Ancient/Classical Egypt has been my dream Assassin's Creed destination for years, and it's great to see it finally happen. I hated both Unity and Syndicate, so I'm pleased that Origins shows some improvement, and that extra year of development clearly helped a lot. The world is gorgeous and fascinating. I loved exploring it, and I loved immersing myself in this period that very few games have ever really touched on. The main story is okay, nothing great, but it's the best AC story in a while. I like Bayek and Aya as characters, and things were compelling enough to keep me interested, which is something the last two games spectacularly failed to achieve.
One thing I took notice of right away is that the climbing and parkour feels better now. The control layout has changed a little, it's less context-sensitive and more streamlined. The reason I find this refreshing is because for too long I've been sick of that sticky, inaccurate, right-trigger-does-everything platforming that the series became overly comfortable with. It's mostly minor tweaks at play here, and it still works pretty much the same way, but it feels much less frustrating. Origins takes a new freeform approach to climbing, where almost everything you see can be climbed fairly easily, and you don't usually need to find specific spots to grab onto either. Though this takes some of the "puzzle" out of platforming, it also makes it flow a lot better, and the design is quite clever in the way it manages to still make it look fairly believable. It's not perfect, and if the game was more city-focused I'd probably be noticing the same old problems again, but overall it feels great, so a big thumbs up for that.
The mechanics and the level design have been refined enough that stealth is now a viable option almost all of the time. It can be tricky, but the game encourages you to avoid direct combat most of the time, a true stealthy assassination is much easier to pull off than it was in previous games, and you have a lot of options. The result is that Bayek actually feels like an Assassin, instead of just a very fast and nimble murderer, and I appreciate that. There are some pitfalls though... For a start, "social stealth" aspects, such as blending in with the crowd or sitting on a bench, are completely removed, and that's a real shame. I hated the new combat system at first too, because the game does a poor job of explaining the mechanics. Even once I understood it all, I still found it a little awkward and repetitive. It does get better as you progress, but it's never really great, and it needs some work if they're going to carry it over to the next game. Also, Ubisoft have this thing about homogenising their games these days, and there are many aspects of the open world that are way too similar to their other worlds that most of us will have played before. I don't think Assassin's Creed should remind me of Far Cry, but this one does, and that's weird.
The game still feels... Bloated. The RPG mechanics and levelling system still aren't really necessary, but the game is designed around them more than any other in the series, so it seems like we're stuck with it now. It's basically an Action-RPG, and that's probably the genre we can continue to expect from Assassin's Creed in the future, which is something I have mixed feelings about. Crafting seems to be in the game simply to check the box of "this game has crafting," because I can't think of any other reason for it to be there, and all it does is get in the way of your progress. The side missions are hit-and-miss. Some are great, and even take some cues from The Witcher 3, but others are just padding and repetitive busywork, and you have to a lot of them in order to level up. As expected, the modern day segments are back, still don't really need to be there, and only served to ruin my immersion, but they're thankfully very short this time unless you choose to stick around. The last 4 hours or so of the main storyline is extremely dragged out for no particular reason, and could have easily been condensed to about 1 hour, which really tested my patience.
TLDR: The game could have been more trimmed down to make it less bloated and to make your pacing through the main quest more satisfying. I still feel like there is a lot of typical Ubisoft fluff getting in the way of your progress and interfering with the main draw of the game. I'm sad to see social stealth gone, and the combat isn't very good. However, there has been some progress with the parkour system, sneaking around and doing stealthy assassinations is more enjoyable than ever, and the world is beautiful and an absolute joy to explore. There are still a lot of flaws here, but some innovation too, and it's reinvigorated my interest in the series in a way I haven't felt since Black Flag. I hope they stick with having longer breaks between installments, and keep refining these concepts so that the series doesn't stagnate again.