Assassin's Creed Origins

My original plan was to have completed all my other Assassin’s Creed games before Origins was released. However, this was a total pipe dream and I still have Chronicles India and Russia to go as well as The Ezio Collection but that only sort of counts as it’s just more of our favourite Italian assassin and I’ve already done his adventures once.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes us all the way back to ancient Egypt and puts in the sandals of Bayak of Siwa as he goes on a murderous rampage to avenge his dead son. This is basically the birth of the Assassins versus Templars thing as Bayak keeps killing dudes only to be given more dudes to kill. The story is pretty good and despite some people calling Bayak boring, he is far more engaging that Connor from Assassin’s Creed III and that Arno guy from the forgettable Assassin’s Creed Unity. You also get to play as his love interest Aya for small sections of the game.

The gameplay has caused a lot of people to call Origins a breath of fresh air in the franchise. I get it as it feels a lot more refined than before, but I can’t help but feel that it’s kind of missing the point. Assassins are supposed to be sneaky and kill people silently. While I get that they should be combat ready at all times, the default should be sneaking and the punishment for being detected much more severe. You can kill anyone in any way, shape or form. I was kind of hoping for some more planned assassinations like the first game.

Another notable difference between this and previous games is that instead of Eagle Vision, you now have an actual Eagle who can see stuff for you and identify targets, enemies and chests and allow you to see them. I am assuming at some stage, an assassin will go into some kind of scientific device with said eagle and they will combine to generate the Eagle Vision power we know and love from the franchise. It is incredible that the eagle can supposedly see treasure chests in underground caves but whatever, we’ll run with it.

As well as killing people, there will be lot of optional side quests that pop up for you to help the people of Egypt with their day to day lives. This will also include killing some more dudes at some stages as was the norm in ancient Egypt? It is quite comical how casual Bayak is about killing people for the most inane crimes.

Another good thing about the gameplay is that you can chose the difficulty level to suit your ability.

Egypt is huge. The first area itself is probably the size of one city from Assassin’s Creed II and there were only three cities in that game. There are like twenty areas here. It does suffer a bit from being far too spread out though. There are desert regions in the south where there is nothing to do. Some of the mountainous terrain in the north is a little tricky to navigate quickly through.

I suppose my point here is that if you are going to have a big map, use it a bit more? There is literally no point in having the desert regions in the game, they are just taking up memory. That said there are in excess of 400 locations to explore where you have to complete actions like open treasure chests, kill dudes (obviously), find secret tablets and gaze at the stars.

Graphically the game is stunning. Egypt is beautiful from the pyramids to the oceans and everything in between. The character designs and environments and well thought out and there were few cases of me getting stuck on the scenery. The music offers an ancient Egyptian feel with the familiar twang that’s accustomed to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It doesn’t overpower but also goes unnoticed for the most part, which is the right balance for in-game music.

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 67 Achievements

I am hoping that Ubisoft are done with this. We are already two DLCs in and Discovery Mode with a nice even 1,500 points.

There are 12 main storyline achievements but you will get a couple more through normal play that don’t warrant going too far off the beaten track. The fact there are those empty deserts at the bottom of the maps means that it is possible to complete the game without defogging the entire map which is a bit weird but there you go.

Outside of the main stuff, it does throws in the usual Assassin’s Creed varied achievements and my word, it doesn’t half want you to do some convoluted shit. The first one of these was feeding a corpse to some animals. First you have to kill a dude (I know, right?) then drag his dead ass across the burning desert in hope of finding some animals that actually want to eat him. Once you’ve done this, you then need to throw the corpse down in a place where the animals will go without them seeing you and then hang around waiting for it to get eaten. Stupid.

Killing three enemies with one hit was a pain too but I foolishly tried to get this one at the beginning of the game when my weapons were shit. In the later game I had one weapon that killed everyone with one swing so this is actually a lot easier than I made it for myself.

Another fun one makes you tame a lion (you need to have acquired the skill from the skill tree) and then lead said lion to a crocodile and make them fight. This is made hard by the fact that you cannot fast travel with a lion so you have to wander the wastes of Egypt looking for a crocodile while your trusty lion follows you.

The one achievement I needed to grind out was for killing dudes (again) by firing fire arrows into oil and setting them on fire. You need to do this 30 times but there are not a lot of opportunity and also normally you have to fire arrows through fire into oil to do it. You can, however, get legendary bows which have automatic fire arrows which makes this easier.

There are another three achievements worth mentioning. You need to sell 100 trinkets at once. Trinkets are useless items that you find in pots and stuff as you search places. There appears to be a limited number of these so you need to save them up to get it. DLCs may help in making this easier to get in the future.

The one which annoyed me is for witnessing raining bugs in the desert. This means you have to run Bayak through the desert regions of Africa until he starts hallucinating. Once he starts, it’s totally random what he will see. Raining bugs is one of many hallucinations Bayak could see. Some people have reported not seeing this for several hours. What happened to me was that I saw it not once but twice without getting the achievement. I then restarted the game and it unlocked so this was one of the rare occasions where the game glitched on me and this could be an Xbox issue rather than a game issue.

The last one is the big one and it’s for clearing every location in the game. This is straight forward for the most part but also time consuming and there is one thing that nearly fucked me here too. When you are exploring certain locations, there are yellow crystals called silica that you need to pick up to complete the area. However, make sure you pick all of them up. The last location of these types requires 50 silica to complete it so if you rush through like I did and not pick them up, you will have to revisit these areas to get the missing silica.

I also had that annoying collectible issue where I was missing about four locations and had that, ‘is this the last one??’ moment when trying to find them. Pro tip for this – the map is too bright. Lower the in-game brightness right down and it will make finding those missing locations a damn sight easier – they show up on the map as question marks if you haven’t found them yet.

Downloadable Content

There are three DLCs. The first one of is a single player expansion called the Hidden Ones. Its not very long and compared to main game, the achievements aren’t that demanding. The most notable ones are for killing three dudes from a zipline, freeing twenty rebels from captivity and jumping off some statue thing between 10 am and 12pm. The reason this last one is tricky is because there is no in game clock. You have to time it based on the shadows in the game.

The second DLC, which is free, is Discovery Tour which allows you to play in a non-combat Egypt and learn all about ancient culture. This is great move that has been really well received by the public. It offers three achievements, all are easy to get it shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half to get them.

The more recently released Curse of the Pharaohs sees Bayak visit Thebes where long dead Pharaohs are coming back to life and killing people. Bayak goes on a quest to stop them and in doing so, stumbles into the afterlife. It’s probably closest to the Tyranny of King Washington DLC from Assassin’s Creed III in that it’s totally out there in terms of fantasy. This is especially the case when you end up fighting a load of giant scorpions.

Curse of the Pharaohs carries another six achievements which are straight forward to get. Thebes and its surrounding area is a lot bigger than the Hidden Ones DLC so it takes a while longer to get them all but when they charge £15.99 for the privilege, I would fucking hope for some extended gameplay. Artifex Mundi games are cheaper than this.

I had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed Origins and it’s definitely given me the impetus to complete the franchise. With the DLCs included though it takes up nearly 20% of the hard drive so you don’t want it sitting around forever once installed. In fact, that’s been the most annoying part of the game – having it sit there, waiting for the DLCs to come out.

Achievement wise, it’s very doable and leaves everything in the hands of the single player gamer and offers variety. In this regard, it is a great list to go through.