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Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/14/2014

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Up until this point, Assassin’s Creed had pretty much overstayed its welcome. With the release of Rogue, it was clear Ubisoft was just wanting to use the series as a yearly cash grab. While no single game is inherently awful or bad, the formulaic nature of every game playing nearly the same but with new characters and story just wasn’t appealing anymore. The game was starting to feel less unique and made from love and care and more just copy and paste and insert a few new characters. Unity was the series’ first next-gen outing with updated visuals, mechanics, and co-op. Unity scales the series back to its roots and focuses solely on the narrative and less on varied mechanics. For instance, naval battles are gone as the game focuses just on Paris set during the French Revolution. So, like in the original games, we get to run around a large town area full of chests, side quests, and things to collect to gain money to buy customization pieces. Then there’s the meat of the game which is the story missions.

Honestly, this is where AC shines best, just a large historically accurate city with fun story missions and a few side quests. Unity’s side activities are abundant and completely optional. These range from various co-op quests to helping solve mysteries using your Eagle Vision, finding chests that contain various amounts of money or customization pieces, emblems, and secret relics. I personally feel there’s too much here and it’s all padding and filler. I spent a couple of hours doing these activities just to try them out and they don’t interest me at all. Once you finish the game there’s no reason to keep playing unless you’re a completionist and want to achievement hunt. The series has always been great for that. 

Unity has a five-tier difficulty system in which missions are rated from one to five diamonds. Of course, you can increase your rank by buying or finding better armor pieces and weapons. You also need to buy skills to increase this rank as well. I finished the game at rank four and never found the game overly difficult combat-wise. You should never engage 8-10 enemies anyways and that’s been a rule in the series since the beginning. The skills you can unlock are rather useful and some are acquired just by playing the game. Poison darts, health, lockpicking, and various things like these have been done in the series before and at this point, I don’t find it necessary to lock these things away anymore. Just give them up in the beginning and let me acquire armor pieces. It’s just another excuse to pad the game and make you finish missions for skill points. The only reason to acquire franks in the game is to increase your ranking and allow you to buy armor and weapons, however, this is completely optional. You should be at least rank four by the end of the game, but I didn’t have to end up buying much.

The story itself is decent at best. At least we get to see Arno rise and fall as an Assassin and regular person. You start out playing through Arno’s childhood and how he discovered the Assassin Brotherhood and he is on a path of vengeance to kill the murderer of his father. You also have a love interest, Elise, who you knew as a child, and the strife they go through is okay. Unity’s story was never gripping or kept me on the edge of my seat. There were a few twists and surprises, but nothing amazing. The ending is rather disappointing and typical. The “real-world” here with Abstergo mostly takes a back seat and you never control any character like you did Desmond. It’s told through dialog and pre-rendered scenes. It’s mostly pointless and I wish the series would just get rid of this part of the story. I say this in every AC review I do, and I’ll keep saying it.

Sadly, while it did go back to its roots in terms of scope, the game still has mundane boring combat. The animations are silly with weird clipping issues and the game is still just a parry fest. You can unlock heavy attacks, but when the enemy’s life bar flashes yellow you parry and attack. Its uninteresting and head-on combat has never been the series strong point as it should be avoided. Most of the missions require you to find a target, assassinate them, or find your way into a stronghold and gather evidence for something. Eagle Vision is key here as it lets you see enemies through walls and tag them on your mini-map. As the game progresses these strongholds get tougher and bigger and more confusing to navigate. A new addition to assassination missions is side objectives that allow you to make the hit easier. There is usually one assistance and assassination opportunity that requires extra thinking and leg-work. Sure, you can just charge in and kill the target, but usually, in later levels, there are just way too many enemies around and you will never even make it. You also can’t finish the missions unless you’re anonymous so the target will lay there, you then have to run away, and then work your way back without being seen to finish the job. It’s best to just do it the correct way the first time around and it’s satisfying every single time.

