Hands On With Assassin’s Creed Origins On Xbox One X – First impressions

I had the opportunity to go to GameForce in Belgium today and I’ve used most of my time checking out how well the Xbox One X performs. To give you the short of it; it looked stunning! Surprisingly, it wasn’t Forza 7 that blew me away, but Assassin’s Creed Origins!

Having just played Assassin’s Creed Unity on my regular Xbox One, I must admit the graphical difference is overwhelming.

*Disclosure: All of the images below are taken with a Phone Camera, as there was no option to directly record them.

It was immediately apparant that the amount of detail was far greater than any Assassin’s Creed we’ve seen before.

And I’m a sucker for water physics, so I was glad I got to jump in and see that I had total freedom. I even had small flashbacks of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which is my favorite one to date.

You even get to dive down into the water again and see some varied aquatic life.

But Assassin’s aren’t naturally aquatic creatures and eventually you’ll have to emerge and do what they do best… Assassinati… Climbing!

And if you don’t quite know what lies ahead, you can now use a LITERAL Eagle vision. At any point can you press UP on the D-pad and soar through the skies with your feathered friend. It’s definitely a more impressive method to scan your surroundings, but a tad less usefull than the previous games’ take on Eagle Vision. Though that kind of ability always had the risk of being overused in games and then you spend 50% of the game in X-ray/detective/Eagle Vision-mode…

The eagle isn’t your only animal compatriot, you’ll also have a trusty steed. It sure helps getting around the vast environments that Origins has to offer and the horse handled very well. Perhaps even a little too well as it jumped over any obstacle automatically. Very much the same way as the Assassins themselves often feel like they’re on auto-pilot.

But again, thank god for our equestrian friend or crossing this desert would have taken ages!

Most of the games shown at GameForce had one issue in common: they didn’t have any kind of tutorial or true demo to show. They kind of dropped you into the deep end and let you experiment to your hearts desire without even explaining the controls. I went into Assassins Creed Origins thinking that wouldn’t be the case, as I literally played an Assassins Creed game the day before.

To my (and my friends who were with me) suprise, the control scheme was entirely different than what we’ve gotten used to. You no longer press the RT button to run, that button is now used for melee attacks. X is no longer the option that lets you quietly assassinate your targets, this has been moved to the Y button.

It lead to some funny accidental kills though… at least there’s that…

Aiming and shooting a bow now feels more natural though, as you get to use LT to aim and RT to fire. But having the fight button on the shoulder button just feels a tad weird to me.I don’t know if the game will let you remap the controls to what you’re used to, but I quietly hope so as otherwise I’ll have to take some time adjusting to this.

When you do get into combat, the action is pretty smooth though.

I was on the edge of skipping this one before I got to play it. I was getting kind of tired of the Assassin’s Creed formula (especially after Unity’s insane amount of side-content and chests testing the limits of my repetition-tolerance) But the gorgeous graphics and the interesting setting may just have me playing this game to completion just like I did with Black Flag.

I have high hopes for it!

*Out now: buy it for Xbox One