Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey begins quite 2,400 years ago at the onset of the Peloponnesian war: a decades-long struggle between Athens and Sparta for dominion over the traditional Greek world. It’s a fitting period to explore that’s rife with social and political intrigue, full-scale warfare ashore and sea, and a tangible air of myth and legend. And after an astonishing 60-plus hours of galloping, sailing, and slicing through that historical-fiction sandbox, it’s easy to ascertain why it had been worth fighting so hard over.
Ironically for a game set in ancient Greece, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is anything but Spartan. This epic-scale action-roleplaying game shines as a grand adventure through a powerful and delightful open world on a scale we’ve rarely seen. With so few compromises between quantity and quality, Odyssey vaults over its predecessors to become the foremost impressive game within the history of the series.
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Odyssey’s world is that the biggest and most vibrantly colorful of the series. albeit much of its playground is blanketed within the fickle blue waters of the Aegean, its playable acreage is immense and rivaled only by its sheer jaw-dropping beauty. Greece may be a stunning series of picturesque locales: white-stone isles, eternally autumnal forests, sun-blasted desert islands, an endless expanse of beach, alabaster cities defended by titanic statues of bronze and stone, and therefore the inviting, rolling waves of the open sea. These beautiful scenes explode into life because of a lighting system that also causes me to prevent and snap an image even of these hours later.
Of course, like virtually all grand-scale game worlds, flaws lurk slightly below the surface. they vary from minor immersion-breaking hiccups like draw distance that never seems to be quite far enough to capture the view, textures that arrive moments too late, or slightly off-sync audio, to the more severe: getting terminally stuck on geometry, finding an unlootable item, or having your tamed beast become untamed once you die and reload — which can alright cause you to die and reload again if you happen to possess had a tamed bear. Bugs like these were annoying, sure, but almost frequent enough to sour me on exploring what has become one among my favorite open-world maps ever.
For the primary time in an Assassin’s Creed game, we get a choice of whether to play exclusively as a person or a woman: siblings Alexios and Kassandra. True, as far because the story’s concerned they’re effectively an equivalent character, but albeit they’re superficial there are some meaningful differences. Namely, Kassandra’s voice acting is usually more consistently well done than that of her brother.
For that matter, accents and voice delivery throughout Odyssey are hit or miss, usually falling somewhere between good and outright scenery-chewing, especially when it involves no-name NPCs who sound like someone who’d watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding once before being asked to try to an impersonation. But the facial animation of the marquee characters is great, and you’ll sense the subtle disgust or confusion on the face of Alexios or Kassandra without them having to mention a word.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey may be a resounding achievement in world-building, environment, and interesting gameplay with occasional problems throughout. Its incredible recreation of ancient Greece is some things I’ll want to travel back to long after I’ve finished its main story, and its excellent systems mesh together during a way that’s hard to beat. While there are definite rough edges, Odyssey sets a replacement bar for Assassin’s Creed games and holds its own within the eternal debate over the simplest open-world roleplaying games ever.
