2.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

Bilbo: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a simply massive romp with an insane amount of places to explore and things to do. But I found Odyssey to be a large downgrade from Origins in many ways—a game with significantly weaker mechanics, consistently bad writing, and repetitive mission design in a beautiful but largely copy-pasted world. It pushes RPG mechanics like leveling and dialogue choices further, which I appreciate in theory, but the execution is poor. It runs well and has few glitches, which is impressive for a map this large, but it’s still a deeply flawed and bloated experience. Almost every moment of the game lacks both stakes and variety. The story is arguably the weakest in the series. The core idea—a family torn apart and reunited in a Greek tragedy structure—is strong. But it’s told across way too many samey missions, with little emotional impact or depth. Dialogue is banal, poorly written and awkward. Cutscenes are stilted, and the low-budget presentation undercuts what should be big moments. Most of the main characters are ok, but general NPC voice acting is terrible enough to take you out of the story (I wish there was a way to play in Greek for immersion). The modern-day narrative with Layla is nearly nonexistent unless you play the DLC, which is an unacceptable design choice given how central the modern story is to the overall AC lore. And even then, the DLC modern story is laughably bad. You’re juggling three major storylines—the family drama, the Cult of Kosmos, and Atlantis—all of which should be connected but are bafflingly disconnected. Each ends in an unsatisfying whimper, and even when you finish all three, it never feels like the game is truly "over." Kassandra’s journey never builds to anything meaningful. Layla’s arc is half-told. And major revelations are either glossed over or treated with complete narrative apathy. Kassandra (or Alexios) is a fun protagonist with a solid performance and campy charm, and I appreciated finally having a proper female lead. But the game does absolutely nothing with the fact that you're a mercenary. You're killing both Athenians and Spartans regularly, but important characters from both sides treat you like a trusted ally with no concern or acknowledgment of your double-dealing. The game fails to develop your character in any meaningful way. You’re the same blank slate in every cutscene, and dialogue choices rarely reflect your previous actions. Kassandra is charming, but she never really develops. Whoever you don't pick becomes Deimos, a sort of Darth Vader figure that (spoilers, but I think this is quite obvious) you can redeem if you play your cards right. This is a compelling premise! But I think the execution is extremely poor. You're constantly told how scary Deimos is, but they barely get enough screentime to make an impact. And like the rest of the game, the cutscenes feel cheap and heavily downgraded compared to past Assassin's Creed titles and other AAA games. While Deimos does kill a main character or two, these are both shallow characters I didn't have any attachment for due to the cheaply told and stretched out story. There is a few interesting conversations with Deimos towards the end of the game, but it's simply not enough. And the actual moment of redemption (or lack thereof) and the following resolution epilogue are extremely underwhelming. There aren't really any other antagonists worth noting. As I'll explain later, the cult system had potential, but it's executed poorly even where it does weave cult members into the story as major villains. They're given almost zero screentime or dialogue, and we never get any sort of assassination dialogue like we got in prior titles when they're defeated. The final cult unmasking is also baffling. This makes the villians here the most forgettable in the series yet. The only villian that's compelling at all is Deimos, and Deimos likewise isn't given enough and isn't well-written enough to carry the entire villain burden. The historical characters are also given less to do than ever before. We see some fun faces here, but most of them are extremely shallow and the way you interact with them feels like an even more contrived "historical greatest hits" than the average AC game. My highlights were Socrates (complete with a "and the child turned out to be Plato!" throwaway reference) and Alcibialdes. Barnabas isn't real, but he's quite fun as well. Testikles cracked me up. But it feels like all of these characters are shoehorned into a main story that's already stretching believability with the protagonist's constant acts against both major nations, rather than natural interactions that actually take into account who your character is. They can at least be entertaining, but there was so much potential for ancient Greek stories that simply wasn't met here. The game is also inconsistent in its tone, and often far too silly. I don’t mind silliness in video games! The silliest sidequests here were the most memorable, and I enjoyed when the game leaned into its hamminess. But during important story beats, things often felt less serious than they should have, and the few actually serious moments that the game took seriously lacked a punch because of that. Speaking of choices: I like that you can pick dialogue, but the system is shallow. Most options boil down to being nice, snarky, or mean, with occasional murder or romance routes. These choices almost never affect anything