Since I’ve been laid up with the knee for awhile, I’ve been doing some gaming. I’ll be honest and say I didn’t pick up Assassins Creed: Origins when it first came out. I was hesitant because the story seemed so far from the previous games. Yes, it looked gorgeous. But I couldn’t figure out how they were going to make it mesh with the series canon. So I waited until one gamer I trust emphatically because we have very similar tastes in games had played it and could tell me what he thought. He told me he thought I’d like the game and, since Ubisoft was having their Black Friday sales all last week, I picked up the Deluxe edition of the game at a nice price.
My initial concerns about the game were quickly proven to be false. The storyline is a great backstory for the Assassins. I haven’t finished the main storyline quests yet, so I’m curious to see how they play out. No, I won’t give any spoilers. I’ll leave it up to you to play the game or go to Youtube to find the videos. However, I’m enjoying the game a great deal.
Graphically, the game is absolutely gorgeous, as have been the last several Assassins Creed games. Ancient Egypt comes to life as you play the game. I’m sure there are historical inaccuracies. I’ve caught a few and I’m not an ancient Egypt scholar. But they don’t matter. I’ve been enjoying acting as medjai or protector for the people. It’s fun seeing the intrigue and deception between the Roman factions, the manipulations of Cleopatra, etc.
Another thing with this particular installment of the series is you can choose to play it straight up as a stealth game or not. That means, depending on how you’ve kitting out Bayak, you can take whichever playing style you are most familiar with. The downside of taking the fight straight up the middle isn’t so much that you can get overwhelmed by the enemy but that they can and will call for reinforcements from outside of the combat zone and those reinforcement might just include a character class that you learn very quickly to run away from just as fast as you can.
Even though I haven’t finished the main story quests and there are a ton of side quests I haven’t done, I can tell you now this game has replay value. The sheer expanse of the open world and the number of side quests you can come across — quests that aren’t marked on the map until you either stumble upon them or you manage to synchronize an area — see to that. So does the fact there are so many different approaches — not just geographically but tactically — you can take on the main missions.
