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Thu Nov 08 2018
6 min read
My honest opinion on Assassin's Creed: Odyssey?
At first, it seems like a pretty nice game. At first.
I would rate this game a solid 6/10.
First of all, I would like to note that I am a huge fan of these kinds of games. It's a story-based RPG in which you can upgrade your weapons, armor, and ship to strengthen your character's health, armor, assassin strength, warrior strength, or hunter strength. That in combination with an open-world exploration map is what draws me in to a game.
However, the story is lacking. The story begins off strong, telling how the main character (Alexios) is a mercenary who has been raised as an orphan because his father, a great general of Sparta, had to throw him off a cliff for accidentally killing someone. Eventually, he is given a hard job as a mercenary - to assassinate his father. That's the first 5 hours of the game. After that, the story breaks down. The opener makes it sound like the climax of the game is when you find your father and have to kill him - but in actuality, I found the father after 1 hour of playing and then instead of killing him, I let him escape and that story arc ended. My main issue with this game is that it continually changes what you think will be the main story-line so there is no central idea holding it together. It keeps adding elements to the story (for example, now there are cultists I need to assassinate, as well as mysterious intelligent beings from before our time I need to investigate) and it makes the whole story jumbled.
The leveling of the main character and the abilities are also jumbled. As you progress throughout the story, completing quests and the story-line, you gain experience to level up your character to increase your damage, armor and health. Like any game, the experience required to level up increases exponentially. However, you get to a point where you have to continually do quests and take down a bunch of small bandit camps just to stay at the same expected level. Grinsing is a normal part of any game but this requires slightly more effort than should be needed. Once the cult is discovered, you are bombarded with thousanda of quests you need to complete in order to level up and progress with the story which can be very overwhelming and irritating.
In addition to these concept issues, there are obvious concrete issues. When horse-riding is very glitchy and can cause you to get stuck in a rock or mountain. Also, sometimes when boarding the enemy vessel, if it is sinking and you are still on board, you will get glitch inside the sinking ship and die underwater along with the ship.
After much critique and criticism, I'd like to mention the good things the game does well. Since this is my first assassin's creed game, I think the assassination part is done well and is very enjoyable to take down a fort by systematically assassinating all soldiers and hiding their bodies. In addition, the abilities you are able to use can be very satisfying (especially the spartan kick). My favorite component of the entire game is the ship battling. I think the ship battling, mechanics, and boarding vessels is done very well, extremely enjoyable, and if it was put into a separate standalone game (sea of thieves?), I would buy the game.
I would also like to mention that a lot of people say this is a "pay to win" or "microtransaction" sort of game (just see any review of this game, or Videogamedunkey's review). I've played around with this and in my honest opinion, many of the items offered on the store are not much better than ones you can find in-game by looting forts, camps, caves, tombs, and shipwrecks. Even if the items you currently own are very low-leveled, the game allows for weapon upgrades and weapon engravings ("enchantments" or "enhancements") to make current weapons just as powerful with a price. I think Ubisoft did a very job with this and I don't see the online store as a hinderance.
Keep in mind, at this point I've spent approximately 20 hours in gameplay (I'm almost done with midterms, ok?) And while this is my first Assassin's Creed game and I haven't completed the game, I think that this is a pretty ok game. It's not the best and I wouldn't pay money for this game, but I definitely recommend the ship battling and bounty system and I think that makes it worthwhile.
Overall, I would recommend this game to others. It is a decent game and is entertaining when you're bored and you have nothing to do.
Overal rating: 6/10.
Edit: Now that I've logged over 100 hours of in-game experience, I'd like to assess/expand my original score of 6/10, displaying a key game element and its score:
total score: 6/10