How do you top the fantastic Assassin’s Creed Origins? That is the big question that I asked while starting Odyssey, while I didn’t review the previous one, I did play it for quite a few hours and loved it. A little bit curious and highly motivated I started my adventure in the ancient Greece setting with Kassandra. That is immediately one of the first new things you’ll encounter, you have the choice between two playable characters, brother and sister. So what about the rest? Luckily I won’t have to use message pigeons or light signals in the sky to tell you what I think about Ubisoft’s latest long-standing Assassin’s Creed franchise.
THE GOOD
- An incredible enormous interactive map: Ubisoft is a master in creating believable and huge worlds. Odyssey isn’t any different, each little corner has something unique, from sub-quests, loot or impressive landmarks. The amount of creative work honestly can’t be comprehend, it must be in the thousand development hours. Crazy stuff. The benefit for the player? You can easily spend hours and hours exploring the world without actually progressing in your main quest. I’m not shy to say that I regularly just played as the eagle, flying through forests and chilling from all the beautiful scenes. Or just taking a swim and enjoy the underwater setpieces. Odyssey is without a doubt the best, the most diverse and most beautiful openworld in any video game to date.
- Ancient Greece setting: While the setting from Origins is superior, I’m just in love with the Egyptian art, Odyssey isn’t far behind and is nothing less than impressive too. The more violent world and large-scale battles will surely excite and inspire every gamer. Mythology is something I have a large passion for and seeing it perfectly implanted in this Assassin’s Creed game is just a sight to behold.
- Visuals: Having a good setting and great design is a huge plus but having the tools and competence to bring everything together with beautiful visuals isn’t an easy task. Ubisoft have some code-wizards in their ranks because Odyssey doesn’t only look great, it is one of the most monumental visual games on Xbox One X. It is hard to explain the feeling but my eyes became teary on regular occasions because the visual stuff on screen was just too beautiful. (Wait until you see the big city)
- Best story in the franchise: Is it because you have more influence on the story (decision-based consequences) or because the characters have more depth. I’m not really sure but the story caught my attention a lot more than previous Assassin’s Creed games. While the decisions you make have minor changes in quests it still is a nice new feature in an ever improving franchise.
- Interesting dialogue: Interesting conversations about Cassandra’s history or the main story with an emphasis on the changing ways of life in ancient Greece and historical topics really captivated me, I was genuinely interested in what came next. The different pace of conversations between friends, family or quest-givers kept the entire game attractive.
- Fun and highly adaptable ground combat: We saw a bigger RPG approach in combat with Origins and Odyssey takes it even higher. With a free to choose tactic of fighting enemies, different gear (or loot, whatever you prefer) and all kind of ways to improve your overall stats. While the system might feel a lot like a grinding process the fun gameplay and visual attractive world keeps your entertainment high. I prefered the stealth-gameplay but the balance between slow and fast gameplay is perfect. Some of the more difficult to unlock-moves are awesome to look at, a cinematic view gives it that bone chilling feeling.
- Sailing and water-combat: I know that many of you will disagree but I just didn’t like the naval combat in Black Flag. And in Odyssey the ship battles are back in a big way. With more control, more possibilities and a better visual presentation. It doesn’t beat Sea of Thieves when it comes to water effects but damn… it does look pretty to control your ship around the water and battling against other ships. It was fun to play Assassin’s Creed differently and it is a great way of drastically changing the gameplay for a while but if I’m honest the naval-combat isn’t something that is
- Audio issues: You have more than decent dialogue, a fantastic story but one thing that really annoyed me was the audio delay with facial expressions. Sound frequently bugged too, forcing a restart. For example a never ending slash sound.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey SCORE: 92%
Ubisoft has done it again, they delivered yet another fantastic game that puts them in a strong leadership position as the best openworld developer in the world. With gorgeous visuals, a strong story and an almost never-ending world of diverse content.
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