A step towards the unknown
Much like last year’s Origins, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a step towards the unknown for the franchise. While Origins lets go of its roots and offered a full open world experience, Odyssey takes it further by introducing dialogue choices, consequences for your actions and a ton of active skills; transforming it into an RPG.
You can choose to play the game as either Alexios or Kassandra. For most of the game, the plot moves at a brisk pace; introducing new points while providing closure to existing ones. It’s a pleasant variation from most modern titles where information is held out for too long and then the game ends right when things get interesting. It does spend an appropriate amount of time in build-up, and is constantly adding new threads that are all interconnected. It is a long journey, but it rarely feels like a slog. Powerful story moments, memorable character interactions and twists are littered throughout. The main character has believable motivations and has a clear path they want to follow, and the tone of the game feels a lot more natural, instead of one emotion dominating all interactions like it did in Origins.
The battle system is pretty much the same as last year’s game, but with two key differences. You don’t have a shield anymore so you must rely on parry and dodge to avoid taking damage, and your character can map abilities to the face buttons. Holding L1/L2 will give you access to melee and ranged skills respectively. These skills include a spartan kick, arrow volley, a charge attack, critical assassinations and so on. I loved the addition of active abilities and the combat becomes even more fun when you unlock a second skill wheel.
Dialogue options and other choices can help you get out of trouble, instigate fights, start a relationship and decide how others view your character. Some choices can have a major impact on your interactions while others are just for context and flavour. As an example, early on in the game I saw some priests killing civilians on my home island. They said that the civilians were carrying a deadly plague. I thought they were innocent and ended up killing the priests. Several hours later when I returned home, people were either sick or dying all around due to the plague that was spread by me saving the civilians.
Naval combat returns and allows you to upgrade your ship as well as recruit captains for bonuses. The idea of locking main story content behind levels that was present in Origins is not completely gone in Odyssey, but thankfully it has been severely diminished. You do need to complete locations, collect bounties or finish side quests here and there in order to be of the required level to finish main missions; but due to the more natural flow of the plot, big story chunks are more closely connected. In every area you can perform certain tasks to lower the fortification status. This lets you assassinate the leader of the region and take part in a large scale Conquest battles to take control of it.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey aims to please anyone who is or was a fan of the series. The massive improvements in storytelling, more depth to combat, interesting characters as well as other refined gameplay and world design elements make it the best Assassin’s Creed game of this generation.
Overall: 9.0
HT23 end-of