It leads me to suspect Aya was originally designed as the main character of the game, but eventually Ubisoft decided to go with a man. After all, a minority protagonist is already risky enough, a minority female protagonist? That would be too much!
• Boss fights are uninspiring and generally a chore. I personally don't like AC:O’s fighting system. But that's just me. I wish the game gives me the option to stealth kill bosses instead of force me into confrontation with them.
• Tomb explorations aren't very interesting. Compare to puzzles and underground structures Ezio explored in Rome, Egyptian Tombs are just a lot of corridors and chambers. I know, I know… that's historically accurate. After all, you can't change the internal structure of Great Pyramid of Giza, but still… after you visit a few of them, there’s just not enough variety to keep you interested.

All in all, I think the great things outshine the weak points and problems by a lot. And AC: Origins is definitely a great AC game.