beyond the immediate quest. The few that matter—the early choice with the plague, the fate of your family—are welcome but far too rare. The world doesn’t react to your actions, and neither does your character. There's no evolving personality or shifting reputation. You’re just choosing a tone, not forging a path. The story’s lack of urgency and cohesion makes it hard to stay invested. Important quests are buried under layers of filler. Major twists are undercut by poor pacing. And even the more dramatic moments (like the possible redemption of Deimos or discovering Atlantis) feel like half-baked afterthoughts. The writing simply isn’t strong enough to support a 100+ hour narrative, and every storyline ends with a shrug. Combat in Odyssey is a major step down from Origins. While Origins wasn’t perfect, it felt grounded and responsive. Odyssey’s combat feels floaty, sluggish, and unsatisfying. Attacks don’t connect with weight or force, and visual feedback is poor. Even when you’re doing hundreds of thousands in damage, it rarely feels like you’re actually hurting your opponent. The decision to remove shields is baffling. Regardless of your weapon, you're stuck with a wide-window parry and dodge system that becomes repetitive fast. There’s little need for tactical thought—just spam abilities, dodge red attacks, parry white ones, and chip away at enemy health bars. Combat drags, especially because nearly every enemy is a health sponge. Enemies just have way, way too much health and it makes the protagonist feel weak. It’s the same problem as the combat in Syndicate, this team’s first AC game. You still go down fast, but I would gladly take enemies going down just as fast. And with level scaling, enemies will always have the same obnoxiously huge health pools, no matter how strong you get. Haven’t we learned this is bad game design? Stealth is marginally better, but only just. It’s significantly nerfed from Origin's already less complex stealth. You now assassinate with Leonidas's Spear, which wouldn't be a huge problem if the new animations didn't all take forever and look very loud. More importantly, unless you're very high level with the meta build, stealth is weak even if you've been building towards a stealth-first character. In another series this may be forgiveable if the combat is great, but it's not (more on that in a sec). But this is especially egregious in an Assassin's Creed game, where stealth is traditionally the main focus. I thought it was ok in Origins, where although social stealth was removed, you were still able to one shot almost every single enemy. Here, it just sucks. Outside of the weakest foes, you have to spend adrenaline to do enough damage to one-shot most enemies. And this isn't enough to kill most elites, meaning you'll almost always end up going loud. Doing everything right only to be busted by an enemy you simply can't one-shot is extremely unsatisfying, especially given my lack of interest in the combat (which I'll get into shortly). Worse yet, none of the missions are designed around stealth. There are no sandbox-style assassinations. No black box levels. Just the same open-world forts you clear for side objectives. The stealth available here is the most basic of open world slop stealth you’ve seen a billion times, stuff that’s there in games like Ghost of Tsushima but is rarely the main focus. Here, this basic level of stealth is unfortunately both the most fun way to play the game and it’s not even necessarily always viable. There’s very little enemy variety to spice things up. You have light enemies, heavy enemies, animals, and the occasional mythical creature. Most fights play out the same way regardless of who you’re fighting. The only real exceptions are the four mythological bosses, which are fun and take place in unique, curated arenas. They feel like actual boss encounters in a game that otherwise lacks them. They’re silly lore-wise, but they’re undeniably cool. Animation commitment is another issue. Some abilities lock you into long animations that you can’t cancel—even if your target is already dead. You’ll find yourself hacking at the air while other enemies start wailing on you. It’s clunky, unsatisfying, and makes combat feel even more tedious. Odyssey’s combat simply isn’t good enough to support the hundreds of hours of content the game throws at you. When combat is this frequent, it needs to be satisfying. Here, it’s barely tolerable. Odyssey leans hard into RPG mechanics, but most of its systems feel bloated or undercooked. The loot system is especially frustrating. You're constantly flooded with new gear that quickly becomes obsolete, thanks to level scaling. You’re forced to either constantly change your outfit and weapon every few hours or repeatedly fast travel to blacksmiths and spend resources upgrading old favorites. Neither option is fun. Instead of rewarding exploration with meaningful items, most loot is forgettable stat sticks. The game does offer a decent amount of build customization—especially once you hit endgame and can respec freely. You can mix and match perks, enchantments, and gear sets. And I appreciate the ability to override the appearance of your gear so you can keep a consistent look. But the core problem remains: you’re grinding gear for marginal gains, and you’re always fighting enemies scaled to your level. You never feel like you’re getting stronger. It’s a treadmill that never speeds up. XP and leveling are tightly linked to progression, and this is where Odyssey’s worst monetization