Assassin's Creed Origins is free to play this weekend on PC

Ubisoft is offering up a brisk helping of Ancient Egyptian adventure for PC players this weekend, courtesy of its three-day-long Assassin’s Creed Origins free play event starting Friday, 19th June.

Origins, if you’ve not yet had the pleasure, casts players as Bayek – one of the first Assassins in the series’ sweeping, generations-spanning narrative – setting them off on an epic, and rather sandy, tale of vengeance across a sumptuous open-world recreation of Ancient Egypt.

It’s a good ‘un, of course, in large part thanks to that dazzling map, but it also shines thanks to its long-overdue finessing of the Assassin’s Creed core, which impacted everything from combat to parkour and helped make the increasingly stale series feel relevant again.

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Inevitably, Origins suffers a little from Ubisoft’s all-too-familiar open-world homogenisation, but Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan still found himself dazzled by its “mad ambition and grandiosity” in his Recommended review. “As dawn rose,” he wrote of his time with the game in 2017, “I wondered whether this would ever end, and I realised that I didn’t really want it to.”