Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

I’m not a fan of ‘gopher’ games that make you run around collecting items, rescuing damsels in distress, delivering messages, and murdering politicians to level your character. The whole premises seems rather tedious and unimaginative.
So right from the start I expected to hate Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Combine that with the fact that I’d never played an Assassin’s Creed game before, and I am not the most nimble finger clicker, I was prepared to spend a good portion of my playing time getting my head lopped off.
None of that happened. Well, yeah, there is a pretty steep learning curve here. I did spend a lot of my initial hours zigging when I should have been zagging, and with my opponent’s spear in my head, but I stuck with it and eventually even an old poop like me was able to figure out the mechanics.
What kept me going was the sheer majesty of the game and the beauty of the surroundings.
I’ve been to Athens, Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Delos, Aegina, Hydra, Crete, Melos (now Santorini), and dozens of other locales on the campaign map multiple times. I’ve walked around the ruins at Delphi, strolled the docks of Piraeus and walked through valley of Laconia for research for my books. I wanted to see these places at they might have looked 2,500 years ago and that for me is the true joy of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
The team at Ubisoft deserves a lot of credit. They did their homework. Sure, you’d expect to see historical figures like Pericles, Socrates, Alcibiades and Archidamas in a game about the Peloponnesian War. But that anyone outside of academia even knows who Brasidas, Aspasia, Herodotus and Pausanias were, is impressive. Kudos to you.
I’m probably an oddball gamer because I was not motivated by stabbing people in the back to gain levels and steal loot. The entire idea of stabbing people in the back goes against the grain of the Greek ethos of ‘kleos’ or honor. What kept me going was the desire to see more of the world that Ubisoft created.
I wanted to visit the Athenian Acropolis and see the Propylaea, Erechtheion and Parthenon as they were shiny and new, instead of in piles of rubble. I wanted to gaze up at Phidias' statue of Zeus in Olympus (one of the wonders of the ancient Greek world that no longer exists), speak to the Pythia at the temple of Delphi, and see the five villages of Sparta as they might have looked. Getting to walk the streets of Athens, Argos and Elis was like taking a trip back in time. Magical.
Okay, the game isn’t perfect. The pronunciation of common names like Pericles and Socrates and the character’s accents were maddening. I can only guess that Ubisoft believes we’ve Americanized the real pronunciations, or at least I hope that’s what they were thinking. Ultimately it’s a minor annoyance.
The hoplite battles were a major disappointment. The Greeks fought in a phalanx formation. Shoulder to shoulder. Shield to shield. The battles here are a 300 movie style free for all. Oh well, guess you can’t have everything.
Also I could not fathom how Alexios and Kassandra could be descended from Leonidas, but have no connection to the Agiad royal family. By rights they should have been Pausanias’ cousins, but they’re not. I don’t know who they are. The whole Pythagoras-is-my-father thing is rather bizarre and makes no sense at all.
I won’t go off the charts here listing the historical inaccuracies that drove me batsh!t crazy, as it serves no purpose. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed the game.
If you ever wanted to unravel the labyrinth of the minotaur beneath King Minos palace at Knossos, get drunk and sing songs with Socrates at an Athenian symposium, feel the Aegean Sea roll beneath your feet on the deck of a trireme, or stare out in wonder at the lights twinkling over Attica at twilight, try this game. You won’t be disappointed.

​Assassin's Creed? No.
Ancient Greek Demigod Simulator? Yes.

​I bought this game to be a stealthy assassin in the shadows.

50 hours later:
I am wearing flaming armor, wielding a poison trident, and I just Sparta-kicked a mercenary off a cliff while riding a unicorn.

​The Odyssey Experience:
​Stealth: Optional. Why stab quietly when you can set the entire fort on fire?
​History: Accurate, until you fight a Minotaur.
​Dialogue: 50% Philosophy, 50% "Malaka."
​Romance: You can flirt with everyone. Men, women, elderly people, probably the horse if the devs had more time.
​Fall Damage: Doesn't exist. You can jump from Mount Olympus and land on your feet like a superhero.

​The Gameplay Loop:
​See a question mark (?) on the map.
​Go to the question mark.
​Kill the Captain. Loot the Chest.
​Realize there are 4,000 more question marks.
​Cry.
​Keep playing.

worst "Assassin" game, best "Wonder Woman/Hercules" simulator ever made.
​10/10 - Would hear "Malaka" for the 10,000th time again .

I came for the assassins.
Stayed for the world.
Odyssey is one of those games where you tell yourself “just one quest”… well
and suddenly it’s 3 a.m.
Beautiful open world, solid combat, and an absurd amount of content.
Not perfect, but dangerously immersive.
Worth playing if you like exploration and getting lost on purpose.

You kill cyclopses, you kill minotaurs, you slay kings and gods, but in the main quest, I’m running around doing errands to get OIL just so that person can talk to me? The quest design is a complete MALAKA
-the atmosphere and environment were so immersive that there were moments when I forgot to actually play. I recommend playing it, if we exclude the side quests.

However, my biggest issue with Odyssey is its level scaling system. Enemies constantly scale to your level, meaning you never really feel stronger, no matter how much you grind or upgrade your gear. The satisfaction of outleveling enemies and returning to dominate old areas is completely gone. Every encounter feels artificially difficult — not because of smart AI, but because the game adjusts numbers to match you. It turns progression into a treadmill rather than a power fantasy.

