4/5 ★ – Shirts_that_fit's review of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

A stunningly beautiful game that is fun, but could have been so much better. Odyssey is not a bad game. It is a good game. But it should have been an amazing game. Assassins creed is arguably my favorite franchise of all time. Mostly because of nostalgia. Assassins creed two is one of my favorite games of all time. And it’s sad to watch Ubisoft not keep up with the rest of the gaming industry in some aspects. I’ll start with the worst things about the game. The production value of the story bits and cutscenes. It’s bad. This game took me about 48 hours to roll credits. And in that amount of time there were less than 10 actual good quality cutscenes. Each of which was less than 20 seconds. That’s unacceptable for a story based game like this. This leads to another issue which is the game is just far too big. Like wtf. There is a continent in the game that I think would be the perfect size for the map. On the continent there is 7 regions. Each region has about 5 districts. 35 districts would have been perfect. The actual game had 37 REGIONS. That means there is probably around 190 districts in the game. What were they thinking? Most of it is empty filler content anyways. I’m not joking when I say the game could’ve been a third of the size and I would’ve enjoyed it more. Oh and if they had made a smaller world then maybe they could have put a little more time into their half ass cut scenes. Next, the story. It’s… fine. I think i felt emotions… twice maybe three times the entire game. And it really is because the production value was so shit. Like I won the freaking Olympics and the cutscene was 10 people who all looked the same lightly clapping like they were at a freaking Ancient Greece golf tournament. The story did get better later on though. There were some really good characters, and some really bad ones. I did like how they implemented Greek mythology with a more realistic POV. Also, I loved that Kassandra was a lesbian that just slept with every woman in Greece. That actually made my experience so much better. Another critique, the traversal of the world sucked. You cannot create one of the biggest worlds in video game history and not let people traverse it easily. Why they didn’t let you fast travel to every market on the map once you revealed it was such a horrible design choice. Like only sync points and docks….. are you kidding me? I don’t feel like running 500m for every little thing. Not to mention most quests are, hey go get this thing over there and bring it back. That’s fine but once I get it just teleport me back. Or give me the option to teleport back. Also, I think the game would have greatly benefited from a glider. Just saying. My last big negative thing about the game is the mercenary system. I HATED it. What were they thinking? I think they were going for their own take on shadow of war’s nemesis system but they missed big time. I would’ve really liked it if there was a one mercenary per level and once you killed them the bounty was gone and you didn’t get another mercenary until you leveled up again. That would have been awesome. But instead there are just infinite mercenaries in the world constantly hunting you to interrupt your quests and be a pain in the ass. I can’t tell you how many times I was having an awesome fight with a pole match or a captain and some freaking merc showed up and ruined it. Cool idea, horrible implementation. Conquest battles and diplomacy were pretty neutral for me. I never did much with the diplomacy because there was no incentive. And the battles were cool at first but after awhile I was like… okay? It’s more combat. Now the cultist system was cool. Honestly, had they just used this and scrapped the mercenary system all together I think the game would’ve been better. I loved hunting cultists and getting awesome gear for it. Some of them were frustrating to find but overall it was really fun. I do think there were too many of them though. I liked how some you could just go find and others were involved in side quests. Once I was just chilling in my ship and a cultist pulled up on us and we had an epic sea fight before I Spartan kicked her in the ocean. Her name was the octopus… and that was awesome. That leads into the ship mechanics. They are very similar to black flag. Unfortunately, arrows aren’t as cool as cannons and they never will be. However, it was still really well done. I wish the ship was faster… or hey idk maybe make the world smaller. I did enjoy recruiting people for my crew and upgrading my ship. Naval combat was nice and didn’t overstay its welcome. The combat itself was just okay for the first 20-30 hours of the game. Once you started to really develop your skills though it became a lot of fun. It wasn’t until about 25 hours in when I finally decided, okay I like this game. I tried a lot of different builds and they were mostly all fun. Again, I wish it didn’t take so long to level up. Overall, combat was very playable and prevented me from putting the game down early. Finally, the visuals. Odyssey is an unbelievably beautiful game. The map is insanely gorgeous. I loved climbing high shit taking in the view and jumping off. It never got old. Still I don’t think they needed this big of a map to show it off. Nevertheless they made one of the best looking games ever. And I truly believe that’s why the cut scenes and story were so disappointing. They felt so out of place in such a beautiful game. It literally felt like assassins creed 2 cut scenes in a modern game. I also did the lost tales of Greece dlc and every one of those stories was better than the OG game lol. Believe it or not, I actually really enjoyed my time with this game. Once I learned to accept its faults I had a lot of fun. I loved Kassandra and Greece was a dream to explore. Nostalgia kept me playing through the first 20 hours and honest fun kept me going through the rest. I plan on doing both main dlcs as well. You’re not bad at all, Ubisoft. I just want you to be better.