The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Odyssey

 

Context

When Assassin's Creed Odyssey originally came out, having played all AC games from the start up until Unity, I was so disgusted by Unity that I signed out of buying any further games in the series. For me, Unity was a heap of a game, although it had some positives, these were outweighed by the rife bugs, broken stealth and poor cohesion of the story with all the game activities.

Odyssey's release and subsequent review came after me being intrigued by the series again since Origins, and the positive reviews for Odyssey sucked me back into the series again.

It was actually quite a while before I played Odyssey, because I went back and played Syndicate (review here) and Origins (game review here and DLC review here) first so I could keep to playing the games in order.

I loved Origins, to the extent that I felt it was tied for greatest game in the series with Assassin's Creed 2, so I had very high hopes for Odyssey.

The Setting

Odyssey continues the theme of Origins in going much further back in history to tell the story. Origins was set during the time of Julius Caeser in Ancient Egypt, so just before the count of years switches from BC to AD. Odyssey goes back even further, to Ancient Greece circa 431-422 BCE.

As might be expected, the landscape of Greece is much different to Egypt. Odyssey presents us with a larger map than Origins. However, a fair portion of the map is devoted to the sea. Yes, that's right, sea-faring returns to Assassin's Creed with Odyssey.

Ancient Greece is a world of islands and large land masses lush with vegetation and pockmarked with traversable mountain ranges. It's a much different environment to Origins, where you had to jump on horseback to go between major settlements, whereas in Odyssey you can largely get around by foot. One thing I really liked in Origins was that I rarely fast travelled, and preferred to get on horseback, set my horse off to autopilot to where I wanted to go, and then switching to Senu (the eagle) to watch the landscape go past from on high. In Odyssey, if somewhere isn't close enough to go by foot you'll probably just fast travel. For some reason, putting your horse in auto-pilot seems to send you on very convoluted routes to your destination. I do somewhat miss the appeal of the long distance horse-riding in Origins, but Odyssey replaces it with having much more to do quite close together. Islands tend to contain several places of interest in smaller areas to Origins and even the large land masses are more densely packed then the deserts of Egypt.

The Protagonist

You can choose between one of the siblings of Kassandra (female) and Alexios (male) to be your character. The choice is almost completely cosmetic, with the majority of NPC speech referring to you in neutral terms as the Misthios (Mercenary) rather than by gender. You can sow your oats in this game, but Greece is a very bisexual culture it seems, because whether you are male or female doesn't really seem to impact who your character can enjoy him or herself with. Without spoilers, the character you pick does determine the gender of one of your main enemies as well, but that person's identity is by the same nickname rather than their real name, so that doesn't really have any impact either.

There's no direct difference between choosing Kassandra or Alexios

There's only two things I think that might influence the player's choice of which character to pick.

To start off with Kassandra is the canon character. Ubisoft went through this period of developing stories for female characters, only for executives to overrule having a female lead because "it wouldn't sell." In fact this happened with Origins as well, where originally you were supposed to play Bayek's wife, Aya, as the main character. In the end, you mostly play as Bayek in such a well written story and character I couldn't imagine it being any different. With Odyssey, however, the "game not selling" was solved by allowing the player to pick either gender.

The second consideration is the voice acting. Both voice actors do a good job of voicing their character as the main protagonist. However, the other sibling does feature in the game, and Alexios's voice actor does a spectactularly appalling job of voice acting in the alternative role, to the point that it is ridiculous and atmosphere breaking.

When it first release, my original play through Odyssey was with Kassandra, and Alexios's voice acting was so bad I really had to think very hard about playing my new run through with Alexios. I was very concerned his voice acting would leave me irritated after a while, and there is no option to change characters part way through the game. In the end, I did decide to play as Alexios second time around, and I'm pleased to say it's been absolutely fine and not really much different to playing Kassandra with regards to the voice acting.

The Gameplay

As might be expected, Odyssey has its gameplay routes in Origins and anyone who has played one will recognise the other.

