Assassin's Creed Odyssey

This is overall one of the best games in the series, with the same lows as the rest of the series but higher highs.

Negatives

The main negatives of this game can be summarized as extremely repetitive and grindy gameplay. This is not a unique issue to Odyssey, this is a prevalent problem in every Assassin's Creed game that I have played, but it is still detrimental to the pacing of the game. The game hits a brick wall mid-game where it locks your ability to progress in the story behind a levelling system that requires you to do repetitive, tedious fight sequences that give very little xp upon completing, so you end up doing a small variety of slightly changed missions over and over again for the majority of the game. This issue is also present in the travelling mechanics; it takes a long time to go anywhere new in the game by foot/horseback, but at least there is nice scenery to see. Whereas when travelling to a new island, you have to travel the huge map by sea, where there is nothing exciting happening; it is just the ocean for ages, and it feels more like a chore you have to do before you get to play the fun part of the game. It feels like it's padding out gameplay time over adding something memorable.

A more minor problems are that the developers didn't really take full advantage of the Greek setting, locking Atlantis behind a DLC {spoiler] and putting very few actual monsters from greek mythology in the game, all of which you only find out are even in the game during later mid-game and endgame quests. There is only one god you get to see in the game and the free accompanying dlc, and the few others in the game are locked behind paid dlc. [/spoiler]

The way that upgrades are handled in this game is unbalanced. Rare equipment is only marginally worse than the legendary equipment in terms of base damage, but is drastically cheaper in both drachmae and the materials required to upgrade. If you want to use legendary weapons, you have to grind for materials in order to not spend 20 minutes in a boss battle and not get one-shot killed by enemies. I'm unsure if this was intentional to punish players who are inattentive to the equipment and the materials required to upgrade, but I don't think this gameplay choice makes sense

Positives

The story and graphics of this game are .

The cult of kosmos is a great . I prefer this method of mystery surrounding the members of the cult

The ancient



This is overall an okay game, and

+ A surprisingly well-developed open-world experience by Ubisoft.
+ Diverse and fun environments, very detailed and intricate.
- This is not AC anymore, why did they bother with the meta-story...

Completed.

Tante robe da fare, tutte uguali ma non dispiace visto il gameplay divertente ed i diversi modi di comportarsi (attaccare direttamente, stealth o usando l'ambiente).
Storia divertente, fastidioso il mare che a volte è fin troppo irrealistico. Bellissima esperienza per chi ha 200 ore da buttare

My buff girlfriend's Aegean journey. Edging toward terrible microtransactions but they aren't absolutely required to play the game

I decided to play Odyssey since its been a year since I played Origins and heard Odyssey was a lot more polished and had a more interesting story. Odyssey is honestly another typical Witcher 3 wannabe open World semi RPG. Odyssey feels like its trying to be Witcher 3 so hard with a similar open World, similar combat, similar exploration and quest giving, and similar horse traveling. But Odyssey lacks so much that made Witcher 3 great and even lacks a bit of what made Origins decent.

The main play to start is Odyssey's length. The main story itself is around 40 hours and with all side content, the game easily run around 100 hours, I could even see some people taking 200 hours if they do every location and conquest battle. There are something like 100 side quests in this game, and to be honest, that's just way too many. Most of the quests in this game are just mindless filler that consist of going to a random location, looting an item, freeing a prisoner, or assassinating a target. I'd say for every one good side quest in this game, there are maybe 20 bland and forgettable ones. There are actually some good side quests that have interesting characters and are fun, but most of them are buried among the bland and boring side quests. This game also adds romance options and lets you basically sleep with many of the random characters you encounter in your side quests, and the game lets you sleep with both sexes regardless of your gender. This just felt cheap and pointless and like these guys were trying to mimic the romance from the Wither series, but at least in the Witcher series when you romanced you got softcore porn and actual scenes in Witcher 3 and nudity. In this you just have the main character kiss and then the screen fades to black, which is pretty lame considering this game is rated M.

Odyssey lets you choose between a male and female character at the start who are siblings, and it really doesn't impact the story because whoever you choose has almost the exact same dialog as the opposite sex counterpart. The story of Odyssey was pretty disappointing as well. It started off okay and I thought the whole cult was interesting, but then the game started shifting focus away and just overly started dragging out. The game has 3 different storylines really that each have different conclusions, and this felt kind of messy, I feel these 3 storylines should have been tied into the main storyline rather than being separate. Then you have the naval combat, which just feels sluggish and tedious, I mean ever since Black Flag we've been spoiled. And I found that halfway through the game I just wanted the story to end because how bored I was. Most of the main story just consists of you trying to find your family and save them. Other things I didn't really like was that I found it way too easy to level up, especially early on in the game and found myself going into many side quests overpowered, and even if you can make the game where quests adjust their difficulty based on your level, it still felt easy going in to these quests. The combat gets somewhat annoying too because you get some overpowered abilities that pretty much make you able to Rambo your way through most areas rather than focusing on stealth, and speaking of which, there are many enemies in this game who can't be one shot killed with a stealth blade, even with full upgrades, and if the enemy survives they will alert the entire base of your presence often, and I just found this annoying that enemies can survive stealth hits.

I mean there are a few good things about this, even with all the flaws I listed. The voice acting is pretty solid, especially Kassandra, it was cool having an Assassin's Creed in Greece, even if half the map is smaller islands, the graphics are solid, and I liked enemies and missions leveling up with you so you couldn't be too overpowered, plus the game had decent enough boss battles and I did like the variety of weapons you could use in this game and the customization and I did enjoy most of the cult questline, even if it had a pretty bad ending and dragged out a little too much.

