Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

As many as Ubisoft has made over the years, the platonic ideal of an Assassin’s Creed game has never existed. They’ve made some excellent games. Assassin’s Creed II gave the glorified tech demo that was the original a story, a spine, and some gameplay variety. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag added an entire second layer to the series in the form of hectic sea battles. Last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins significantly overhauled the combat and added complex, stat-heavy player levels and gear accumulation. It also completed the series’ transition from maps that featured a single large city (or a few medium-sized cities separated by narrow corridors) to a true open world, with numerous settlements large and small and vast tracts of desert and wilderness. Along the way they’ve some true missteps (the buggy, redundant AC: Unity and the misconceived, simply unfun AC III) and a number of merely OK, iterative time-wasters (Brotherhood, Revelations, Rogue, Syndicate). Since the scale of the games and the aggressive schedule they’re released on requires two or more to be in development at the same time at separate studios, Ubi has never quite been able to nail down every possible good point from the series in a single title.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is no exception. It’s unquestionably the vastest game in the sequence, with well over 150 hours of gameplay and two separate fully-voiced main characters. It retains the levels and the loot from Origins, with the addition of Mass Effect-style dialogue options, which add some flavor to the experience but only materially affect the overall narrative at an isolated handful of clearly telegraphed points. While Origins’ few sea missions were a chore, Odyssey returns to naval combat in a major way, with a ship and a crew to upgrade and a variety of strategies at sea that approach but don’t quite equal the pirate battles of ACIV.

The area open to exploration is no less than all of Greece, albeit those borders that define the modern nation. (Set in the early phases of the Peloponnesian War, around 430 BC, the Greek world at the time also included Sicily, parts of mainland Italy and Spain, the coast of Asia Minor, and North Africa, but the game is massive enough as it is.) As is series tradition, historical figures from the period emerge as allies and quest-givers, from Pericles to Cleon to Herodotus to Demosthenes. An excellently voiced Socrates hectors the player with annoying philosophical lines of questioning, and the creditably open-minded romantic options allow you trysts with Alcibiades (and many, many others) regardless of your chosen character’s gender. The storyline doesn’t follow the events of the war very closely but rather engages the player with a more personal series of adventures that spiral out into three somewhat interlocked questlines. Starting as an orphaned mercenary (“misthios”) on the backwater island of Kephallonia, you’re sent all over the map trying to reunite your lost family, take vengeance on a manipulative secret society, and collect lost artifacts connected to the AC series’ continuing science fiction mythology.

There’s a lot to do, and that doesn’t take into account the hundreds of map locations that don’t factor into the main story, but do hide necessary gear, resources, and precious experience points. Even more so than the other games in the long-running series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is so packed with systems that inevitably there are conflicts and redundancies. Your biggest task in the game is to eliminate a huge list of mystery cultist targets, who largely exist in the world serving other functions — ship captains, fort leaders, mercenaries, or political figures. Some of them you will track down by following obscure clues, some by winding through elaborate quest strings. But some others, anticlimactically, you will kill entirely by accident just through routine gameplay. Sometimes the narrative takes this into account, but other times it feels like you’re missing big chunks of plot just because you picked off the wrong guy too soon.

The game makes an effort to add a sense of exploration by only giving you hints to where certain goals are located, rather than automatically putting a flag on your map as has been tradition. The impact of this design choice is flattened somewhat by the fact that Ubisoft insists on putting a question mark symbol over every point of interest in the game, reducing your chances of getting lost or stumped greatly. It might be time to rethink the overly helpful map design to add a bit of wonder and mystery back to future titles. There’s also an entire involved mechanic that opens up major army battles only after a series of tasks have been completed in a region. This game element is almost entirely superfluous. Other than a couple of story quests and assassination targets that require you to enter battle, it doesn’t make any difference which side you fight on or how many battles you win. The naval aspect, by contrast, can be overlooked for over half the game, but fail to upgrade your ship at your peril. Several of the endgame cultist targets can only be found afloat.

