The Hidden Ones is the first expansion for last year’s award winning Assassin’s Creed Origins set in Ancient Egypt. In this new expansion you set sail from Memphis to Sinai to assist a faction of The Hidden Ones (The Creed), and take back the land from The Order (The Templars). Old characters and new characters play a role in what becomes an intertwining albeit short story. As Bayek discovers new Egyptian nomes, you will work towards building The Hidden Ones by making new recruits and assisting people in taking the leap of faith to become a master Assassin.

There are three new nomes, or zones, in The Hidden Ones. These new areas are all fairly similar environmentally, having The Red Sea run along the west side, and un-scalable cliffs to the east. The Romans have camps and sites throughout the whole map, and you’ll find discoverable titbits from the original game thrown in such as star circles and resting spots.

At first, the expansion appears to offer lots of missions and plenty to do, however we soon realised there really wasn’t much extra thrown in to the game. There’s a new level cap of 45 which is in no way a grind if you had already reached 40, you can upgrade your stats a little further using animal parts and precious metals, and you’ll find everything in the towns to be of the same accord as the base game. There are no new ideas in The Hidden Ones, just more content.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Assassin’s Creed Origins was a great reboot for the series, pushing the Assassin’s Creed franchise in a new direction and aligning it with role playing games such as The Witcher and Horizon Zero Dawn, however what we’ve come to learn from the expansions for those games has not been made apparent with this expansion from Ubisoft. There’s no new features, no new enemies, and really nothing that feels new in The Hidden Ones. Where The Witcher 3 added things like unique item enchantments, and Horizon Zero Dawn added new beasts, the first Origins expansion fails to add anything other than more of the same. At least with the promise of mythological beasts in the next expansion, we may yet see something new for Bayek to enjoy.

The side missions are pretty much just an A to B task, involving an assassination of sorts. There was only one really memorable side mission which sent you around the map looking for treasure, though the conclusion of it was far from epic. The Hidden Ones touches on topics like child slavery, the worth of a villager’s life, and even self-worth, but they are all topics which are only touched on lightly and no side story gets solidly driven home in this expansion.

All missions are complete in under 5 hours, and the side content and explorable areas are quick and easy to wrap up. What was a lengthy exploration in the base game, such as finding the star circles and figuring out the meaning of it, seems pretty pointlessly tacked on in The Hidden Ones, and perhaps Ubisoft realised they really didn’t have much in the way of content so they decided to add these as an afterthought, with no real end-game purpose. We had hopes for a 10 hour expansion followed by an even larger one in March with the release of The Curse of The Pharoahs, so hopefully we’ll get a decent length expansion next time.

Assassin’s Creed Origins: The Hidden Ones was reviewed on Windows PC using an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW Gaming graphics card. The expansion was stable throughout the entire review period.