3/5 ★ – Lammy's review of Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Assassin's Creed Origins + DLC Post-Plat Review: It's been a while since I've touched this series, and it's transitioned to an RPG series in that time so let's see how things have evolved! AC Origins follows Bayek of Siwa, a Medjay (essentially a religious police officer) in Ptolemaic Egypt, about 49 BCE. After the precursors of the Templars kill his son, Bayek and his wife Aya swear murderous vengeance on those responsible. Along the way, they intersect with real history in that standard Assassin's Creed way, occasionally interrupted by a modern day story of Abstergo employee Layla Hassan doing very little all told. Oh, and Bayek's story ties in to the foundation of the Assassin's Brotherhood and associated creed, but it's not really the focus here. The origin story parts of the game are kinda rough, but Bayek is a very strong player character and his personal narrative is excellent. The gameplay has taken steps away from the pure action game structure of the earlier AC games, adding in some surface level RPG elements like gear stats and skill trees in their place. It doesn't run too deep and there's still skill requirements in the combat, but the game does feel like more of a numbers game than before. The main loop of the game is an absolutely massive open world, filled with things like camps to raid and collectibles to loot; some of the tasks get a bit samey but I was still having fun by the end of the DLCs. Speaking of, there are three major DLC/updates - two paid packs titled "The Hidden Ones" and "Curse of the Pharoahs" which provide further gameplay without expanding either the major loop or the story meaningfully, and the free "Discovery Tour" update that serves as a sort of virtual museum for ancient Egypian history. My one major complaint is that during the DLC sections specifically, I ran into consistent crashes on my PS5 using the physical disc edition; it seemed to be caused by a wonky update install, and downloading the version from PS Plus that included the update in the same set of files seemed to resolve it, but it was an overwhelmingly frequent crash that I can't ignore. Overall, the game is... good! Story's solid but flawed, gameplay is solid but a little repetitive, and there's a crash issue that I was able to solve with a little work. If the game didn't have the performance issues I'd call it a 7/10, but with the crashes I'll call it a 6/10 all told.