Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Review – Bigger world, greater freedom but harder to play

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series got a new start on Assassin’s Creed Origins about one year ago, and now they are back with a new title – Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. This time, the game is taking you to ancient Greece with familiar yet different gameplay mechanics. We enjoyed the game on PC these days, so here is our Assassin’s Creed Odyssey review where we will explain our thoughts about the game!

Check out our gameplay below:

The Story

Set in the year 431 BCE, the game tells a fictional history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. You will get to control one of the siblings – Alexios or Kassandra. As the descendant of the Spartan king Leonidas I and a mercenary, the protagonists will fight to unite their family, as well as uncovering a malign cult.

We took on the role of Kassandra since it is very new for Ubisoft to let players play as a female protagonist throughout an Assassin’s Creed game. Although we do think that Kassandra has a more subtle personality and a better voice-acting compared to Alexios, both of them shares basically everything from dialogues to outfits.

The World

Exploring the huge and breathtaking open-world in ancient Greece is enjoyable, though the map still fills you with numerous icons and side contents. Gladfully this time Ubisoft adds an “Explorer Mode” that eliminates waypoints to your quest objective on the map. Instead, you will need to get clues from the NPCs to know where you should head to.

There are countless side quests and contracts shattered around the world where you can complete for extra EXP and Drachmae/equipment. While the side contents are interesting with their own stories at first, it slowly turns into a boring task as you repeat the similar mission over and over again.

The Choices

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is inheriting most of its features from Assassin’s Creed Origins but with a twist, This time around, players are allowed to decide how the protagonist behaves – either good or evil by making choices on the different dialogues. For example, you can choose to show mercy or kill your enemy when you defeat them.

You are free to develop romantic relationships with the NPCs as well. Gender doesn’t matter here, you can flirt with either men or women (or both) if you want. However, we didn’t see any serious relationship that develops as the game progress, all the relationships you get are nothing more than a one-night stand.

The Combat

The combats are just like how you do it in Origins – you can’t just swing your weapon recklessly, instead you will need to parry and attack when there is a chance. Of course, you can perform stealth attacks (assassination) but you still can’t kill your enemy in one hit if he has a higher level than yours.

Customization on weapons and armors have improved too. You can equip a huge variety of weapons ranging from Bows, Short Blades to Heavy Blunts, along with the freedom to mix and match all kinds of armor parts that you found in your adventure. You can also engrave additional stats on your weapon and armor parts.

The skill tree branches into 3 categories – Hunter (ranged), Warrior (melee), and Assassin (stealth). As usual, you get a skill point when you level up (or complete exploring a tomb) and you can spend it to unlock new abilities. There are a few special abilities that you can assign to certain buttons, and some of them are really interesting. For example, there is a “Sparta Kick” ability that references movie 300 and an ability that allows your arrows to fly through walls (well, f*ck logic).

A big portion of the game’s map is on the sea, which means you will have to spend most of your times sailing across the water. The naval combats are back in a satisfactorily way – you can ram into enemy ships, or fire arrows and javelins at them before you board the ships to kill your enemies off. Your ship is also upgradable with resources you collected along your journey.

Other contents

As an addition, you can knock out an enemy and thus recruit them as a crew of lieutenants for buffs on your ship (eg: more damage on arrow attacks). The game now features a mercenary system that if you commit too many crimes (attacking ships, stealing stuff or murdering citizens), a bounty will be placed on you and the hunters will start to chase you down.

The hunters are basically a boss, you can fight them (they have some strength and weakness, you should learn about them before you fight them) or pay off your bounty with Drachmae (in-game currency). Also, you can kill the sponsor directly to clear your wanted level.

If small-scale battles don’t satisfy you, Odyssey is featuring Conquest Battle as well. As you will lead a side in a skirmish (either Athens and Sparta) to fight up to 300 enemies, it becomes very challenging for you to balance your dodge and attacks while protecting your allies.

Moreover, you will need to lower the nation’s Power Meter before you can participate in a Conquest Battle. You can do so by killing Leaders, destroying war supplies, taking down heavily guarded forts and more, but all of these requires a lot of work and strategic planning.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is now available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch (Japan only). Dio get the game if you are interested, you won’t regret buying it! Will you choose to play as Alexios or Kassandra? 😀

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