For a game with so many characters, factions, and locations, the number of ways your hero can interact with the environment is quite limited. There’s only a few points where you can legitimately talk your way out of a fight. As suggested by the three separate branches into which you can sink ability points, your principal choices are open combat, ranged combat, and stealth. In sharp contrast to AC: Origins, using your bow and arrows to thin out the enemies’ numbers is rarely workable. Encampments in Odyssey tend to be flat and cramped, and alerting so much as one soldier to your presence will quickly bring out not only the rest of the camp but multiple nasty mercenaries, with fire and poison effects and usually a bear or lion sidekick for good measure. Odyssey has a five-star “wanted” meter just like Grand Theft Auto, and reinforcements come amazingly quickly, often while you are still in the midst of battle. Taking on more than three or four regular soldiers is not advisable. So the most effective way to play is to dedicate your experience points towards building your stealth skills, allowing you to lurk around the edges picking off bad guys one at a time, until the path to your target is clear. The combat, which involves balancing weak, strong, and charged attacks with limited-use special abilities, is more sophisticated and fun than in previous Assassin’s Creed titles. It can also be frustratingly random — the bounty hunters have access to all the same skills as you do, and the same dice rolls determine their damage. One lucky critical hit can take you from full health to dead, and the heads-up display could be clearer about indicating when you’re in danger. Enemies scale to your level throughout, and it’s not until you’ve gotten quite a bit of the story cleared that you are able to boost your special skills to full power. As consequence the game gets substantially easier right at the very end. By that time you’ve been forced to get your fundamentals right, so when you get access to a maxed-out chain assassination, you’re suddenly able to clear camps in a matter of seconds. It’s satisfying, but it’s a long wait.

As in all massive open-world games, the story struggles to some extent with urgency as you’re free to wander for as long as you like, completing side quests, collecting bounties, and uncovering new lands on the map even as life-or-death decisions seemingly hang in the balance. While the arc of your character, Alexios or Kassandra, is well-formed with a beginning, middle, and an end, the game doesn’t finish the story of the Peloponnesian War. The always-controversial “present day” elements of the story are limited to maybe fifteen minutes’ total time with Layla Hassan, returning from Origins to give an ever-tenuous connection to the ongoing Assassin’s Creed fiction, which pretty much ran out of steam five games, a movie, and a console generation ago. Odyssey does incorporate the time-travelling superintelligent alien precursor nonsense more elegantly than did Origins, which is not saying a lot. They do provide a good excuse to allow your hero battles with mythological creatures like minotaurs, cyclops, and hydras despite the nominally realistic setting. Overall, Odyssey leans more into purely magical, fantasy powers more so than is usual for Assassin’s Creed games. Your character can leap from any height without taking damage, and can unlock outright impossible abilities such as invisibility and teleportation. It’s somewhat appropriate for a period where myth and history weren’t quite as divided as they became later, and dialogue options allow you to present yourself as a demigod, if that’s how you want to play it.

For a game that gives you so many extra activities apart from the main storyline, it’s a shame that Odyssey doesn’t bring back some of the metagames and resource sinks that previous titles featured. After you reach max level, you’re just going to accumulate currency and treasure for which you have no use. It would be nice if there was a base to upgrade and furnish, or missions to send your lieutenants on, or a ship-trading minigame, all features that have been in Assassin’s Creed games before. And for as much of a constant drip of loot as the game offers you, once you have a set of legendary armor and top-rank weapons in the style you like, there’s not much to do with new drops besides dismantle it or stockpile it. There are tons of treasure-map puzzles just as in Origins, but the rewards for completing them are functionally useless. You might just go ahead and seek them all out because it’s a nice change of pace from all the killing.

For a world that can eat up weeks of your life, it sure helps that it’s stupendously beautiful, and varied. There are volcanic islands, green mountains, meadows full of pink flowers, blue seas, and a wide variety of captivating and grotesque monuments. The same enemy types repeat throughout the Greek world, but Athenians, Spartans, cultists, bandits, and hunters all have different unit types with separate weapons and movesets. Naval movement is unfortunately a little on the pokey side, meaning you’ll end up bypassing it in favor of fast travel points once you’ve unlocked a few on each island. It’s easy to climb almost anywhere, and your horse is always just a whistle away, even if you just ran it off a cliff to its certain death. The game does hitch and skip and even crash occasionally playing on a stock XBox One, perhaps an inevitable consequence of being optimized for the pricey new XBox One X. Despite the imperfections it’s well worth playing to the last achievement, and beyond, as the first chapter of downloadable content, Legacy of the First Blade, has already arrived to provide a pleasantly streamlined, story-heavy reprise of the main game’s action.