Assassin's Creed Odyssey - PS4
I picked up this game about a week ago because it was on sale for 19.99 (retail 59.99). I think it was a good purchase and I've gotten some hours out of it so far and am still playing it and it seems to hold my interest a little bit. That said it is certainly not an amazing game and I would not buy it at its full price at all.
I'm about 13-14 hours in right now, so the story has started ramping up, I'm like level 15 or so, and have explored a lot of different areas. The game just feels, empty and repetitious. The game wants to be the Witcher sooooo bad, with mechanics like being able to call your horse from anywhere, the free roam endless wooded repetitious landscape, npcs that don't talk to you at all, honestly kinda bad combat, but without any of the good parts of the witcher like the cool quests and narrative. It also really wants to be an Assassins Creed game (spoiler) but fails to achieve that particularly well either. Now, my last Assassins Creed games that I played were back when Black Flag came out, and I had played all the ones previous to that. The story in AC Odyssey is basically nonexistent, and Ubisoft seems to have taken a liking to the aspects of Black Flag; abandoning the Assassin timeline in favor of a more historical free roaming sandbox game. This would be awesome and all, if the world was at all interesting. ACII had the entirety of Italy to explore, with noted historical achievements like Notre Dame, the city of Rome, Venice to explore. AC1 had breathtaking architecture for its time, and AC4 had the awesome pirate / Caribbean aesthetic that made up for its lack of structures. This to me, exemplifies what makes the AC games AC; an emphasis on historical combat, an alternative timeline (with secret societies) and an amazing free roaming parkour environment. Odyssey does almost none of this. Of the 13 hours or so I've played so far the only singular time I've ever thought, "wow this is really cool actually" was the very first synchronization on the Statue of Zeus. That was really cool because you got to see the whole island you were on from the top of the mountain, and in that moment it felt like the world was limitless. In successive synchros, not so much. You climb up a cliff so you can jump on a branch and boom synchronization. You get to the top of a house that is barely a story, sometimes two, and boom synchro. It's the same problem that to me, AC3 had, an uninteresting climbing environment. The world feels overwhelmingly repetitive; get a mission, travel 300 meters to the next marker, you kill guards / clear a fortress, travel another 200 meters to complete the quest. The most interesting quests I've received have been the city state takeover missions. In these what you are supposed to do is travel the land and clear different forts that are erected around the area you're attempting to clear. Once the area is weakened enough you are able to travel to wherever the head leader of the area (usually I guess a senator? prominent politician?) is and kill him, as the nation is weakened so he has to disperse his defenses. Or, you could ignore all that and attempt to fight him full powered, where he will usually be levels up and have bodyguards all surrounding him. This leads to a somewhat cool interaction betweent eh land and the political state at the time, as you are then able to do a conquest battle, where you fight in a big ass war / conflict and just go ham with the combat. This would be such an interesting and cool idea but unfortunately is executed like garbage. None of the battles / political sphere matter one bit. No matter which side (Athens or Sparta) you pick, none of the sides will ever be friendly toward you. Almost every single area in the game is just hostile, so there's no sense of like, the Civil War in Skyrim where you are shaping the landscape (even though that in itself was handled poorly). The whole point of doing these battles is to get better and better gear, but the game already hands you an extraordinary amount of high level gear, making the whole process superfluous. It's strictly designed to appeal to completionist natures of gamers, but even then its a frustrating sort of completionist. I'll compare my previous trophy hunting in Hollow Knight to this. In Hollow Knight, the last few trophies I had to get were the Pantheon trophies, in which I fight the bossrushes. This was a cool and fulfilling completionist activity, as I got better and better at the combat, I could test out my kinks and work out the battles, while still being challenging. Odyssey seemed in contrast, to learn nothing from its previous games at all. Go here, collect this Ancient Tablet, loot these chests, kill these cultists. Boom, area done. The repetitive nature of these tasks the game asks you to complete is overwhelming at first, and really leads me to question why the fuck I'm still playing this game 13 hours in, because it doesn't seem different and I'm sure as hell not leveling myself to the 60s so I can do all these cultist quests it wants me to complete.
