Assassin's Creed Odyssey - A Great Game That Ignores the Franchise's Roots

Having just completed my first playthrough of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I have mixed feelings. This is a massive game - sprawling, gorgeous, and virtually endless - and yet, I wonder if it’s even still an Assassin’s Creed game. With Odyssey, and even more so, Valhalla, Ubisoft pursued the ambition of an Origins RPG so much that it feels like the series lost much of its essence along the way.

When I think of the Assassin’s Creed games, the first that comes to my mind is the fluidity of stealth, the precision of parkour, and the mastery of infiltration. Odyssey still has some of that, but it's buried under frantic systems that try to do it all - RPG, exploration, and epic drama. The pivot to a more RPG-driven game is fine in and of itself, but I find myself craving the clarity and precision of the earlier games.

The World and Presentation

To start with, Greece is beautiful. Ubisoft has created a world that feels real again. The Aegean Sea sparkles in the sunlight, and every island, from the busy streets of Athens to the calm olive groves of Kephallonia, feels unique. One of the best parts of the experience is sailing from one coast to another and watching the world come to life.

The art direction is amazing. The Greek landscapes are brighter than the warm-toned Egypt. The Greek landscapes are dotted with temples, statues, and ruins, and each of them is rewarding to explore. Even the little villages are alive and full of musicians, merchants, and townspeople.

Ubisoft's new approach has certainly perfected the notion of scale. But that is also the problem. This world is too big, and even if it is beautiful, it can feel bloated. There are so many hours spent in between meaningful activities, I ended up using fast travel so I could keep the game in focus. There is a great first sense of discovery, but after many hours in the world, it feels like it is asking too much of my time. It is a beautiful world, but it certainly is a tad too much.

Story and Characters

You get to choose your protagonist—Alexios or Kassandra. I think that is a great touch. I chose Kassandra, and she happens to be one of the many performance highlights in this game. She is confident and charismatic, and she is able to carry the story in a way that becomes charming and humorous. This makes the long runtime more bearable. The dialogue system, a concession to RPG mechanics, allows us to shape her personality somewhat, even though the plot, as a whole, still mostly traverses a fixed path.

This narrative is expansive and, for the most part, well constructed. It is a magnificent odyssey: a family saga, political intrigue, drama, a mythological undercurrent, and a mystery. There are real emotional moments, especially in Kassandra’s family drama. Yet, as the book goes on, there are parts that start to lose steam, just as Assassin's Creed Origins suffered with the pacing: the middle stretches get filled with repetitive objectives and filler.

I understand why Ubisoft is trying to tell a grand epic, but in trying to do so, they’ve made a game that leans more toward a fantasy RPG rather than a more RPG-driven stealth game. The emotional narrative is commendable, but the series as a whole feels disjointed in identity. For people who have followed the series as I have, the lack of emotional resonance is concerning. The story is still fundamentally the same, just less so than before.

The Combat

Odyssey expands on the system introduced in Assassin's Creed Origins, but takes an even greater step into the RPG mechanics. As a warrior, you no longer have the precision and timing of an assassin. Instead, you have cooldowns, abilities, and gear that need to be managed. You have the ability to specialize within the deep skill 3-tier trees under Hunter, Warrior, and Assassin, but the outcome remains the same: combat will feel monotonous.

My biggest issue with the combat stems from a lack of character. It is largely responsive, and on the rare occasion, even fun, but the character of the combat is a complete 180 from the sleek stealth mechanics of the first games. There is a certain thrill with an assassin action that is lost when you set a combat trap with a gearing system. Most encounters are drawn out, and the only contributor is gear, removing skill from the equation.

In place of the Hidden Blade was the broken Spear of Leonidas. It is a neat narrative device, but it continues the trend of not incorporating traditional assassinations. Stealth takedowns not being guaranteed because of level-based enemies breaks the flow of the game for players who want a purely stealth experience. I constantly had to rethink whether I was able to take a target out silently. This isn’t a tension I want to experience.