rears its head. I bought the XP booster because I was worried about falling behind the main quest’s level requirements. I ended up doing all the content anyway, but the fact that Ubisoft sells XP boosts in a full-priced single-player game is shameful. Worse, it’s hard not to suspect that the game’s bloat—its copy-pasted side quests, its endless map icons—is partially there to push players toward that purchase. There is also a premium currency and microtransactions, which have absolutely no place in a full-price single player game. Even without the booster, the level scaling undermines the entire RPG experience. Enemies are always within a few levels of you, which makes leveling up feel pointless. Worse, it contributes to the game's biggest problem: a constant feeling of sameness. You can have a great build, cool abilities, and flashy gear, but it still takes forever to kill anything. You never feel powerful. The skill tree offers some fun abilities—Sparta Kick is iconic, and the chain assassination is satisfying when it works. But the balance is poor, and some abilities are objectively better than others. The crit-focused builds dominate late-game. And once you find something that works, there’s little incentive to experiment because everything else feels underpowered. Even then, combat never becomes great—it just becomes tolerable. Even the damage numbers are ridiculous. You’ll see stats in the hundreds of thousands, which might sound cool but is actually meaningless. Bigger numbers don’t make combat more satisfying. They just clutter the screen and make stat comparisons harder to parse. The open world of Ancient Greece is undeniably massive and initially stunning. The sheer scale is impressive, and there are a handful of breathtaking views—towering statues, gleaming coastlines, sweeping mountain ranges. But once the initial novelty wears off, Odyssey's world reveals itself as hollow and painfully repetitive. Almost every city, fort, and temple reuses the same architecture and assets. The color palettes may shift, but the layouts do not. Even Athens, while grand on first impression, quickly begins to feel like every other city. Most locations blend together into a blur of reused structures, samey enemy camps, and filler content. The game is overloaded with map icons, most of which lead to the same handful of activities: kill captains, loot chests, burn supplies, free prisoners. There’s no clever twist, no contextual depth—just the same checklist repeated ad nauseam. You’ll do it because your brain is wired to check things off, not because it’s actually fun or interesting. It’s content for the sake of content. Worse yet, the open world rarely justifies its size. There’s almost nothing of value off the beaten path. You’re never rewarded for curiosity or exploration. If you see something interesting in the distance and travel there, odds are it’s just another fort, another chest, another objective. The few genuinely surprising or handcrafted moments are buried under an avalanche of filler. Traversal doesn’t help much either. While parkour still exists, the world is rarely designed around it. There are almost no moments of satisfying climbing or movement puzzles. The camera is more zoomed out and oddly centered, and the protagonist has a strange walking and running animation. This makes movement feel off. The environment doesn’t challenge or respond to how you move through it. Compared to earlier AC games, Odyssey’s world feels static and gamey. Ultimately, Odyssey’s world is massive in size but shallow in design. The game’s structure actively discourages organic exploration. Almost everything of value is marked on your map, and there’s little incentive to wander or stumble onto something naturally. You’re trained to follow icons, chase question marks, and treat the world like a checklist rather than a place worth exploring on its own terms. Unlike open world games that encourage curiosity and discovery—like Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring—Odyssey’s design funnels you into rote behavior. You're not exploring to see what you find. You're exploring because a marker told you to. You do get the option to find quest locations using environmental clues rather than markers, which is a nice touch. But when the quests themselves usually boil down to the same handful of objectives, even that novelty loses impact. Greece is still damn impressive, and might make this otherwise very mid game worth playing for many. Like Origins, the world is still the best aspect of the game. Unfortunately, like the rest of Odyssey, I found Greece to be a significant downgrade from Egypt. Yet Greece is still a compelling world that's exciting to explore. This saves the game from being a total miss, and in fact kept me compelled to suffer through what I liked less just to see more of its massive and beautiful world. What's here looks great, and there's a ton of it. People interested in history and Ancient Greece will get a lot out of just playing the game and seeing its impressive presentation of such an interesting piece of history. Still, this is a world that's significantly downgraded from the truly excellent rendition of Egypt we got in Origins. The more you explore the massive world, the more obvious it is how little variety there is within that world. Almost every uninhabited part of the map looks like the same mix of plains and forest. There's only a few areas that have properly different deserts or mountains. Most of the islands don't really have a unique aesthetic either. Worse yet, the inhabited areas and other points of interest have a very bad copy and paste problem. The assets are impressive, but there's only so many. For example, there's only a few types of temples and buildings, so even areas like Athens look very similar to every other city in the game. That's not to say Athens isn't impressive, but once you've seen it, there isn't much point to seeing the dozens of other cities scattered around. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like the few colossal and genuinely breathtaking statues throughout the world, the autumnal nature around the Olympics city, and Sparta, but generally there's very little new to find throughout the massive map. Tombs are one of the worst offenders. Origins’ tombs were atmospheric, lore-filled, and often told micro-stories or hinted at deeper world-building. Odyssey’s tombs are all the same: dark corridors with snakes, spike traps, and a loot chest at the end. No lore. No puzzles. Just another item on the list. There’s a stupid amount of question marks to check out, nearly all of which are repetitive basic combat and stealth challenges that have you killing captains, burning resources, freeing hostages, and looting treasure chests. There's a ton of these to do, but it gets repetitive fast — especially considering many missions have such inspired objectives as you finding certain objects, burning certain resources, freeing certain hostages or killing certain characters in these mostly copy/pasted locations. There aren't any tasks like the constellations in Origins, which felt unique to the setting and actually expanded on the characters with flashbacks. Exploration is also still a far cry (ha ha) from something like Zelda or Elden Ring. The open world design is very stale. There's rarely anything interesting to find in the world that's not marked, so you'll be hitting viewpoints and beelining to question marks to satisfy completionist tendencies almost the entire game. Nothing about the world design feels all that intentional or handcrafted outside of its general shape mapping to Greece and a few exceptional landmarks — the world just doesn't hold a candle to games like BOTW, TOTK, or Elden Ring in any category but scale. That said, the draw distance is extremely impressive, especially paired with Ikaros, and makes for stunning views across Greece's mainland and isles. Overall, I would take a map a fraction of the size with far fewer but more varied points of interests over the simply massive Greece we got instead. I will say: Despite thinking this game isn't actually very good, just running around checking off locations and doing quests is still satisfying to my ape brain, and there is SO much to do. Although I wish it was much smaller, I do have to give it credit for simply how big it is and how much there is to do. I can't help but clear out Greece as I go, so my playtime is very padded. The more time you spend with the game, the more you realize how little this game is and how thinly it's spread. But running around Ancient Greece is simply fun on a basic level. If that's all you want, you're going to love this game. If nothing else, it's a very good turn off your brain type game to eat up time. One of the most glaring problems throughout Odyssey is how poorly its missions are designed. Whether you're doing a main quest or side quest, the structure is almost always the same: go to a marked location, scan the area with your eagle, and either kill someone, pick up items, or talk to someone. That’s it. There’s no setpiece design, no scripted moments of tension, no handcrafted mission structure like in the older Assassin’s Creed games. Everything takes place in the same forts, villages, or wilderness zones you’ve seen a hundred times already. Just this time, it’s bookended by a cheap cutscene where a more important story character has a discussion with you and give you a fetch quest. A perfect example is the Olympic questline—a potentially exciting arc where you represent Sparta in the games. But instead of thrilling competitions or unique setpieces, it boils down to a few 1v1 fistfights and a fetch quest. There's no real gameplay variety, spectacle, or storytelling weight. What should feel like a major cultural event ends up indistinguishable from any other side mission in the game. Even main story missions are rarely distinguishable from side content—many are just slightly longer versions of the same formula. There’s no moment-to-moment creativity in how missions unfold. You’re never forced to approach things differently, or given bespoke spaces to navigate. Compared to the variety and ingenuity found in games like The Witcher 3 or even earlier AC titles like Brotherhood or Unity, Odyssey’s quest and mission design feels utterly MMO-like: fetch quests with some light combat in recycled locations, repeated ad nauseam for dozens of hours. NPCs and cities add little to immersion. Every NPC has the same handful of animations and very similar face, hair, and outfit models. Dialogue feels recycled. Even in main cities, people don’t behave differently from small villages. There’s no sense of scale or culture. Even minor crimes trigger unrealistic responses—peasants trying to fight your fully armored mercenary, for example. Nothing about the cities or people feels alive. As you traverse, there's also no real emergent interactions with the world and so few areas of interest that aren't marked that the basic gameplay loop never gets a shakeup. This is a real shame. There