Assassin’s Creed Origins Review

It’s thanks to these smart upgrades – and the generally more forgiving stealth mechanics – that make enemy camps a real joy to flush out, though having to send Senu, Bayek’s eagle companion, into almost every objective first quickly became annoying. It’s nice to get a literal birds-eye view of these locations, and understanding the lay of the land is imperative to sneaky preparation, but trying to tag mission-critical enemies and pickups was often an exercise in frustration. Also, missions with real forward momentum suffer from having to break flow for these aerial sweeps as you approach. You can choose to ignore the large tooltip telling you to take to the skies, but you’ll be severely disadvantaged if you do. Origins wants you to play in a certain way a lot of the time – luckily their way is fun, but it does come with its own drawbacks.

Presentation:

Ubisoft and, in particular, the Assassin’s Creed series has always had a fragile relationship with stability. Employing a wholly unique blend of jankiness, Creed games provide raucous laughter and raging annoyance in equal measure from time to time with some of gaming’s weirdest glitches. As much as I’d like to say the extended development cycle of Origins helped smooth off these rough edges, it hasn’t: that special blend is still present (though never in the same frequency as Unity, who’s legendary glitches may never be matched).

That said, Origins is probably Creed’s most stable game to date, with only a few truly spectacular goofs (almost always concerning mounts or combat animations) In a world as large as Origins’ – and really, it is unfathomably large, especially when you zoom out (and out and out and out) on the map screen for the first time – this kind of clunkiness is expected, even forgiven, considering the admirable scope. Even when its behaving itself perfectly, Origins isn’t a beautiful, polished thing to behold on the micro-scale. Textures are muddy, fauna behaves weirdly, enemies and wildlife behave weirder still, but when you take a step back and see what Ubisoft have created here you can’t help but be blown away. In its vistas and its towns and its endless shades of Egyptian orange that give the title an instantly unique look, Origins is a roaring success. In its recreation of a land we’d never be able to visit otherwise, it’s a marvel. The fact that your camel occasionally clips through the landscape or that the less-important NPCs look like overly smooth horror shows going through robotic animations can be ignored when glimpsing the masterpiece of design just behind them, slightly out of focus but incredibly important nevertheless.

Sound design is similarly unbalanced: Main players are voiced brilliantly, with actors infusing genuine character into their respective bundle of polygons. Random NPCs however – who you’ll be speaking to a lot more than, say, Cleopatra – are simply off-putting. The music can swell to wonderful heights or be completely, weirdly absent for incredibly long stretches. It’s far from deal-breaking, and again given the sheer volume of audio present it’s understandable that not all of it can be award-worthy, but maybe in future titles it might be worth paring down the frankly ludicrous amount of content in favour of more curated, polished experiences.

Conclusion:

“Assassin’s Creed Origins” is a product that proudly displays the love and effort that went into making it – and that’s a feeling you don’t often get in AAA game development. It soars thanks to a brave approach to aging systems, cutting a surprising amount of the ‘core’ Assassin’s Creed experience in favour of bold new directions – and it really works because of it. It’s fitting that the game that took them twice as long as usual to develop turns out as one of Ubisoft’s best.

What’s less fitting, but no less brilliant, is that the game about the beginning of the Assassin’s Creed movement is the series’ most evolved.