I found these side objectives are rather neat and fun. Sometimes you can free some people to start a distraction and clear out an open courtyard which gives you quick access to the target. The assassination opportunity puts you right in front of your target without being seen. One mission had me kill someone attending a ball in a mansion. I freed a fireworks cart that would force the target out of the ballroom and into the hallway which let me blend in with the crowd and kill her without fighting through guards. Some of these were fiddly and you have to be in the right position at the right time or you will blow it, so a lot of trial and error is still needed which can be really frustrating, but satisfying once you figure out where the target is and the quickest way to them. I did find traversing the buildings can still feel finicky and too sticky. Sometimes I just wanted to hop down to go to a specific platform and Arno would hop around like a bunny and jump down or go up to something when I just wanted to run straight. It made me fail some missions, and this is still an issue that needs to be addressed. 

The visuals of Unity are outstanding, but it’s a technical nightmare. At launch, Unity was one of the most broken games to ever be released, and while now it’s been patched up just fine, the engine is horribly optimized and runs like garbage even 7 years later on new hardware. The anti-aliasing is a resource hog and I had to turn it off just to get 60FPS on an overclocked RTX 2080. Back in the day, it was impossible to run the game maxed out and get 60FPS and it ran even worse on consoles. At least Paris is beautifully recreated and the historical buildings look beautiful and are fun to explore. Everything just looks so good here, but at the cost of a terribly optimized game engine.

With that said, Unity isn’t the worst AC game, but not the best either. I appreciate the return to simpler times with just a core story to focus on and one city to explore on foot. There are still too many side activities to pad the game and the ranking system is guilty of this as well. Combat is still boring and rough looking and climbing around things is sticky and fiddly. While the new opportunities during assassinations are fun to accomplish it makes the trial and error that much more prominent and frustrating despite the satisfying pay-off. Unity is worth a play through if you have the rig to run it, but don’t expect a next-gen revolution.

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Quebec

Release Date: 10/23/2015

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Here we are, another year, another Assassin’s Creed game. Having to actually say this is just sad as Assassin’s Creed has always been a good series. The games are high quality, play well, and look amazing for their time, but when you release that same greatness over and over with only minor changes it can grow tiresome. I was personally done with AC when Black Flag was released. I just couldn’t get through it. I already played them all up until that point and I felt AC3 hit the series peak, but they had to keep going.

Syndicate doesn’t do much new, but as it’s the last of the “older AC style games” it does everything very well but is also a little too familiar. While we do get new characters and the continued “real-world” story of the Assassins vs the Templars, the most interesting part of any AC game is the historically accurate world you explore. This time its 19th century England, specifically the London area and surrounding cities. You play as two characters this time, Jacob and Eevie Frye who are rogue assassins that are trying to stop the Templar plot in London. The main villain is Starrick who is pretty decent and well hated, but overall, the actual story is not much to really care about as it drags on a bit too long and takes forever to really go anywhere. Most of the game is just interaction cut scenes on what to do for the current mission and very little progression overall. Eevie is trying to obtain the Shroud relic which grants eternal life and Jacob doesn’t believe in the relics and pieces of Eden and wants to just stop the Templar threat. Both characters play exactly the same minus a few skills, but Jacobs’s missions lead him on a separate path.

Assassin’s Creed has been slowly eeking in RPG elements over time and I hate them. It doesn’t belong in this game at all and it really shows here. The entire map is sectioned off with leveled areas up to level 9. Of course, story missions also require you to be at certain levels and the only way to level up is to complete missions and use your points in the skill tree. Once you acquired enough skills you will level up. The grinding isn’t too bad here, but a few times the story missions didn’t give me enough XP to level up so I had to end up liberating sections of the map. This is where the game really becomes formulaic and you can see the series has hit a brick wall. Each side mission that requires you to liberate an area repeats throughout the game. The missions range from assassinating templars, to bounty hunts that require you to kidnap the target dead or alive, then there are child labor camp liberations where you just have to assassinate the foreman and free the children, and there are gang strongholds. The gang in this game are the Blighters and they all dress in red so they stand out. You just need to kill everyone in these areas. Once you liberate all areas of the city you then have to fight the gang leader. You get an opportunity to do it out in the open, but more often than not the thugs will take you down as there are so many of them. Whether you kill the leader or not you have to challenge the gang to a stand-off and just eliminate a bunch of them in a closed-off area. Once that area is 100% liberated you can recruit those green-dressed members to fight for you.