The basics are very very similar to Origins. The general principles of the parkour, stealth movement, eagle vision, scouting with your eagle, collectibles, location-specific tasks, inventory and loot system and experience and levelling are all there and feeling familiar. However, Odyssey does refine and develop on quite a lot of the game playing aspects to Origins, so much so, that I'll split the gameplay part of this review into sub sections.

Combat

The basics of being spotted by enemies and then entering into a combat "mode" are the same, as are most of your choices of weapons and armor. However, Odyssey does change and add quite a few new features to combat.

The most obvious difference in Odyssey is that your character has no choice of a shield. If you are not holding a two-handed weapon than your character has their spear in their other hand. This means you can no longer hold a block-stance against enemy attacks. To be fair, blocking wasn't great in Origins because many attacks were unblockable anyway, and I found dodging to be more consistent.

In Odyssey, you cannot block, and instead you'll be relying on dodging or parrying. Parrying did technically feature in Origins, but in Odyssey it is much more effective and you'll be using parrying and dodging together. If you parry certain attacks at the right time you'll gain an advantage. Similarly, if you dodge attacks at the right time you gain another advantage. Rather than just standing there with your shield up, you'll be poised to watch your enemy attacks and react accordingly. In Origins, it was easy to nerf the combat system with a combination of strong attacks and dodging. In Odyssey, combat works the best the way it was intended.

No shields for your player in Odyssey, but parrying is extremely effective.

After the lack of a shield, the next thing you may notice will be that archery is managed differently. In Origins you had 4 different types of bow that would be effectively long-range, spread-shot, high-power or standard. In Odyssey, these variations don't exist as bow types and all bows fundamentally behave the same. The special abilities of bows now largely fit alongside other weapons, such as increasing damage with certain types of attack, being on fire, increasing critical damage and things like that.

The additional bow features that were in Origins now take the form of Abilities you can invest in as part of a skill tree in Odyssey. There's a feature for spread-shot, there's a feature for long-range, as well as the rest of the one out of three skill trees that is entirely devoted to archery-related skills.

Expanding on the skill system, there are three basic damage types and skill trees:

• Hunter: For archery-related skills. Hunter damage relates to your use of bows.
  
• Warrior: For melee-related skills. Warrior damage related to your use of melee weapons.
  
• Assassin: For stealth-related skills. Assassin damage relates to your use of your spear, which is Odyssey's alternative to the hidden-blade in all the previous AC games.
  

The skills available are wide-ranging, and can tremendously benefit your chosen type of gameplay. Melee combat is pretty much unavoidable, so any player will need to invest here, but for the Hunter and Assassin trees, you can probably invest in these trees only so much as it suits your gameplay. In true Assassin's Creed style, I still very much favour stealth gameplay and hardly bother with archery, and I have invested accordingly.

Specific to open-combat, as well as the more generic upgrades to improve your damage or armor rating, you can also opt for abilities to poison or set fire to your enemies, as well as "borrow" attacks from the Assassin tree to augment your openly-offensive capabilities.

Stealth

If you've done any reading into Assassin's Creed Odyssey, particularly opinions of other players on Steam, Reddit and the like, you've probably heard a lot of players say that stealth has been rendered pointless or useless in Odyssey. This is absolutely not true, but what is true is that stealth no longer rules absolutely supreme like it did in previous games.

Origins gave us some introduction into the end of stealth attacks being universal one-hit kills, but it came up so rarely that it really wasn't much of an issue.

On Odyssey, if you don't invest in and play your stealth abilities properly, it will indeed end up feeling like stealth is useless. What stealth has become is a much more deliberate choice as to whether you want this to be part of your gameplay or not. Instead of just defaulting to being an unstoppable attack from the start of the game, stealth is now more of a non-open-combat high-damage attack that you can invest in to maximise your effectiveness.

Firstly, you need to invest in your stealth skills. The most absolutely critical skill is the Critical Stealth attack, which will triple your stealth damage when fully invested in. Secondly, for a modest investment you can open up a second loadout in your inventory. All weapons and armor can feature perks that increase either your warrior, stealth or hunter damage. Start focussing on building a stealth loadout, where you prioritise increasing stealth damage over everything else, including armor.

