2.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - The Fate of Atlantis.

It's a better dlc than Legacy of the First Blade, but not by much. The big difference here is that there's three big new maps to explore, and they all look quite pretty. Elysium, the first map, is beautiful, but is a total pain to explore because of how vertical they made some of it. It looks cool, but to traverse you either need to climb for minutes at a time or find your way to teleporters. Hades is much better and looks totally unique, and has much more natural traversal. Atlantis, while again totally unique, is more of a pain to traverse again due to all the verticality, but isn't nearly as bad as Elysium. Atlantis is beautiful on a surface level, but doesn't have a ton of interesting details. Very little is added to the gameplay. There are a few new enemy types and upgrades to your abilities you can find, but not much more. Mission design is as MMO fetch questy as ever. There's at least two new monster bosses that are clear highlights of the DLC. From a story and writing perspective, what's here is maybe the worst I've seen from the entire series. Nothing makes even a lick of sense in either Kassandra's story or the modern day and stuff that could be cool like Atlantis are woefully mishandled. The gods are Isu and yet are presented in such a boring way, and it's impossible to tell if anything in Elysium or Hades even matters or is real in any way. Despite leaning into the Isu stuff, it feels less connected to the series than ever. Stuff that was awesome and mysterious in earlier games feel mundane and poorly presented here in a way that takes away from the mystique and makes prior games worse — for example, there's just pieces of Eden everywhere and they all feel relatively weak and silly, compared to prior games when they were a huge deal. Atlantis I guess actually happened? But it's also presented in a confusing way, it doesn't really do anything interesting or even believable with how it presents the human and Isu living together, and the ending is truly awful and nonsensical. Atlantis gets destroyed in the dumbest way for the dumbest reason. Where earlier games had a cool undercurrent of mystery and a modern day throughline that felt cohesive and interesting, this just feels like shlock without an ounce of thought put into it that an AI could have written. The one exception to the bad writing: the Hades stories that weave in dead characters from the main story are actually some of the best stories in the entire game. They made me feel emotion for characters I barely cared about in the main campaign, and that's impressive. They aren't amazing or anything, but they're actually good and had me invested in them. The modern day stuff with Layla is irredeemably awful. She randomly kills her lover out of nowhere outside of some exposition that she's getting corrupted, then she mutilates a character that is constantly referred to in other games as a big villian in a terrible fight. It makes zero sense and has truly awful characterization; I hate every one of these characters. Maybe it hits better if you read all the comics and stuff, but when games expect you to know massive extended universe stuff to enjoy them like 343 Halo games it just doesnt work and sucks. At the end of the day, this is just more to do in prettier maps. It's more worthwhile than the Legacy of the First Blade dlc and has a few good story moments that are character-focused during Hades, but the modern day story and Kassandra's in Elysium and Atlantis are abysmal. It's a real shame to see something that should be amazing like Atlantis handled in such a terrible way, and that probably ruins the potential to go back later and do it properly. Maybe we can get an Atlantis game or expansion later that says that this version was just animus bullshit and the real one is different. Let's hope. Because instead of the cool Adam/Eve cutscenes and easter eggs from before, this Atlantis story is just awful and doesn't examine any of the themes or implications of humans and isu.