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Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Discovery Tour Review: Play this now

Free content is usually take it or leave it, but let me assure you: Assassin’s Creed Origins’ recent Discovery Tour add-on is a must-play.

I know, I know — I’m about a month late with this hot take, but nonetheless, said take stands. Let me convince you why.

I’m not sure how it would fare in a school as an actual education tool, but Discovery Tour and its 75 unique, interactive tours pulled me in immediately. I switched from Bayek to a modern day avatar (I won’t detail who, ’cause spoilers) as it felt extremely fitting; after all, I’m a modern day guy just walking through a video game world, learning about the history of the real world it’s based upon. Who needs an Animus?

Discovery Tour has two main narrators, and I must confess I preferred the male one over the female one. The former throws a lot of personality and inflection into his reads, while the latter is a bit more monotone. As I was excited about learning of Alexandria and its origins, I wanted my narrator to do the same. That all said, both do a tremendous job of relaying a ton of information about townships, crops, art and Ancient Egyptian culture. The tours are of reasonable size — five minutes or so on average — and you can skip individual nodes if you’re finding them boring.

While each tour does an exemplary job of setting the tone and relaying information, I must confess I enjoyed the bits where game development managed to sneak in. For example, Ubisoft wasn’t exactly sure what Ancient Egyptian dye pits actually looked like, so one tour sneaks in just what the development team based them upon.

Want to find out exactly what that is? I’m not going to ruin it for you — go and take the tour. Thankfully, the entire setup is pretty seamless; you can load in and out of tours from the in-game menu — no fast travel or camels required — and each is pretty easy to follow once you start, with a golden line taking you from point to point.

With rumours that Assassin’s Creed might be heading to Greece next year, I think I’m more excited about the prospect of a Grecian Discovery Tour more than the idea of core game itself. If the rumour doesn’t pan out, that’s okay too — I’d be MORE than happy to shell out a couple bucks if Ubisoft wanted to give the Discovery Tour treatment to Assassin’s Creed II‘s Italy.

We usually don’t cover free DLC, but this is pretty different from the norm. Consider this an earnest recommendation: go and expand your horizons with Discovery Tour. You won’t be disappointed (and if all that wasn’t enough, see also: free Achievements.)

 

9 out of 10

The good

  • Immersive and engaging.
  • You’re learning stuff with a controller in your hand!
  • A little little sneak peak at behind-the-scenes development decisions.

The bad

  • The female narrator can be a little bland.

 

Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ Discovery Tour was reviewed using an Xbox One. The content was provided free to all Origins’ players by Ubisoft. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.