191.2 hours played
Written 8 days ago
AC: Odyssey is [b]many[/b] things. Underrated, oversized, full of passion, but also nearly devoid of the flagship Assassin's Creed(TM) stuff (unless it's the Atlantis DLC, in which case it's runaway fanfiction, dubiously canon). But as a [i]game[/i], one that you play for a couple hours and then put down and repeat 20 times, it's fucking fantastic.
[h2][u]Map & Story[/u][/h2]
I've had a difficult time beating this game. Not only because it's monstrously massive and just the main story (plus some side quests for leveling) took me 80 hours to complete, but also because she sheer SCALE you can see on the map screen can be super daunting and discouraging. For what it's worth, the game definitely didn't NEED to be as huge as it is. Not every area is memorable, and a lot of them have a very repetitive regional story: local Big Man is Very Bad, enslaved people, war waged for profit, throw in some ancient treasure and off you go, [i]misthios.[/i] It is very clear [i]someone[/i] had big ambitions for the map of Odyssey and it [i]had[/i] to be filled with [i]something,[/i] so the overall blueprint for local quests is the same, with only the puzzle pieces changing.
But there are also quests that [i]truly shine[/i] with charm, good writing, AMAZING actor performances, and will leave memories and characters for you to reminisce about for a long time after. Odysseus' daughter; a middle aged pirate woman who lost her whole crew; the pirate queen Xenia; Alkibiadies that horny prick, your great buddies Herodotos and Barnabas. These are all wonderful characters and I have mentioned only a fraction of them.... but unfortunately, only about a 1/3 of your time is spent with those wonderful labours of love, and the rest with boring, repetitive cookie-cutter quests where the characters often aren't even named. The map could've easily been 40% smaller and I don't think anyone would've complained.
The main story is... better??? But it still has chapters it could do without. It has an unsatisfying ending; it literally Just Ends after a Big Important Guy dies 5 minutes after being coming on screen, and it's disappointing that the actual ending to Kassandra's personal story is contained in the DLC "The Legacy". The narrative structure of this game will be misleading and confusing to an audience that expects a cohesive and neatly arranged plot. It's much better experienced as a series spanning many seasons, or a book whose chapters you're expected to read out-of-order.
I would even go as far as to say it suffers from the Open World nature of modern Assassin's Creeds, and poor artists were left doing what they could within the framework they were given.
[h2][u]Graphics & Sound[/u][/h2]
Graphics still hold up in 2025, 7 years later. This game could go on to retain beautiful graphics for 20 years if only raytracing were added to it. It bangs it out of the park on all three pillars: excellent art direction, robust technical foundation, and obsessive attention to detail.
Thousands of screenshots from all across Greece could serve as wallpapers, or be printed and hung on the wall. The world is alive and responsive when you traverse through it - the water ripple effects are the best I've ever seen; the fire effects are jaw-dropping for a game that ran on the PS4; the rain makes everything sloppy and muddy and blood sinks realistically into the ground.
Kassandra changes her breathing depending on your actions; holds her breath before diving into water or landing from a big jump (also on a horse!); or does steady, measured in- and exhales while running or climbing. She has mini flavour animations for shielding her face from fire/dust, leans in to light a fireplace with her torch and leans away once it's lit, shakes off her hands when leaving water, or a billion other minute things you would expect from a Rockstar Game. Yes, it's high praise, and I'm tired of pretending people hired by Ubisoft aren't capable or producing masterpieces. This is what AAA USED TO mean, what we stomached the high price tag, weird upselling practices and even weirder microtransations, for. It's attention to detail you could NEVER replace with chatGPT.
[h2][u]Micromanaging the Inventory[/u][/h2]
A.k.a. the aspect of RPG that AC needed the least, and also botched in execution.
If you're familiar with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has basically the reverse if DXHR's scarcity problem: it has an [i]overabundance[/i] problem. Clear a couple areas of minibosses and lootable chests or do like three sidequests and your inventory will be [b]spilling over[/b] with items with arbitrary numbers and confusing perks that are 10% better than what you currently have, which you don't care for because you'd rather play your cool stealth-and-adventure game, not "Hold X to Dismantle" simulator. For every half-hour of gameplay, there's a solid 5-10 minutes of managing the sheer junk in your backpack, with a bonus errand to the Blacksmith every couple of levels when your EQ is falling behind. It's a system that would've done alright if there was perhaps a single piece of equipment dropping every half-hour or so? But instead, Alexios the Garbage Man and Kassandra the Sanitation Engineer will be busy turning piles of crap into comical amounts of pieces of wood, stone, and leather.
It's the only part of the game that actively made me angry on some occasions. The fun and interesting parts of the game are gatekept behind the fact that I've got 100 (no joke, i counted) pieces of junk to go through after 5 hours of ignoring my inventory, but I can't no more because the bad guys are beating me up in 3 hits, and me them in 30.
It's work, in my videogame, and that's no good.
[h2][u]Technical[/u][/h2]
I have a pretty beefy setup (AMD flagships from late 2023) so I played at 1440p and Ultra High, with framegen often hitting 90 frames. You could probably knock that down to High and notice little-to-no downgrade, and at that point even the Steam Deck can guarantee 30fps. I've only encountered 2 instances where the game crashed outright, and glitches that annoy instead of amuse are rare as well. (For some reason, heavy weapons were given an immense amount of ragdoll force in this game. I recommend getting a big club and smacking a guy with a heavy execution attack.)
[h2][u]Conclusion[/u][/h2]
The main compliment I could give to AC: Odyssey is that it's [i]smooth and beautiful.[/i] All the systems glue well together into an experience transitioning smoothly between different kinds of activities, and it all takes place in a stunningly crafted world. It's an extremely mature game, both meaning by the latest patch as well as Ubisoft nailing the production pipelines that even [i]enable[/i] a single-player open-world game to have 200 hours worth of content to [i]just work.[/i] Oh, and the gratuitous gore.
The main criticism I could give to AC: Odyssey is that it's a game made by Ubisoft, a giant, soulless corporation with an exceedingly controversial upper caste. That means microtransactions in a singleplayer game, it means it was buggy as hell on release, as well as those gameplay problems I've mentioned above - the misunderstanding of what makes RPG's appealing, and an overinflation of the game's content count. (The latter being something they'd overswing in the other direction with Mirage and fail as well.)
That's why, I would want to urge you - [u]do not make the mistake of crediting Ubisoft for the excellence of this game. Credit its people - the artists, programmers, and QA testers, down in the trenches, making the game [i]actually[/i] happen.[/u]