Overall most of my issues in this game come from its lack of originality and it dragging out. Half of the side missions in this game could have easily been cut out and the size of the map could have been reduced by maybe 1/3 without so many islands that require you to travel with your ship, and the main story could have also been condensed a little and combined the Atlantis, main story, and cult questlines together. Plus I felt like this game borrowed too much from Witcher 3, but did it worse like the romances, side quests, and exploration. The reason I loved Witcher 3 and its one of my top games of all time is because Witcher 3 had a rich World full of amazing lore, an interesting World, and side quests that actually were well thought out and not repetitive cookie cutters of each other. The only quests in Witcher 3 I found repetitive were the hunting contracts, but at least those were fun and offered some challenge and the side quests didn't drag out like this games. I feel 80-100 hours for a first time playthrough to complete all quests is just way too much, this game took me almost as long to complete as Persona 5, and this game isn't even an RPG. This game just pads itself too much with tedious side content than is super repetitive. Odyssey had potential, and has better gameplay and controls than Origins. But Origins just dragged out a lot less and I found Origins story and side quests to be more memorable, and Egypt felt more interesting to me than Greece, which got a bit repetitive in World design. Odyssey is just another big open World game that will be forgotten in 2 years when the next Assassins Creed game comes out. I miss when the series used to be fun and had concise stories, actually had great focus on stealth, and were more linear but focused. AC never needed to be open World or change its formula, but Origins decided to take the series in this direction and it looks like they won't be going back after all the positive reviews this game got.

After the excellence that was Assassin's Creed Origins, it was clear that the new direction taken with the series was a hit. Ubisoft would continue to carry on the open world RPG style with Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the follow-up to Origins. The entirety of Greece is opened up to the player in the largest Assassin's Creed game world yet as the franchise reaches towards new levels of ambition. The result is a generally excellent game with a few notable, glaring hiccups.

If you've played Origins, you already know what to expect with Odyssey. It picks up right where Origins mechanics left off, tweaking them just a bit. Equippable armor is now a thing beyond cosmetics, and the skill system has been overhauled yet again. There are some other changes, but for the most part, it's very similar. Exploration is tied to leveled zones, and it's an open world RPG with a familiar combat system. Exposition has changed a bit, as you now are given the opportunity to play as either Alexios or his sister, Kassandra. The general plot remains the same, but the dialogue and character traits certainly do differ between the two.

The biggest improvement to Origins' combat system is a rehaul of combat skills. The skill tree features fewer passive upgrades, and more active abilities. These skills range from simple tricks such as a Sparta kick or a shield bash, to more ridiculous, almost mythical feats such as teleporting assassinations and a rain of arrows. This immediately plays up to the fact that Odyssey takes the mythical portions of Origins and really runs with them. While you generally fight regular enemies and animals, there are more fantastical fights with a minotaur, medusa, and some cyclopes. Whether you enjoy these or not will depend on what you're looking from the story. I've already been open about my satisfaction with the history/myth hybrid that Assassin's Creed adopts, so I personally enjoyed it quite a bit.

Naval combat returns, having been absent since Unity did away with it and only making a cameo appearance in Origins. Since this is ancient Greece, there are no cannons or mortars. Instead, ramming plays a bigger part, and your ship is manned by several archers playing the role of the cannons. Cosmetically, it's different, but in practice, it's essentially the same as in Black Flag and Rogue. The game balances how frequently you actually need to engage in naval portions well, with the map having large swaths of mainland as well as several islands to explore. The fact that the entire game world is accessible and not blocked off a-la Black Flag also means you can opt to run across the mainland instead of taking a ship to a small port location as well. It's all up to you.

Greece itself feels like a small step down from Egypt. Yes, there are some beautiful sites to see, especially on the more tropical islands and more arable regions, but a lot of it boils down to lots of craggy mountains and deciduous forests. This is hardly the fault of Ubisoft; Greece itself does look like this. There are certainly some villages that are particular picturesque, but for the most part, urban areas are a little more forgettable than in Origins. Side quests are a strange, mixed bag. Most of the actual hand tailored side quests are fine, with fun side stories and characters. But the game also features procedurally generated side quests that initially lure you in under the pretense of being actual side quests. You can quickly tell that this is a ruse, because the dialogue obviously takes chopped up sentences and inserts them, making for very odd, almost mechanical dialogue. You eventually learn how to filter these out and forget about them, but their inclusion is odd.

If there's one fatal flaw to the entire design philosophy of Odyssey, it's how the leveling system works. The level cap is set to level 99, and the entire world keeps scaling with you until the end. Some enemies remain above your level until you hit the max. This means that you never really feel like you're getting that much more powerful. You get more tools at your disposal, but your actual level of power seems to be relatively the same. The worst example of this is that legendary armor sets do -not- scale with you, so once you finish a set, it's stuck at the level it's at. The only way to bring it up to your level is through a blacksmith, and this process gets increasingly more resource-hungry as you continue to level up. Now I can see why this may have been a choice intended to always give players something to work towards, but in pretty much any other games with a set system, there's a defined endgame where sets remain virtually untouched. This may or may not bother you depending on your ideas behind how this should work. The long and short of it is that leveling up begins to feel more inconvenient than empowering.

In terms of plot, there's nothing super special. Some twists that remind you a plot is occurring, some standard revenge fare, all that. The pacing of the game can make you completely forget you're chasing a goal at all, as open world RPG style games tend to do. If you play games specifically for stories, you'll at least get something here. It likely won't blow you away, though. By all means, Odyssey is much more enticing as a game based around exploration. Despite the shortcomings of Greece lacking the same beauty as Egypt, it's still an exciting adventure from start to finish. Whether it's sailing the Mediterranean to your hearts content, musing with Socrates, or navigating the labyrinth, Odyssey will almost assuredly pull you in.