After you liberate your first two areas these missions get old really fast and I didn’t bother with the last two cities. Most of the main missions are pretty much this combined with just unique areas and circumstances. Kidnapping, assassinating, stealing, blowing things up, and of course, there are secondary optional objectives you can meet for more XP and money, but some of these just seem impossible to accomplish, it was fun to try and strive for these, but if I blew it I didn’t bother restarting or anything. One new addition to the series is vehicles in the form of horse-drawn carriages. These drive okay for the most part but are pretty much useless once you start unlocking more fast travel points by syncing up at high points. They drive okay, but there are a lot of physics glitches in this game and often you’d see horses fly off into space or freak out and run off into the abyss.

Syndicate has a lot of great-looking outfits and items to unlock. Each character has an outfit, gauntlet, and sidearm to equip. Most of these have to be crafted or met at a certain level and you can find them by meeting secondary objectives on missions, locked chests, or by just playing the game. I feel the game is far too small in scope to need RPG elements. Once you get to level 8 you can finish the game and there’s no point to continue playing anymore. The only reason you need to level up and get better equipment is to survive the story missions. I was able to finish the game in about 13 hours, and I still felt this was dragged on. Without the grinding, the story takes about 6-8 hours to complete with 8 sequences. I enjoyed the story and the Frye twins have great personalities, but overall it felt average and forgettable at best. They didn’t go through enough personal issues, they got away scot-free for going against the Orders rules, and overall the entire Assassins Order played no part in this game. The missions felt like they were just stringing you along and barely had a story to tell as an excuse.

As it stands when I finished the game, I felt the side stuff was pointless and boring. I enjoyed the unique story missions the most and yes, acquiring skills is just fine and the skill tree was actually useful. My characters felt more powerful as I leveled up and it made doing certain things easier like when Eevie can stay still and become invisible when she masters the Stealth tree. There are crowd events to complete in each area like stealth kill a messenger or scare some bullies, but these aren’t fun. They are just there for completionists and to pad hours onto a game. I felt no reward or accomplishment when just checking these boxes for items I won’t even need to use. You can upgrade each piece of equipment once to add a stat, but this is mostly for melee combat. Which in fact is terrible. It tries to be like Batman Arkham‘s combat system where you mash one button and then counter or break defense. When the enemy’s health bar flashes yellow you can press the parry button and when the health bar is gray you can break their defense. It doesn’t chain together smoothly and half the time it felt unresponsive. Some of the kill animations are also way too long and there’s a lot of clipping and while it feels and looks brutal it’s just button mashing. 

The overall movement and flow of Syndicate feel a bit janky. A lot of time the character would hop around like a rabbit when I was trying to get down somewhere to hang on to a specific thing. A lot of the times this blew missions and I had to restart. You can free-run up or down with two separate buttons, but you also get a grappling line and it doesn’t work as you think. You have to be directly under a building to grapple up and you can grapple across rooftops, but it does come in handy for assassinating people in large open areas. The problem is you can’t grapple back out quickly as you must be right next to a building. This felt only half useful most of the time. Other than this the only side missions I enjoyed were with real-life people such as Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Dickens. These missions are always enjoyable in AC games, but the same repetitious missions repeat here as well. 

