Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Odyssey continued the paradigm set forth by Origins which reconstructed the combat and gameplay almost entirely. The only thing that remained the same really was the parkour. So what makes this game so much better in my opinion then games like Origins or Valhalla? The map. It's so huge which isn't necessarily a good thing but it's so beautiful to be in and explore. It really reminds me of Just Cause 2. Nothing good about the game except the map. The characters within the world and the story are not all that good, and the horse riding feels very blocky. The combat is good but they just copied the Witcher Style games. I really just like to be in the world, explore, and fight. The fact that they include a couple of mystical creatures is also pretty rad. The story is also super long so expect to play for a while.

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.