The best thing about Assassin’s Creed Origins is the game world. Ubisoft did a fantastic job creating Egypt. The map is massive, and strictly playing the story missions covers around 60% of the map—this is without any of the DLC content. Exploring the pyramids, the Sphinx, and other Egyptian landmarks is a lot of fun. The City of Memphis is particularly memorable to me. In the hands of a better studio, this game could have been a masterpiece.
Graphics fidelity is top-notch, and it’s very well optimized. At the absolute highest settings on 3440x1440, I was getting around 120 FPS on my GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. With the HUD elements disabled, it manages to look on par with Red Dead Redemption 2 in some areas.
Gameplay is very mediocre and extremely repetitive. It’s obvious that they are trying to imitate The Witcher 3, but it does not measure up. The mechanics seem very shallow, and they got boring fast. It suffers from the copy-paste design of Ubisoft games—bargain bin gameplay in a AAA open world. In true Ubisoft fashion, the map is full of markers, which robs the player of the joy of exploring and discovering something cool in the open world. Once a viewpoint is activated, everything in the area is highlighted on the map for the most part. There is no reason to go to a remote corner of the map because you know nothing is there other than maybe a trinket or two. But if it is anything remotely important, Ubisoft will make sure there is a question mark on the map. It removes any sense of discovery.
The bird is another goofy mechanic in the game. It’s basically a high-tech drone in the form of a hawk, and the game really wants you to use it. It could have been so much better, but Ubisoft can’t help themselves.
There are also those ridiculous modern-day sections, but thankfully, they are very short.
I am happy they removed looting animations from the previous games.
The story can be interesting in certain parts, but by and large, it’s nonsensical. The dialogue is very bad, and the characters are poorly written. It felt like they were trying to create a character like Geralt from the Witcher games but failed. Black Flag still remains the best in terms of story and characters. The final missions are extremely annoying because you don’t even get to play as the main character.
I paid $8.99 for this game, and I think I got my money’s worth. I recommend getting it on sale.
It sounds like the sense of discovery one can achieve is not strong with this one, like playing google maps; open to purely scenic detours but incentivized to the rails. While a beautiful game, fortunately, AC does not seem to lead the industry in terms of the most desired aspects of the open world model especially in terms of its mechanics. But that AC exists with great game aficionados like you to go on these journeys and report back for us all, is perfect.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, fren. I will make it my life's work to report back on these mediocre games.
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