The game does look absolutely stunning though. For the time, the game was ahead in terms of technical achievements for graphics and no GPU could run the game at maxed-out settings and 60FPS, but now that it’s been five years I can see why. The Anvil engine is horribly optimized and runs poorly on GPUs that are four generations newer. I had to turn anti-aliasing completely off on an overclocked RTX 2080 as I couldn’t get 60FPS with everything else maxed out at 1440p. That’s the game’s fault, not my system. When you do get it running well it looks stunning even today. Great lighting effects, outfits that look gorgeous and beautiful recreations of historical buildings. I enjoyed exploring London. However, the facial animations and models on everyone but the main characters looked horrendous and the same five-character models repeat. The game is a little rough here and there, and I also found on my 1660ti system that the camera had jerkiness to it despite hitting 60FPS with everything maxed out and anti-aliasing set to FXAA (otherwise you lose 20FPS and it’s not worth the cost).

As Syndicate stands now, the series really needs to reboot or needs to go back to simpler times when you just had a nice narrative and a few things to collect. Outside of the mediocre story and somewhat fun story missions, the side missions are repetitive, formulaic, and get old fast. There are only chests and newspapers to tear down off walls and even these are old as they have been in every single game except the first one up to this point in time. You can make beautiful historically accurate worlds, you can have state-of-the-art graphics, but in the end, the series will get stale and tiresome fast.

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 10/27/2017

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Let’s get one thing straight, Assassin’s Creed needed a reboot for sure. Syndicate was by no means bad, but the only thing really changing were the locales and the gameplay was getting stale. Origins ups the ante with the largest game yet, but…also adds RPG elements? RPG isn’t something I associate with Assassin’s Creed.  At least the story is entertaining and the new settings are daring and beautiful all at the same time, but do the RPG elements hurt more than help, and is the series going to find itself stuck in a new rut it can’t get out of?

You play as Bayek of Siwa, a man who had his son murdered by The Order of the Ancients, and he is on a story of vengeance and revenge. Bayek is actually a great character with a good amount of personality and spirit. He’s a likable character and isn’t just hellbent on revenge. He changes over the course of the story becoming even cold and bitter towards the end (not a spoiler), but this is also the story of how the Assassins came to be. The origins of the Creed we have all come to love. This is also long before the Templars stepped in too.

One of the first things you will notice in the game is the size of the world. It’s incredibly massive, and sadly, too massive. Almost two-thirds of the map isn’t explored during the story and is reserved for just going around and finding collectibles and doing side quests. There are dozens upon dozens of side quests and these are needed to grind levels. That’s the first major damper on this game. Yes, it has RPG elements, but you need to grind just to complete the story which is not ideal. The cap here is level 44, and thankfully the first twenty or so levels come fast. By the eighth hour, I was already level twenty, but it slows down a lot after that. You need to be at least level 33 by the end of the game and those last 15 levels are a serious grind as missions are the fastest way to level up and most don’t grant more than 3,000 XP. You would think that higher-level missions would give more XP, but the game chose quantity instead. The higher you get the more you need to complete to move on. I hate this so much and it feels like an absolute chore.

The combat is refreshed and isn’t a total parry fest like previous games were. You have light and heavy attacks as well as a block and parry button. It works well enough, but it’s still just button-mashing in the end. You get an adrenaline bar that can be used for powerful attacks that are unlocked in the skill tree. Ranged weapons are added in the form of bows. There are various types of weapons and bows. Two-handed and one-handed weapons plus various bows with different ammo types. These come in handy when hunting animals and trying to take out guards from a distance. However, your level will impede one-hit assassination kills and how much damage your bow can do. 

You do get the hidden blade in this game about a fourth of the way through the story. Assassinating is the same as usual and just as satisfying. Leapfrogging from guard to guard is fun when you are at least two levels below theirs. The game is tightly locked around this two-level plateau and if you are three levels or more below the enemies they are almost impossible to kill. It makes the game more frustrating as you just want to take these guys out, but you need to come back when you level up so you don’t die all the time. The whole RPG system just hampers Assassin’s Creed’s fundamental gameplay that was best when you could just go into any fight and take them out with stealth if you were good enough. 