The combat in the game is one you would expect to be refreshing. It's an Assassin's Creed game after all, the coolest parts of the games are figuring out how to stealth kill every single dude, how to not get caught so you can successfully complete the area, slaughtering people with your pistols and your pirate sword and weaving in an dout of combat. Odyssey does none of this. The RPG nature of Odyssey leads to a Dark Souls esque combat that just isn't satisfying enough. You get indicators when the opponent is about to attack and you have two choices, parry or dodge, both of which if done correctly reward you with a slow mo cam that allows you to get hits in on the enemy. This at first glance would seem to be a cool mechanic, and it is, however the problems stem from there being a leveling and gear system to begin with. The leveling is pointless except as a gatekeeper, because the enemies level with you. The only difference is, some quests you are required to be a certain level to complete and you can't complete them unless you're that level. The leveling and health system means that often times you can't even really stealth complete areas. I remember unlocking the bow in the game, and I was so hyped. I fucking love archery in games, when I play Skyrim I almost always go bow and attempt to snipe everyone, when I play Dishonored I always try to crossbow bolt everyone out the game, when I play any shooter really I always try for the sniper character (Zer0 from borderlands, Triple Take in Apex Legends, Hanzo from Overwatch). Theres just something satisfying about being able to snipe a character down. Can't do that in Odyssey though, your arrows deal maybe 1/20th of the health bar if youre lucky, and maybe upwards of 1/7th if you get a headshot. Being able to oneshot people requires a special skill that consumes Adrenaline (a finite system that replenishes through battling and engaging enemies, defeating the point of sniping) and getting a headshot with it, while theyre underleveled. OK fine, at least you can have good satisfying combat with the slow mo system right? Sure, but one of the first leveled abilities you can get is the Spartan Kick (lol). Additionally there is fall damage. Put two and two together and you can basically cheese any fight by luring them to a cliff and just spartan kicking them until theyre dead. There was one fight that I was having particular trouble with as I killed some dudes and went up high to kill the Polemarch and was surrounded by like 6 different guys (when one guy sees you they all spot you for the most part). I just kept dodging and spartan kicking, abusing the I frames to deal with the captains as I kicked them off a cliff for minimal effort. It's just so frustrating, the blows lack any depth as it just feels like you're playing Runescape and watching them trade blows in an archaic form of combat, until you get to the end of the duel and you perform one of three different finishing moves on them.
These are my thoughts without including the microtransaction pushed approach to the game and the glitches and bugs of the game (which I assume are exacerbated on PC). Overall the game seems very middling. There are cool concepts included here and a story that is somewhat interesting at times, but the gameplay is just super unengaging. Go here, kill this dude, clear this fort, do this conquest battle, loot. The areas are not really fun to look at, certainly beautiful but not engaging at all, there are no alternatives to assassinate people other than hiding in a bush really, the cities are widespread and most of the game just feels like empty space. IT feels like someone blew up a "no correlation" stats 101 picture and said "OK all these dots are going to be cities and areas." The combat overall feels cheesy dull and repetitive. The coolest parts are being able to sneak around and assassinate people, but you can't even do that correctly because a lot of enemies are just overleveled and you can't oneshot any captains or significant characters. I can only hope that the story is more redeemable, as an interesting character named Demios just got introduced that I look forward to playing against, but even then the missions assigned to that segment of the game are just more mindless repetition. Kill this cult leader in this area, find clues for the next cult leader, kill him. Overall I'd give the game a 5.5/10. It's certainly beautiful at times, worth the 20$ I spent on it as I'll probably still play it in the next coming months, but definitely not worth the 60$+. This feels like a slow burn type of game that you would play in the middle of other games, certainly an improvement on previous AC games but it jsut tries too hard to be a somewhat middling Western RPG rather than sticking to the things that make Assassins Creed an intriguing franchise.