Assassin's Creed Origins - The Curse of the Pharaohs (DLC)

The Curse of the Pharaohs is the second major expansion for Assassin's Creed Origins, and the one that drops any pretense of grounded historical thriller in favor of full-on Egyptian mythology. You are still Bayek, still a Medjay with a vendetta and a good bird, but now you are trading dusty Ptolemaic politics for the Fields of Aaru, the shadow realm of Aaru, and the genuinely spectacular afterlife landscapes that Ubisoft Montreal built around each cursed pharaoh. Ramesses, Nefertiti, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun each get their own pocket dimension, and the visual variety between them is the single best argument for buying this DLC. On the RPG side, the expansion ships with a raised level cap and a new ability branch called Overpower, which gives Bayek flashy finishing moves tied to Egyptian deities. It is not a deep system by the standards of a proper CRPG, but it adds enough new toys to justify re-examining your build if you have been coasting on the same setup since the base game. Weapon variety gets a bump too, with cursed pharaoh gear that carries mythological flavor in its stats and aesthetics. The loot loop remains satisfying precisely because Origins already nailed the feel of combat, and this expansion does not break that. Where it stumbles is in the quest structure surrounding those incredible afterlife setpieces. The overworld sections in Thebes and Herapolis are padded with the same fetch-and-kill busywork that made certain stretches of the base game feel like obligation rather than adventure. The main storyline is strong enough, with each pharaoh's curse carrying its own emotional logic and some genuinely well-written dialogue around Egyptian mythology and the costs of immortality. But the side quests propping up the runtime too often exist only to push you toward the next level gate. For players who care about narrative payoff, the main quest thread rewards patience; the side content mostly does not. The afterlife realms themselves are worth the price of admission if you are the kind of player who stops moving to look at environment art. The Field of Reeds has a golden, heavy-light quality that no screenshot fully captures in motion. Aaru feels genuinely alien. These are not recycled Egypt biomes with a color filter slapped on; they feel like a team was given permission to get weird, and they did. Whether those hours of visual spectacle outweigh the filler depends entirely on how much you enjoyed Origins' open-world rhythm already. If the base game's pacing frustrated you, this expansion will not convert you. If you loved it, this is the version that dresses it up in the mythology it was always quietly gesturing toward. Bottom line: a solid expansion for RPG players who want more Bayek, more build tinkering at higher levels, and mythological Egypt done with real craft, even if the quest design refuses to match the ambition of the world it builds. Monika, Scout Team