You can loot weapons off of enemies, chests, and other places and even upgrade them at the blacksmith, but I found this useless as I was getting a constant stream of better weapons by just playing. I didn’t even really need to buy anything either. It’s just a wasteful system which means I didn’t really need any money too. I just refilled my arrows when needed and sold stuff to empty out my inventory and maybe bought outfits for Bayek which all look great. You don’t get any armor in this game as your health and damage are all determined based on your level. You can hunt animals for their skins to upgrade your hidden blade and overall armor rating, but that’s about it. I didn’t even bother doing this as hunting is just another chore added to the game that isn’t really needed. One of the few things the series scaled back on was collectibles. There are hidden scrolls, Ptolemy statues to destroy, and of course, viewpoints to sync up with, but most of the collectibles are in the form of taking out guard outposts and looting them. You need to kill the captain as well to make the fort takedown complete. I found this boring and tiresome after I did a few and just skipped these entirely.

There are some entertaining side quests, and most are different, but a majority require you to either rescue someone as you can carry them out of a camp and put them on your horse, or assassinate someone. These got old quickly and even the dialog in between didn’t matter much. Some missions have you “investigating” an area, but again, just filler to cram on more hours to the playtime. The most enjoyable part of the game was climbing up to viewpoints and doing story missions. Naval battles are also back, but only during a few scripted events, and they are fun, sure, but it’s nothing different than previous games. You play as Bayek’s love, Aya, during these missions and they mostly consist of just taking down ships with different life bars. There’s no upgrading, no customization, or anything like that. You get this set ship and controls for about three missions. You can use boats in the main game, but they are just used as transportation and nothing more as there isn’t a whole lot of water in Egypt.

I can’t deny that the story was entertaining, especially towards the end, but the game is just beautiful. Large sweeping vistas of deserts and climbing the Pyramids of Giza is memorable and incredibly fun. However, a lot of the realism that was well-loved in previous games is gone. This isn’t a painstakingly recreated Egypt with buildings that are realistic down to the brick. It’s a hodge-podge of real-life objects thrown into a somewhat realistic-looking Egypt landscape wise. The game re-creates the biomes and environments of Egypt, but the map is large areas smashed together. While it flows well and looks pretty, I don’t particularly care for this. I like the smaller more realistic and historically accurate places. I liked reading about each building I discovered or a real-life person. Yes, there are real historical figures here like Cleopatra, Ptolemy, and Caesar, but they’re fictional recreations and their backstories aren’t told anywhere. If this is sacrificed for larger open worlds I just don’t want it. Assassin’s Creed is getting too big and there are not enough interesting things within to fill it. 

In the end, Origins‘ RPG system hampers the game at every turn. You have to stop advancing the story to level up with mostly repetitive side quests which are filler to force you to explore the world. While the main story is really entertaining, I still didn’t care about Layla or the real-world stuff with Abstergo. You cut away maybe a few times to this, but that “side-story” just doesn’t feel like it ever goes anywhere. Just keep me in the historical world and that’s it. We don’t need the Animus, we don’t need Abstergo or any of the science to make an excuse to keep exploring various worlds. We don’t need The Apple of Eden, or any other artifacts. Origins also has a poorly optimized engine with frequent slowdown and AI issues everywhere. I even had plenty of physics glitches. Sure, it looks stunning, but there are problems here. The combat system is fine, but again the skill tree doesn’t even help much here as most of the skills felt pretty useless and I didn’t even need them. These systems were never needed in an Assassin’s Creed game. I don’t mind more side quests, but make them optional like they’re supposed to be. The RPG system is the worst thing to ever happen in the series and sadly it seems like it’s here to stay.