aren't any random open world activities to keep the player engaged, and there aren't any crazy things to find or interactions with the world like the desert hallucinations in Odyssey. It's just not that immersive of a world. You don't interact with Greece in meaningful ways other than clearing out quests and question marks on the map. Cities feel soulless, with NPCs that are doing the most simple of animations and that don't react in any way to the player. This is open world design at its most basic, even compared to Origins. At least Greece is interesting and pretty! If only it had less copy and pasted assets. And for a game set during one of the most famous wars in human history, Odyssey does an abysmal job of making you feel like you’re actually in a war. Outside of conquest battles—which are themselves shallow and repetitive—you rarely see any evidence of the Peloponnesian War. There are no large-scale battles, no marching armies, no strategic movements or military presence beyond a few color-coded forts. Spartans and Athenians are mostly indistinguishable aside from their armor color, and the conflict itself has no real impact on the world around you. Conquest battles, the game’s big attempt to simulate the war, fall flat fast. They’re chaotic melee skirmishes in small arenas where you run around killing a handful of captains and elite enemies to shift a progress bar. They don’t feel large-scale or important, and they’re entirely optional. Even when required in the main story, they’re copy-pasted affairs with no tactical depth or emotional weight. Earlier AC games like Assassin’s Creed III managed to depict active, unfolding battles with a sense of immersion and consequence, despite using weaker technology. Odyssey’s war is a backdrop with no narrative or systemic presence—it’s just window dressing. Despite being a returning feature, the ship and naval mechanics feel more like a box-ticking obligation than an integrated part of the game. The Adrestia is visually striking and sailing around the Aegean can be beautiful, but ship combat is the shallowest it's ever been in the series. You ram, fire arrows or javelins, and occasionally board. That’s about it. There’s no tactical nuance or real sense of progression. Worse, it’s barely ever used in story missions or meaningful quests, making it feel like a tacked-on travel tool rather than a core gameplay pillar. You can recruit lieutenants, but outside of some passive bonuses, they have almost no impact on gameplay. The entire system, once a highlight of games like Black Flag, is stripped down here to the bare minimum—and it shows. The Cult of Kosmos system is perhaps the most glaring example of wasted potential in Odyssey. On paper, it sounds like the perfect fusion of RPG exploration and classic Assassin’s Creed assassination structure: 40-plus cultists scattered across the map, some tied to quests, others hidden behind clues. In practice, it’s an extremely shallow checklist. Most cultists are generic elite enemies with no personality, backstory, or interesting encounters. You either stumble upon them randomly or unlock them via vague, disconnected clues that often amount to busywork. When you finally confront a cultist, it’s never in a curated mission space—it’s just another fight in another reused location. Even the ones tied to story content don’t get meaningful dialogue or unique assassination moments. There's no buildup, no mystery, no drama. Worse, once you gather enough clues, the game simply marks the cultist on your map. There’s no deduction required. A system that could’ve made you feel like a detective—piecing together identities, stalking targets, and executing planned kills—ends up playing like an MMO bounty board. Instead of revitalizing the assassination fantasy, the cult system just highlights how far the series has drifted from it. A system where you have to act as a detective to find and trigger well-designed proper assassination sandboxes would have been easily the best part of the game, and would have made for easy opportunities to flesh out the villains through typical assassination dialogues. The choices made around the cult system are extremely disappointing and echo the rest of the game's issues with quantity over quality. This was an opportunity to push the boundaries with player agency and keep the assassin roots of the series intact, an opportunity that was thoroughly failed. There's also a mercenary system, but it's quite weak as well. It could have been a cool sort of nemesis system, but instead, you just find and kill whoever is above you and slowly grind your way up. Each mercenary has a flavor description, but they feel AI-generated and never factor into the gameplay. If you kill NPCs or commit other crimes, you'll get mercenaries tracking you in a sort of wanted system like GTA. But you can pause and hold triangle/Y at any point to magically clear your wanted status for a negligible fee, making this system feel tacked on. There's rarely a compelling reason to stay wanted, either; it just means more high level enemies that will randomly interfere with what you're doing and lead to more dull combat. Ultimately, Odyssey’s world is massive in size but shallow in design. It’s a textbook example of quantity over quality. Once you’ve played five hours, you’ve basically seen it all. The most bizarre aspect of Odyssey is how badly it fumbles its ties to Assassin’s Creed lore while simultaneously undermining its own new ideas. The game is barely an Assassin’s Creed title. There