Assassin's Creed Origins

Assassin's Creed Origins started off strong. Due to my recent interest in Ancient Egypt and other areas of ancient history, I thought it would be a good time to jump into Origins. Ancient Egypt in this game is beautiful, the cities are well designed and the towns appear to be realistic. I have no doubt this is the closest video game representation of Ancient Egypt we have by a long shot. Unfortunately though, apart from the parkour, this game doesn't really feel like an Assassin's Creed game, which I did come to terms with pretty quick as I started to treat it as almost an entirely new IP. However, the game starts to feel like a chore fairly quickly. Once you start to level up, your progression feels like it grinds to a snails pace. You have to do side quests to be leveled up enough to do the main quest, and you have to do quite a lot of them by the end of the game as it starts to take a ridiculous amount of experience to level up. This would be fine if the side quests were well written and interesting, but a lot of the side quests I have done were boring or repetitive missions involving going to a place, killing people, and then coming back, only to progress a third of the way through your level (if you're lucky). Enemies that are only a couple levels ahead of you quickly become nearly immortal and are able to kill you in a couple hits. These enemies don't look any different to their lower level counterparts, the only difference is the number above their head. You can't even assassinate enemies if they are a couple levels above you, they might only lose a quarter of their health. I've played RPGs before and really enjoy the genre, but there's just something that unfortunately feels off about this game and it's progression. The main quest is actually good, and involves big historical figures whom I won't mention for spoiler reasons. How Bayek and Aya deal with their grief is also really well done. But, like I said, the RPG elements of the game simply feel off, and these elements are unfortunately the foundation of what this game is built on. The game seems to lack the immersion of most other RPGs too, as it feels incredibly 'gamey' rather than making you feel like you're in a living, breathing world. As a sidenote, 'epic' and 'legendary' loot is also just a little too gamey for me. This isn't Fortnite. If this game were built like old-style Assassin's Creed games, or if the RPG elements were reworked, I could see this being a very good 8.5 or 9 out of 10 game, because there is a very good game hidden underneath.