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Quebec

Release Date: 10/02/2018

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Man, I am completely exhausted. That’s the feeling you will get when trying to slog through this insanely beautiful yet equally insanely bloated mess of a game. I have a complete love/hate relationship with Odyssey. It’s been installed on my PC since it launched in 2018 and it’s taken me three years to finally get around to completing it. There is so much to digest and chew with this game that I don’t know where to even begin. I have a lot of negative things to say about this game and will probably go on a tirade about certain mechanics and systems the game has, but there is still something here to be enjoyed.

Let’s just start with the story in which Odyssey doesn’t really have a meaningful one. Unlike previous games where there was a hand-tailored narrative tightly woven between assassins and templars, this game seems to forget most of what Assassin’s Creed’s makeup really is. The game features a seemingly generic male or female protagonist whom are trying to bring their family back together after a tragic event that took place while they were children. Therein lies one of the first major issues with the game: The story has no meaning and takes way too long to unfold and there are no characters worth caring about. The game features generic dull voice acting with badly faked (I think it’s faked?) Greek accents with cookie-cutter models that repeat throughout the game. They are mannequin-like and stiff and just boring. Gone are the well-thought-out historical characters we can grow to love, but instead Ubisoft thought it was cute to shove nearly every single major famous Greek person  in this game and give them lifeless personalities and stale dialog to spew. 

The second issue lies with the fact that this is an RPG and not really an action-adventure anymore. In fact, assassinations take a major back seat in favor of head-on combat, which rolls into the level grinding and enemy leveling that plagues this entire game. I miss the days when you can just do what you what when you want in an AC game and that’s that. I miss the well crafted and unique assassination levels, but instead, we get generic everything as Odyssey is the epitome of quantity over quality with every single aspect of the game. There are a lot of layers to the gameplay loop in Odyssey, but let’s just start with forts and restricted areas in general. The combat itself is fine. It’s slightly tweaked from Origins which I haven’t played much of yet. However, it’s boring and dull and repetitive like the rest of the game. You get to assign four abilities from the skill tree for ranged and melee, each respectively. There is a heavy and light attack and most of the game requires you to perform a perfect dodge so time slows down and you can get hits in to fill your ability bar. Each segment is needed for various abilities to activate and you will rely heavily on this. The combat looks good and feels fine, but it’s just the usual AC button mashing, dodging/parrying fest we’ve grown tired of.

There are probably hundreds of them in this game, and that’s not an exaggeration. Most side quests, some story missions, and the Cult of Cosmos main/side storyline make you go into a lot of these. This was fine back in the early days as these areas felt unique and well-thought-out, but here it’s just a random splattering of various enemy types. Each fort/restricted area has a variety of things you can do to “complete” that area. Burn supplies, steal loot, kill a leader to bring that area’s stronghold down (which as far as I know doesn’t mean anything), and kill various types of leaders. Some have specific mission based items. The issue here is the whole RPG/leveling thing as assassinations now require you to be at a higher level before you can one-hit kill them like in past games. So, taking down an entire fort can be a slog when you have to fight every enemy head-on.

It doesn’t help that these areas don’t feel well put together with hardly any cover to hide inside most, and it takes forever to become anonymous. You can’t blend in as you could back in the older games. It’s either doesn’t get caught from the awful AI that seems to make enemies just wander around aimlessly with no set patrol pattern, or fight it out head-on. That’s your only option. I miss the satisfaction of running through a restricted area and just assassinating everyone with a leap-frog type of momentum. It was incredibly satisfying to get everyone without blowing the horn, but in Odyssey, this rarely ever happened. The game keeps the entire world either two-level above or below you and no more or less. You can’t go back to a previous area at level 5 and just slaughter everything in sight. Eventually, that area levels up too.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough the main story missions are locked away behind these level walls. I would then have to go do maybe a character world mission to go up two levels to finish the next few story missions. This would normally be okay, but I don’t care bout a single character in this game! For such a massive and detailed open world everything in it is so boring and lifeless. I only kept playing to explore the world and nothing else. Let’s also not forget the “real-world” that AC games keep shoving in our faces. There’s maybe an hour of this at the most, and I never went back during the main story. The Cult of Cosmos is where most of the “real-world” jumps are, and yes, I could care less about those too. Can we please just completely cut out this real-world Abstergo nonsense already? It was okay with Desmond Miles in the Altair/Ezio saga, but now it’s just stupid and silly.

