Assassins Creed Origins
What a pleasant refreshment from a series stale and stagnant entry. Year after year the team that creates assassins creed has made something new that felt old, they continued working with a mold they created and it worked. People would buy it in hopes of a unique experience only to be relegated to the same go here do this, go here do that mission style. While that is unavoidable to some extent, it was always the same after a few hours in the game. You never felt attached to any specific character as you did in the first two games. From a personal note, it is weird to hear me say this out loud because I thought I was attached to the characters of Ezio and Desmond. It was not until I played this game that I finally understood how much was lost in the opportunity they were given.
Then Origins dropped into our laps with promises of open world and a chance to see the story from the very beginning. I like most people now days am skeptical of origin stories as they have the opportunity to retcon or even just screw up everything we have come to know about the series. I am happy to report that is not the case with AC:O.
From the very first seconds, you realize this is not a traditional Assassins game. You are thrown in control of Bayek as he marks the first name off his list of those responsible for sending him on this path. He is a Medjay, an ancient Egyptian royal police essentially, whose life gets tossed. I will admit that the intro is a little jarring at first because there's not really an intro. It is a cinematic of you killing your target, and then you go straight to fighting some big bodyguard for your previous target.
It seems a little like you are playing a demo at first and you only get to play a part of a mission but that feeling subsides reasonably quickly.
Once you finally make it into the game and can start selecting your missions at will that's when the joy of this game begins to open up. The first thing you might notice is that this is not a typical Assassins game. Your enemies have hit points instead of health bars, your weapons do damage per second instead of just an amount of health they remove, and your eagle vision is an eagle that spots for you, and attacks wildlife randomly for you so you can get some materials to craft with. It is nice to have to sense of freedom to chose whom you are going to attack and with what.
One of the things that blew me away was the world you are visiting, Even if it is a bit of a fictional Egypt, is the stunning views. It is a hallmark of the series to climb towers and see stunning long distance views that would take the breath away from anyone there in person, But they do much more than that in this game because you are blown away by just standing on the ground. You can see mirages in the distance from the heat waves coming off the ground. In some provinces, you can see the pyramids of Giza off in the distance standing majestic and wonderful as I'm sure they did in 48 B.C. You can climb greek built towers and view the city of Alexandria the way you should see it. Riding your camel through the city, you ride past the Library of Alexandria and the Tomb of Alexander the great. For a geek like me it is a bit of a dream to go and visit these places in their current form but to be able to see a representation of how it looked at the time is almost just as good.
The combat system in Origins is superb, very well done and quite easy to understand. The only issue I has was using the shield. Either I could not get the timing down, or I was using it against the wrong people. I mainly used mounted combat, ride in on my camel into a group of bad guys using my charged attack seemed easier than fighting on the ground. One point of contention in the combat system is when you get chased down by Red Skulls (the term I used to describe the high-level enemies that could kill you in two hits even at level 32) and get desynchronized after just enter a province either by accident or on autopilot. You do very little damage to them, but they do very high damage to you. They serve a purpose in the game which is to keep you in check mostly, But it can be frustrating getting run down by a group of guys and getting killed. The worst part of all this though is when you get desynchronized and then spawn in, right in front of them and go into instant combat and die again. Fortunately, that only happened to me twice.
I am giving Senu (your trusty eagle friend) praise for helping keep this game afloat in some of the dull moments in the story. He does not seem to have a range limit from Bayek and can go up pretty high to get a proper perspective. I know I scouted all of the city of Memphis with Senu one day and hit a max distance of about 850m from Bayek. I recommend using him as much as you want, the main thing to consider is that you need to upgrade Senu by hitting synchronization points which also give you the ability to fast travel if you want.
I also want to touch briefly on the mounted system in the game. When riding a camel or a horse you can hold down the "A" button to enable autopilot and follow the road. If you hit the "Y" button, your mount will take you to the best route to get to your objective. It only fails if there are no roads near your objective, which would be if you wanted to scout out some of the lifeless deserts (which I recommend you do)
Moving on to possibly the best part of this game, which is the story. The only way you know you are playing an Assassins Creed game at first is the title. It is so different than how we played the other games. Once you can leave Siwa (the starting province just ensures you are up to a certain level), the choice is yours as to whom you want to kill. They may be a higher level than you, but that only means you need to do some side quests to level yourself up to that point (which I recommend you do right off the bat because the higher you can get yourself initially the better the endgame is going to be for you). You will go through some pretty straightforward missions, but the characters are more engaging than ever before. I recall one task that required me to kill my target, but it was what happened afterward that stuck with me. Finally seeing the consequences of your actions in the game. It may seem silly in an Assassins Creed game but this one moment changes Bayek.
Overall there are some issues in this game. Two big ones stick out at me right off the bat. The out of animus stuff is still just a mess. I am not even sure people care about that stuff anymore. Hell, I barely wanted to do it in the Desmond games that I contemplated stopping the game, so I did not have to do it.
Mainly the end of the story does not mesh with the direction Bayek takes, but they had to tie the story back to the games somehow, and I think that is where the series is failing still. Were still hung up on how we got to Altaïr, Ezio, and Desmond ultimately. For most new fans this will not be a problem, but for those of us that have played the old games, it is hard to ignore the big flopping sound the end of this game made.
I would give this game a 9.5/10 for the first playthrough and a 5/10 for every playthrough after that.