The combat animations are really good; I cannot dispute that. The assortment of weapons is good as well. The transition between dodging, parrying, and striking is more seamless than it was in Assassin's Creed Origins. This is the real problem, as it is described, “competent.” It means that while a game fully works, something is lacking to pull players in and entice them toward further engagement.

Stealth and Exploration

Once again, sneak doesn’t seem to be a priority. The options available are few, and the actions are overly simple: crouch, sit in the bushes, and use the eagle to tag all the enemies. Ikaros has replaced Senu. The scanning feature is still available, but it feels more mechanical, cutting out all the beautiful organic discovery that one could do. The ability to use social stealth and blend into the crowd, then don a disguise and sneak into a hostile area, has all but disappeared. Losing these mechanics has stripped the game of a lot of its personality and strategy, making it feel like a large part of the game has been neglected.

On the other hand, the mechanics for the game loop around the world are addictive. Each zone is filled with question marks, forts, caves, and temples ready to be uncovered and explored. The first few times, it is satisfying, but the predictability sets in very early. You clear a fort, loot chests, free the prisoners, and then rinse and repeat. The first few times, it is still fine, but by the time I’d cleared my tenth floor, the repetitions started to grind. There is a clear sense of checklist fatigue that permeates the entire experience.

Greece is stunning to explore. The return of naval exploration is another added bonus. The ship battles feel more exciting than those of previous games. I loved customizing my ship, recruiting crew members, and sailing from island to island. When land activities start feeling a little repetitive, these sea activities serve as a welcome breath of fresh air.

Technical Aspects and Performance

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is one of the most visually striking games. The warm and natural lighting, high contrast textures, and varying beautiful landscapes certainly add to the game. I love the dewy fog, rain- reflections, and the gold-bathed sunsets. It is a beautiful game to experience. However, beauty comes at a price. Even with solid hardware, performance starts to lag, especially in busy areas. There are demanding performance and console or PC optimization issues. The game is certainly one of the best in terms of technology. It just needs to fine-tune optimization.

Once again, the user interface is slow and unwieldy. It makes everything, from the menus to the map, painful to navigate. When you’re busy managing gear and upgrading abilities, the lag between the window and the interface is exasperating. This was a problem in Origins, and it’s still there.

At the same time, the accessibility options are a step in the right direction. From customizing elements of the HUD to toggling exploration mode and adjusting the difficulty, it is easy to personalize your player experience. Exploration mode is especially good–it takes away exact quest markers and allows players to listen to NPCs and find clues to solve the quest. It’s one of the few systems that seems to trust the player.

The Overall Experience

Having played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for over seventy hours, I can say that it’s a great game in terms of its broad scope, but I can’t say that it has soul. It’s a big, confident game that excels in many technical aspects but lacks the feeling of belonging to its series. The RPG systems are intricate, the world is beautiful, and the story is ambitious, but that all comes at the price of splintering stealth, pacing, and cohesion.

Having been captivated by the stealth mechanics and parkour excellence within the series, I must admit, I feel that Odyssey’s heart lies elsewhere. It’s more about big landscapes, big stories, big discoveries, and big explorations. It’s much more about the immersive experience of being a hero than an assassin.

There’s nothing bad about that, of course. It’s an exhilarating, immersive experience. The flows and gameplay mechanics, the graphics

It’s an experience to appreciate and admire. But as an EDH (Elder Dark Hunter) player, the massive role-playing game aspects were my focus and cornerstone instead of looking at the series as a whole True Assassin’s Creed experience.

The game Odyssey also lets you make a unique cinematic experience to admire, and no one can resist the cinematic views of the Greek landscapes. The graphics, the voice of Kassandra for sure, and the wind of the environment let the player lose themself in it. Ubisoft’s quest to resolve concerns after the Origins series to make a big, broadened game and for sure to the expanded audience, big thumbs up, Odyssey!

To me, Odyssey is about being at the crest of a new world and new horizons/alleyways to discover. The world and the horizons are incredible; all you want to do is admire the captures of new gameplay. But I long for the simplicity of the older Assassin’s Creed games with the stealth mechanics.