Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is the eleventh title in the mainline series of the franchise, released only a year after the much praised Origins, a game that came out after the franchise took a much needed break.
Odyssey is set four hundred years before the events of Origins, moving from Ancient Egypt to Ancient Greece. You now get a choice as to whether you want to play as a male or female character, Alexios or Kassandra to be precise. I personally chose Kassandra for no particular reason other than she’s aesthetically more appealing, and it’s rare to have a playable female in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
After an epic reimagining of the Battle of Thermopylae between the Persians and Sparta, the game jumps forward and begins with you taking control of an unassuming mercenary doing odd jobs for people. After a slow start the narrative progressively entangles you into an adventure of family lineage, betrayal and the unravelling of a secret cult acting as puppet masters, all against the backdrop of a war between Sparta and Athens. The story is compelling from start to finish, but it never really hooked me in, the narrative generally jumped from one point to the next without ever making me feel emotionally involved.
Like Origins before it, Odyssey is somewhat of a diversion from the typical Assassin’s Creed game, in fact it goes even further than Origins in turning the franchise into an action RPG. For the first time there are dialogue choices that make a genuine difference depending on what you decide, as well as opportunities to romance non playable characters. The romance addition seems like a bit of an afterthought, as it’s neither deep nor meaningful, it usually just means you get the chance to shag someone.
The map on first look is intimidating with its large land areas surrounded by small islands, all of them gated off with different progression levels. At the start you have a choice between exploration or guided mode, the game specifically states that the developers want you to play in exploration, but I chose guided. I like to play open world games with a bit of structure on top of their layered content, it gives them more linearity and focus for me.
The campaign progression takes you from one area of the map to another, inside of these vast areas are side missions and side activities for you to discover, as well as equipment to collect to either use or farm off for cash or resources. In this aspect the game hasn’t changed too much from what we’ve come to expect from the franchise, but it is noticeably more level grindy compared with previous entries. There are certain points where the level gap between one story mission to the next is quite drastic. The biggest level grind I had to make was three, but with so much content this wasn’t a problem that really hampered my experience, but I must warn you, Odyssey is a challenging game. The enemy AI is relentless and they attack you in numbers if you’re spotted. So trust me when I say that you’ll get your arse handed to you if you try and overcome enemies that are any more than two levels above you.
Combat is engaging and responsive, but it feels rather floaty and weightless. It’s identical to the system used in Origins, but the camera hangs higher above the character making it slightly easier to fight groups of enemies. Which is still a bit of a problem, a good example of this is when you take part in conquest battles, they are large scale battles that you can take part in after you have diminished the power of a leader within a certain region. This is where you’re surrounded by tens of enemies at once, so locking onto the right target can be cumbersome to say the least, this isn’t helped with the removal of a shield you can use, so there’s a bigger emphasis on parrying and dodging.
However, the upgrade system makes up for all of this, choosing from different damage types such as assassin, hunter and warrior, you can assign yourself with a specific set of skills to use in combat. This can range from firing arrows that explode on impact, one time healing, as well as engraving your weapons with fire or poison effect. The skills tree is not as vast as the one in Origins but it’s far more focussed, giving the player more agency over the way they’d like to approach game’s obstacles.
I was initially dreading the naval stuff going into the game, it’s one of the reasons why I never got that far into Black Flag. But I had a lot of fun upgrading my ship, recruiting people, and fighting in the open sea. And the sea is visually gorgeous, while so much of the travelling from one area to the next is sparse and rather lonely, it gives the game a wild sense of adventure and charm to what is a beautiful but often hollow world.
Assassin's Creed games have always created detailed and engrossing open worlds, in the visual sense at the very least, and Ancient Greece is no different. Whether it’s walking through the gates of Athens or Sparta, or climbing the statue of Zeus, there is a lot of beauty and scale that’s jaw dropping. But for all the visual beauty none of the areas on the map look specifically distinct from one another, you begin to notice the same assets used abundantly over and over. The same could be said for Origins, but the topography of the maps and the locations felt distinct and aesthetically more memorable in that game. It doesn’t help that the transversal can be a terrible burden, at some point you’re guaranteed to find yourself getting stuck in certain spots of the terrain, whether it’s climbing up a mountain or riding through a forest.
Which brings me onto an issue that bogs down most open world games, and that’s the sacrifice of intricate level design, which was integral to the franchise before Origins came along. You can now climb pretty much anything in sight, which is a shame because outside of the brilliantly crafted historical locations that they are set in, one of the reasons why Assassin’s Creed stood out amongst the plethora of open world games is the fact that the worlds were designed around the gameplay mechanics. But I understand why this change has happened, for all of these issues I’ve highlighted there is no doubt that Odyssey takes place in a fully interactive and immersive world to explore.
Another minor but drastic flaw that hindered my overall enjoyment is the addition of mercenaries that hunt you down if you cause too much civil disobedience. On one hand it works because it adds to game’s difficulty and tension, and if you choose to kill them you can loot good equipment from their dead bodies. But they become a problem when you haphazardly run into one on the map unknowingly, or if they suddenly decide to turn up when you’re in the process of clearing out an enemy fort or camp. You can pay these people off but it’s easy to forget the red bar at the bottom of the screen that tells you how much of a bounty is on your head. The idea also feels a bit half baked, outside of giving the game an extra layer of difficulty, it’s just a convenient mechanic so that you hire people to be part of your ship’s crew.
The cultist members that you have to hunt down also feels like a lost opportunity, not only is there plenty of them, but the majority are given little more than a short profile in the menu system. You’re rewarded with legendary gear if you kill them, but I think it would have been better if there were far fewer and their roles expanded within the core narrative. Not only would it have gave the story more gravitas, but there would have also been more satisfaction in killing them off.
It took me sixty three hours to see the ending to the main story campaign, and for most of that time I thoroughly enjoyed myself. But like most Assassin’s Creed games, by the time I got to the last third I was beginning to feel exhausted by the whole experience. There is just way too much bloat and niggling flaws that hold the game back from being something truly special, it’s a fantastic game that’s just shy of being better than the sum of its parts. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood still remains my favourite in the franchise.
Verdict:
4/5