---{ Graphics }---
☑ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☑ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

AC: Odyssey is many things. Underrated, oversized, full of passion, but also nearly devoid of the flagship Assassin's Creed(TM) stuff (unless it's the Atlantis DLC, in which case it's runaway fanfiction, dubiously canon). But as a game, one that you play for a couple hours and then put down and repeat 20 times, it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic.
Map & Story
I've had a difficult time beating this game. Not only because it's monstrously massive and just the main story (plus some side quests for leveling) took me 80 hours to complete, but also because the sheer SCALE you can see on the map screen can be super daunting and discouraging. For what it's worth, the game definitely didn't NEED to be as huge as it is. Not every area is memorable, and a lot of them have a very repetitive regional story: local Big Man is Very Bad, enslaved people, war waged for profit, throw in some ancient treasure and off you go, misthios. It is very clear someone had big ambitions for the map of Odyssey and it had to be filled with something, so the overall blueprint for local quests is the same, with only the puzzle pieces changing.
But there are also quests that truly shine with charm, good writing, AMAZING actor performances, and will leave memories and characters for you to reminisce about for a long time after. Odysseus' daughter; a middle aged pirate woman who lost her whole crew; the pirate queen Xenia; Alkibiadies that horny prick, your great buddies Herodotos and Barnabas. These are all wonderful characters and I have mentioned only a fraction of them.... but unfortunately, only about a 1/3 of your time is spent with those wonderful labours of love, and the rest with boring, repetitive cookie-cutter quests where the characters often aren't even named. The map could've easily been 40% smaller and I don't think anyone would've complained.
The main story is... better??? But it still has chapters it could do without. It has an unsatisfying ending; it literally Just Ends after a Big Important Guy dies 5 minutes after coming on screen, and it's disappointing that the actual ending to Kassandra's personal story is contained in the DLC "The Legacy". The narrative structure of this game will be misleading and confusing to an audience that expects a cohesive and neatly arranged plot. It's much better experienced as a series spanning many seasons, or a book whose chapters you're expected to read out-of-order.
I would even go as far as to say it suffers from the Open World nature of modern Assassin's Creeds, and poor artists were left doing what they could within the framework they were given.
Graphics & Sound
Graphics still hold up in 2025, 7 years later. This game could go on to retain beautiful graphics for 20 years if only raytracing were added to it. It bangs it out of the park on all three pillars: excellent art direction, robust technical foundation, and obsessive attention to detail.
Thousands of screenshots from all across Greece could serve as wallpapers, or be printed and hung on the wall. The world is alive and responsive when you traverse through it - the water ripple effects are the best I've ever seen; the fire effects are jaw-dropping for a game that ran on the PS4; the rain makes everything sloppy and muddy and blood sinks realistically into the ground.
Kassandra changes her breathing depending on your actions; holds her breath before diving into water or landing from a big jump (also on a horse!); or does steady, measured in- and exhales while running or climbing. She has mini flavour animations for shielding her face from fire/dust, leans in to light a fireplace with her torch and leans away once it's lit, shakes off her hands when leaving water, or a billion other minute things you would expect from a Rockstar Game. Yes, it's high praise, and I'm tired of pretending people hired by Ubisoft aren't capable or producing masterpieces. This is what AAA USED TO mean, what we stomached the high price tag, weird upselling practices and even weirder microtransations, for. It's attention to detail you could NEVER replace with chatGPT.
Micromanaging the Inventory
A.k.a. the aspect of RPG that AC needed the least, and also botched in execution.
If you're familiar with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has basically the reverse if DXHR's scarcity problem: it has an overabundance problem. Clear a couple areas of minibosses and lootable chests or do like three sidequests and your inventory will be spilling over with items with arbitrary numbers and confusing perks that are 10% better than what you currently have, which you don't care for because you'd rather play your cool stealth-and-adventure game, not "Hold X to Dismantle" simulator. For every half-hour of gameplay, there's a solid 5-10 minutes of managing the sheer junk in your backpack, with a bonus errand to the Blacksmith every couple of levels when your EQ is falling behind. It's a system that would've done alright if there was perhaps a single piece of equipment dropping every half-hour or so? But instead, Alexios the Garbage Man and Kassandra the Sanitation Engineer will be busy turning piles of crap into comical amounts of pieces of wood, stone, and leather.
It's the only part of the game that actively made me angry on some occasions. The fun and interesting parts of the game are gatekept behind the fact that I've got 100 (no joke, i counted) pieces of junk to go through after 5 hours of ignoring my inventory, but I can't no more because the bad guys are beating me up in 3 hits, and me them in 30.
It's work, in my videogame, and that's no good.
Technical
I have a pretty beefy setup (AMD flagships from late 2023) so I played at 1440p and Ultra High, with framegen often hitting 90 frames. You could probably knock that down to High and notice little-to-no downgrade, and at that point even the Steam Deck can guarantee 30fps. I've only encountered 2 instances where the game crashed outright, and glitches that annoy instead of amuse are rare as well. (For some reason, heavy weapons were given an immense amount of ragdoll force in this game. I recommend getting a big club and smacking a guy with a heavy execution attack.)
Conclusion
The main compliment I could give to AC: Odyssey is that it's smooth and beautiful. All the systems glue well together into an experience transitioning smoothly between different kinds of activities, and it all takes place in a stunningly crafted world. It's an extremely mature game, both meaning by the latest patch as well as Ubisoft nailing the production pipelines that even enable a single-player open-world game to have 200 hours worth of content to just work. Oh, and the gratuitous gore.
The main criticism I could give to AC: Odyssey is that it's a game made by Ubisoft, a giant, soulless corporation with an exceedingly controversial upper caste. That means microtransactions in a singleplayer game, it means it was buggy as hell on release, as well as those gameplay problems I've mentioned above - the misunderstanding of what makes RPG's appealing, and an overinflation of the game's content count. (The latter being something they'd overswing in the other direction with Mirage and fail as well.)
That's why, I would want to urge you - do not make the mistake of crediting Ubisoft for the excellence of this game. Credit its people - the artists, programmers, and QA testers, down in the trenches, making the game actually happen.