Regular stealth attacks generate adrenaline, that you use when activiting special skills. Critical stealth attacks use adrenaline points. If you get down to zero adrenaline, your character will auto refill back up to one point, enabling you to make another critical stealth attack.

Stealth is no longer a guaranteed kill, but it is still extremely effective if you develop your character.

Now, instead of just being able to stealth around an enemy encampment stabbing everything in the back unseen, you've got to keep a watch out on how strong your enemy is. Through careful use of the regular and critical stealth attacks you'll be able to stealth kill 95% of your enemies. For half of the remaining baddies, you'll be able to follow up the stealth attack with the regular attack that borrows from the Assassin tree. This will still quickly kill your enemy but make a lot more noise, which is why you have to isolate your enemy to do it. For the remaining enemies, you'll need to leave them until last you can launch a surprise attack on them and then finish them off in open combat.

Stealth is a very different affair in Odyssey, but with the right investment, I actually like it even more than in the previous games.

Equipment and Loot

We've covered some of the changes in equipment and loot earlier. Essentially it's the same system as in Origins, but more refined and effective.

Much more directly applicable in Odyssey are the item perks. Many weapons and armor pieces feature direct buffs to specific damage types as well as lower buffs across all damage types, armor rating, fire and poison damage and protection and improvements to your skills. These perks are now significant enough that you might find that piece of armor you have which is now 10 levels below your current character level is still better than the rare armor piece you have at your current level. Being able to upgrade good weapons and armors at blacksmiths in the game is much more useful in Odyssey then it was on Origins.

Odyssey also features a personalised perk system as well called Engravings. You unlock engravings by completing certain tasks or milestones in the game, such as killing a certain number of a type of enemy or finding a weapon with the effect for the first time. You can pay blacksmiths to add the engravings to your weapon or armor and therefore add the additional perk.

To be honest, I found the engraving system forgettable. The problem is that you are unlocking higher-power engravings all the time, but once you add one to your item, it is permanent. Therefore I feel like I am forever in a state of not wanting to engrave my item because I'll want to apply a more powerful one later on.

One of my favourite new mini-features of Origins was the tomb locations. I really enjoyed snooping around in these dark cobwebbed places trying to find all the treasures. Origins' tombs were relatively few and far between, but generally pleasantly in-depth. Odyssey expands on the tombs and now there are many more of them. However, the downside is that Odyssey's tombs tend to be much shorter, to the extent that it feels like 3 or 4 of Odyssey's tombs could have made up one Origins tomb. On the plus side, more skill points, and at least the tombs are there to be explored and not something that didn't make it into Odyssey!

Tombs in Odyssey are smaller than Origins, but there are a lot more of them.

Seafaring

Although there are clear similarities to the sea-faring aspects to Black Flag and Rogue, it is a much smaller part of the overall gameplay then either of those. Elements you'll find familiar are the basics of naval warfare, ship boarding, obtaining resources and sailing from island to island. However, all of these things in Odyssey have been streamlined in Odyssey, in my opinion to great benefit. Sea battles, ship boarding and resource gathering were all great fun in Black Flag and Rogue, until you had to do it for the 100th time. In Odyssey, sea battles are simpler affairs, with fewer weapons to choose from, ship boarding much more streamlined, with a quick jump on board, work through the enemies on board, a quick raid of treasure chests and then back to your own ship again. Also, there's nothing particularly special about gathering resources via sea-faring in Odyssey, it's just an opportunity to get more of stuff you can get elsewhere, so there's no obligation to go about pirating in Odyssey just so you can build up your ship or anything else.

Seafaring again returns to the series, but in a very streamlined form.

Odyssey also dispenses with the tedious collectibles and generic strips of lands that bogged down Black Flag. Sea-faring is important in Odyssey, but almost always you'll be on sea either for a specific mission, or to get to another island.

Story and Quest System

This is probably the main area on Odyssey where the many refinements made in Odyssey actually leave the game worse off than Origins.

