Assassin's Creed Origins: The Curse of the Pharaohs

Assassin's Creed Origins: The Curse of the Pharaohs provides a ton of new content for the game and does an excellent job of closing out the season pass.

The Curse of the Pharaohs' unique spin on Origins' setting and formula makes for a memorable experience.

The Curse of the Pharaohs is a big step outside of what we’re used to seeing from Assassin’s Creed Origins, and it pulls its whimsically mystical journey off well. Combat continues to be fun and challenging, and this time your biggest foes are fleshed out and varied enough to turn what could’ve easily been a monotonous series of fights into a highlight. Along with the side activities of hunting down stolen relics and exploring desecrated tombs, this surreal DLC goes above and beyond expectations.

This is Assassin’s Creed finally catching the dragon that it has been chasing for a decade. At long last, it has nailed the balance between outlandish and plausible. Because of the period’s close ties to mythology, it makes sense for Bayek to travel to the ethereal. It’s thematically consistent with the setting, and it’s a sincere reason to explore something new. The Curse of the Pharaohs is among the most ambitious of Assassin’s Creed add-ons while also among the least jarring. It’s quite possibly the best DLC to date. If this is Bayek’s swan song, he went out on a high note.

Bayek leaves reality behind in the second downloadable content release for Assassin's Creed Origins.

Following on from the enjoyable, if a little boring The Hidden Ones, Curse of the Pharaohs is Assassin's Creed Origins' second expansion, and it's a lot more ambitious. Once again, protagonist Bayek -- now getting on in years -- is informed of ill happenings off in a different part of Egypt. This time, he's journeying East to a region that's home to the Valley of Kings -- a burial site where many of the nation's most prominent rulers were laid to rest.

Don’t let my lengthy rant about the overarching lore fool you - Curse of the Pharaohs is a fantastic, content-rich DLC which takes what already worked well, added a few twists and turns, and gave us more of it. This is a solid ~15-20 hours of content if you’re a completionist and explorer with some unique and otherwise underrepresented settings.

At the end of Curse of the Pharaohs, I was very happy to have spent another weekend in Bayek's world. Ubisoft have offered exactly what you loved about Origins plus some fun twists from the afterlife on the side.