Assassin's Creed Origins Review

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.