One of the first things you'll notice about the quest system, especially if you have the DLCs, is that upon getting past the introduction and into the proper part of the game, you'll get about 50 quests appear in your quest log. With Origins it was not particularly difficult to keep a sense of order in your quest log and take a measured approach to moving through individual quest lines and stories rather than just racking them up. It meant you could keep some cohesion between the very first conversation you have with an NPC that kicks off a quest, until you finish up that mini storyline and move onto the next one.

In Odyssey, as well as the spawning of a silly number of quests as soon as you start, Ubisoft have fallen heavily back into one of their old practices of adding "filler" into the game content. The different types of quest you can get are:

• Main story or one-off side story quests.
• NPC quests that only become available based on previous decision, which start off with unique NPC conversation but then turn into a generic filler quest.
• NPC quests that are only available for a limited period of time that are exclusively generic filler quests.
• Mission board quests that are one-off and contain some unique NPC conversation.
• Mission board quests that are non-timed and generic filler.
• Mission board quests that are timed and generic filler.
• Ship mission board quests that are the same as the above mission board quests.
• Timed and non-timed quests that are filler, but give a unique resource as a completion reward.

The game tells you nothing about all of this, and I remember on my first play through being utterly confused as to what was unique content versus filler. Should I be taking on these timed missions while I have a chance or risk losing the chance to see some game content? Should I just take on every single quest I can? The game leaves you to work out that filler quests even exist.

I hate this type of generic content, it is devoid of any unique experience and completely detracts from the enjoyment of the game in my opinion.

Quests, quests and more quests, it's too much! Look how small that scroll-bar is!

As far as the unique content of the game goes, the writing is reasonably good. Many characters are recurring and generate enough interest for you to care about what happens to them. Sokrates was of particular interest to me, Ubisoft does a good job of taking what could be a very dry philoshoper character and turning him into someone really interesting. Sokrates is very thought provoking, but is he actually quite annoying? In true Sokrates fashion, the answer is yes and no!

In relation to the writing, however, there is a theme in Odyssey that is ramped up way more than any of its predecessors, which is the presence of mythological and "special" creatures. Although there is an element of this with Origins, particularly in one of the DLCs, it's left ambiguous as to how much in reality these elements are and how much is interpretation of Bayek's perceptions. However, in Odyssey they have outright placed mythological creatures in the "real" game world under the guise of them being related to artifacts of the precursors, and the other "special" creatures, which are supposedly naturally occuring prime specimens of regular animals in the game, have no explanation given. In my opinion, the premise for these creature is paper thin, and a big step too far away from reality for the series, which is meant to be grounded in the real world, albeit one with the precursor race and everything to do with them (credit to TheCascador on Reddit for highlighting these points).

Overall Summary

Assassin's Creed Odyssey has a lot going for it. Rather than just doing what they've done countless times before, Ubisoft has taken the time to refine many parts of the gameplay and add many new featurettes. Ancient Greece as a setting is beautiful and the graphics are excellent, as is the combat and the ability to take part on much bigger battles than seen in any previous games.

And yet, there is something about Odyssey that is noticeably lacking when compared to Origins. I absolutely fell in love with Ancient Egypt and Bayek, the story of the game and the setting. Yet with Odyssey, despite the fact that on the surface it should be just as captivating, it does fall short of generating the captivation and excitement of Origins.

Personally, I think the severe bloat in filler quests and content takes a huge shine off Odyssey. Also, I felt that although the story writing does have a lot of highlights, actually the main quest line feels simultaneously a little ridiculous and unexciting. There are some genuinely great moments in Odyssey, but it seems to somewhat get lost in the rest of the game.

As regards to the final score, I feel it's obvious that Odyssey doesn't deserve "best in the series" marks like it's predecessor Origins does. Really, my chosen score would be 3.5, but as I don't do halves, do I mark Odyssey up to 4 or down to 3?

In the end, I felt it would be too harsh to give Odyssey a score of 3, which would put it on par with AC3 and Liberation and a comparison to Syndicate probably feels fairer. I know Syndicate is not a favourite for a lot of people, but I really enjoyed it. However, it is not nearly as wide-ranging in terms of ambition as Odyssey, so for me this balances out.