Assassin's Creed Origins Hands-On: 12 Things We Learned

Funnily enough, although Assassin's Creed Syndicate felt like the crucial tipping point for the franchise and whether it would emerge with renewed strength or fade into obscurity, sales show it underperformed regardless.

Such was the mortal wound dealt from AC: Unity's disastrous 2014 outing, putting Ubisoft on the back foot and seeing them take two years off to repair the damage. In that time we saw the phenomenal Watch Dogs 2 upend all expectations to be the sort of game the original should've released as, but as even that struggled to resonate with a wider audience, Ubi are bringing back Assassin's Creed under the 'soft reboot' banner.

Combat is overhauled, we've finally gone backwards in time to visit a period in history that allows for creative flourish and we're getting a solid dump of narrative, being the titular Origins subtitle refers to how the assassin brotherhood began.

So far so good - at least for a primitive E3 showing. But now the game's been shown off to IGN in an 18 minute direct gameplay feed, well... let's just say those initially positive reactions have gone sour pretty fast.

For better or worse - and Origins really is the test of whether Ubi suspends this for a few years thereafter - this year's Assassin's Creed is shaping up to be quite the different beast indeed.