Assassin’s Creed Origins: Him-and-her detective fun in Egypt

After a much-deserved break, Ubisoft is back this year with arguably its biggest franchise – yes, Far Cry is also huge but as it’s yet to have its own movie, I reckon Creed pips it. Assassin’s Creed Origins takes the series to its earliest setting yet, and while we’re still crying out for a ninja-based outing, there are few eras as atmospheric as Egypt in the time of the pharaohs.For this playthrough we really started to get grips with the setting and the characters.

Hero Bayek is working with his partner Aya. That’s partner in both senses of the word, as Aya is both Bayek’s capable equal and his wife. They are sent to investigate the poisoning of a holy bull, which then turns into a rescue mission – for a man, not a bull sadly.

The detective part of the game works well, allowing you to scan the area for points of particular interest, both items and people, that you can then interact with to solve the puzzle. That led to a more standard piece of Creed gameplay, sneaking into a fortified camp for a simple snatch and run.

Leaving the city we marvelled at the size and richness of the surrounding area. Directed to a nearby pyramid our colleague took on scaling the monument, while we delved into the tomb, where a series of physics puzzles stood between us and the loot within.

The game looks beautiful in many respects, the attention to detail in the period is nothing less than incredible. There are a couple of technical wrinkles to iron out before launch, such as texture pop-in and some over-aggressive depth-of-file effects, but that’s to be expected. We played it on an Xbox One X development unit, and it’ll be interesting to see how the game looks across the four hardware specs that the market will soon support.

The writing and characters also look to be top-notch, and so there’s plenty to draw gamers into this evocative outing in the series.

You can read all our Gamescom highlights in our MCV@gamescom daily issues