Strategic Combat
That isn’t to say that combat is no longer a viable option. In fact, Ubisoft Montreal gave the franchise a fresh take on how it handles open combat that looks a lot more fun and engaging than its predecessors. Previous Assassin’s Creed games felt like The Legend of Zelda. The games thought they could fool the player into thinking combat was difficult and nuanced by making fights longer through waiting and countering.
They weren’t harder, of course. Sure, waiting to counter kill eight enemies is certainly longer than waiting to counter kill three enemies, but it’s not harder. Plus, since enemies were always nice enough to wait their turn before attacking, players never had to really respond to multiple attacks. Typically, the closest enemy in any given fight would be the next one to attack, and, ultimately, the next one to fall. The one exception was Unity.
Much like Unity, Origins features enemies that will surround and gang up on the player. However, unlike Unity, Origins will give players faster foes that will hit a whole lot harder. I was shocked by how quickly I was killed off by just regular soldiers in the E3 2017 demo. Yet I wasn’t discouraged. Combat feels visceral, bloody, and dangerous, and actually invokes a pang of fear when more than three enemies are closing in on Bayek. It feels so much like For Honor, and if getting another game that features For Honor’s strategically dangerous combat doesn’t sound like a good time, then I don’t know what does.