are no hidden blades (until the DLC), no brotherhood, and the only real connection to the Templars is the Cult of Kosmos—which, while thematically similar, is so vaguely developed that the connection feels tenuous at best. It’s a game that would be stronger without the AC branding, yet it still manages to damage the series’ existing lore. The story has zero to do with the assassins, although it (spoilers) arguably hints at the origins of the Templars at the end of the cult story. Still, even that feels unclear considering that the Order of the Ancients already exists, as evidenced by the dlc. There are a couple interesting Isu areas in the main map but they're so few and far between that they don't come close to scratching the crazy archaelogical sci fi that the rest of the games do. Like Origins didn't have a lot, but the tombs were much more fleshed out and there were a few totally unique Isu areas that we're insanely cool finds, while nothing comes close in Odyssey. You wield the Spear of Leonidas, a Piece of Eden, but it doesn’t feel powerful or mysterious. Instead, it functions as a stat stick and adrenaline delivery system. There’s no mystique, no narrative weight. The game throws multiple pieces of Eden and Isu artifacts at you like candy, and the sheer number of them, coupled with the game’s disinterest in exploring their implications, ends up devaluing the entire concept. These were once rare, legendary artifacts. Here, they’re just loot. Atlantis should’ve been a major event in the franchise. Instead, it’s barely explained and completely mishandled. The Atlantis questline is poorly paced, with a resolution that feels rushed and disconnected from everything else. The Isu are portrayed inconsistently, and even when you’re surrounded by their remnants, the game doesn’t care. Humans in the Atlantis arc are clearly enslaved by the Isu, but the game never acknowledges this meaningfully—Kassandra doesn’t comment, and the writing never engages with the horror of what you’re seeing. It’s baffling. The First Blade DLC is somehow worse. It introduces a proto-Assassin with a hidden blade, but he’s a stock mentor character with no depth. Worse, the game forces your character into a relationship and parenthood for story reasons, despite the base game allowing you to avoid romance entirely. The emotional payoff is non-existent, especially when you’re expected to mourn the loss of a child you have no actual relationship with. It’s some of the laziest and most manipulative writing in the series. The Atlantis DLC does have some cool moments, especially when it lets you reunite with characters from the base game. But narratively, it’s a disaster. The final destruction of Atlantis happens offscreen and for no satisfying reason. Layla’s story is somehow even worse—she becomes irrational, unpleasant, and borderline villainous, yet the game seems unaware of this. It’s the worst depiction of a modern-day protagonist the series has ever had. Odyssey could have leaned fully into its mythological side and ditched the AC trappings entirely, or it could have told a grounded story that still respected the lore. Instead, it tries to do both, and fails. The result is a bloated mess that damages the franchise’s worldbuilding more than it expands it. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is not a bad game because it’s different from the classic AC formula. I actually respect the decision to pivot toward a full-blown RPG. The problem is that Odyssey isn’t a good RPG either. It’s a deeply mediocre game in both story and systems, bloated beyond belief and fundamentally unsatisfying. Still, I do think a mainline game in this series needs to have some sort of assassination elements, and outside of the basic stealth systems here, there isn’t a single actual curated assassination mission or black box assassination mission, and that’s a crying shame. I would take cutting 90% of the game’s content if it meant more curated map and mission design and focused writing, and especially if it meant a small black box assassination or 3. There are moments of fun, sure. Kassandra is charming. The world is visually stunning. The mythological boss fights are a blast. The photo mode is excellent. But none of that changes the fact that this is one of the most padded and repetitive AAA games I’ve ever played. The checklist-style design, bad writing, repetitive combat, broken loot loop, and mishandled lore all add up to an experience that constantly undermines itself. Odyssey is a game that could have been so much more if it had been smaller, more focused, and better written. There is a genuinely cool game buried under the bloat—a condensed 40-hour version with curated missions, impactful choices, and fewer but better-designed systems could have been great. But what we got is a game obsessed with size and quantity, at the expense of soul. Maybe if I had played less of it, I would’ve enjoyed it more. Maybe if I had ignored the side content, skipped the map icons, and rushed through the story, I’d be more forgiving. But I played it the way it clearly wants to be played—completing every quest, every location, every DLC. And in doing so, I saw a game stretched far too thin. Odyssey is massive. But it’s also empty. It’s polished. But it’s also lifeless. It’s beautiful. But it’s also soulless. If you want to blast around Greece while you listen to an audiobook, you might really live Odyssey. But if you’re looking for a good action RPG or a good Assassin’s Creed game, I suggest skipping this one.