2/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

Starting with Assassin's Creed Origins, this series completely changed direction. What was a stealth-focused, action-adventure game turned into a loot-based RPG complete with level progression. This was a direction I still am not a fan of. Assassin's Creed used to be one of my favorite series of all time. The Desmond saga (despite having faults itself) was one of my favorite stories in gaming, and the characters in the historical time periods (aside from Conner) are still some of my favorite gaming protagonists. After Assassin's Creed 3 though, the series began to change. Pulling back heavily on the modern day elements, and even the Assassin elements to an extent. The parkour became more automated and simpler and the combat system changed many times. Eventually we ended up with Origins which I still like as a game, but feels pretty far away from what I came to the series for. And now we arrive at Odyssey. I've heard a bunch of mixed opinions on this over the years. Many games journalists praised the game for it's dialogue options, gender selection, romance of both sexes, etc. I heard all kinds of praises for Odyssey when it first came out. But as time went on, and the only ones who continued to talk about this game were AC fans, I began to hear another opinion. I've heard this game is trash, it has nothing to do with the series at large, it's filled with copy-pasted content, etc. This seems to be the primary opinion of the hardcore AC fanbase, but where do I reside? I bet you can take a guess. I don't really care for this game at all. It feels like it takes everything I disliked about Origins and amplified it. The map is so much bigger and it's filled with absolutely pointless side content. 99% of the map consists of areas where the objective is "Kill this High Ranking Enemy and Loot a Certain Amount of Treasure Chests". I hate it. This game can boast about how its hundreds of hours long, but it's literally bloated with very boring, repetitive, uninspired side-content and this is coming from the guy who has 100%-ed every single AC game (including this one), most of them twice. This game's side-content is the most uninteresting I've come across in recent memory. My other major problem is yes, the dialogue options. Not only do they not make sense within the framework of the Animus (although this can be argued a bit as, according to a piece of paper I read in-game, it's possible that Layla's Animus is presenting possible pasts; a story decision I don't agree with), but due to how radically different they are, it basically makes Kassandra (the character I chose to play as, as opposed to Alexios) a complete blank slate, giving her no real, consistent personality. This makes Kassandra (who I did enjoy) feel like a super cheap character who has no voice of her own. Do you want her to side with the Spartans despite them literally ruining her life? You can! Do you want to kill this Cultist despite the only reason he does what he does is due to his family being held hostage? You can! This is even WORSE when you consider in AC canon, this is supposed to be a REAL person who acted a CERTAIN way. Letting you choose all willy-nilly just further dilutes the whole concept of the Animus and the series itself. This isn't to mention the LITERAL magical abilities they give you (which IIRC existed to an extent in Origins), but stuff like having a Piece of Eden literally just be a regular Legendary Weapon that you can hit people in the head with is super frustrating when you see how powerful these artifacts used to be portrayed as. The only thing comparable to this was when in AC Unity, they let you get the Sword of Eden. However in that case, at the very least they specified that it was fairly depowered. The ending was also super subpar. The game just kind of "ends" with a cutscene with your family and it's very underwhelming and unsatisfying. Now, was there anything that I did like? Well, somewhat? Some portions of the story were cool. The emails and flavor text outside of the Animus I read were neat, but the major thing I did enjoy about the game was the Cultist system. It took me back to AC2 where you would see a web of interconnected Templars in the pause menu. This is kind of like that, except you have to discover clues in order to figure out who each of these Cultists are. This is really neat and can make finding and killing them fun. Well, except for the major flaws. In this game, Cultists are treated as just really tough enemies, so it's entirely possible that you can just be randomly fighting your way through an enemy fort, come across an enemy and kill him and oh, look, he's a Cultist. That combined with no individual cutscenes (like, for real no Memory Corridors?) makes it feel like slightly more important busywork. But honestly, that's about it. Despite not being a technically incompetent game, this is my least favorite Assassin's Creed game in the series, and I'd rather play any other game than this (even AC3 or Liberation). Overall, this game is a poor excuse for an entry in this franchise. The new things it introduced, I hated (aside from the Cultists system), and the things it amplified from the past game, I hated too. Fuck this game.