Honestly, the game is mostly just overbearing and exhausting to explore and ingest. I tried the old strategy of going through each area and doing all the side missions and quests, but that became incredibly boring fast. The entire game comes to a screeching halt as you constantly run into leveling walls and need to stop one mission to do another to get certain items or complete repetitive “kill all of these” missions to get the XP to level up. The majority of XP comes from completing missions. Discovering new areas, killing enemies, and other things like this don’t ever give you enough to level up. I just wish this whole RPG system was gone as it really hurts this game badly. Then there’s the loot system with armor and weapons, and you can engrave them and upgrade them, but this was a completely useless system as I was constantly getting new loot from dead enemies that were higher levels. This was a completely wasted system and was poorly implemented.

I also haven’t even gotten into the ship battles. This has become boring as well and the first 15 hours of the game are a serious chore as you have to sail around a lot to get to new areas in which you need to hit every synchronization point you can find so you can fast travel around the map. I didn’t have a sync point in every major area until maybe 20 hours into the game. It’s that much of a grind. Ship battles are exactly like they have always been. Shoot javelins or arrows to bust down a ship, you can board it, you can also use flame arrows or ram it. That’s pretty much it. It’s very basic, dull, and underwhelming despite how nice the ships handle and how fantastic the water looks. You can upgrade your ship and assign lieutenants that add stat boosts and change your crew theme, but this mostly seems pointless as I spent almost no time in the water once I could fast travel around the map. This is mostly used for dull missions that require taking down certain ship types and that’s really it.

Through the first 15 hours of the game, all I wanted to do was constantly quit. I felt like I was making progress and then suddenly I had to grind 2-3 levels to get the next set of story missions and that required completing dull side missions of all kinds. There are notice boards in every major town that offer these apart from the ones just sitting out in the world. There are also timed missions that expire like this is some MMO, and boy are these the absolute worst of the bunch. I honestly can’t say I ever felt like the game was actually a lot of fun. The forts are probably the worst part of the game, and sadly, it was the opposite in the past. I wound up just jumping in, killing the person I need for the mission or item, and jumped out. I stopped completing forts about five hours in. 

Traveling around on horseback is also boring as you have to clear large swaths of land before finally getting enough fast travel points, and I just can’t express enough how big this game is. It’s too big and bloated for its own good. Most people probably will never finish this game as it takes a minimum of 30 hours just to grind through the story. I spent 15 hours just trying to complete everything and gave up in the end. The final system I want to mention is the mercenary system. Committing crimes will get a bounty on your head and mercenaries will come after you. You can defeat them to climb the tiers, but finishing this requires being level 50 which is the cap and it’s not worth it. There are at least 50 some odd mercenaries to kill and you will end up killing at least half by the end of the game just because they are there and in the way. Thankfully you can pay off your bounties on the map to get them off of your back, so it’s completely optional. 

Overall, Odyssey is just too damn big and too generic to be considered a memorable game. Sure, the game wonderfully recreates ancient Greece with many amazing monuments, buildings, statues, and towns, but they all start looking the same after a while. There are far too many forts to conquer, the leveling requires way too much grinding of boring side missions and lame quests and becomes incredibly overwhelming and exhausting even as soon as five hours in. There just aren’t any interesting characters and the story is fairly simple and dull. I couldn’t care about anything in this game except exploring new areas because that was at least fun. Naval combat hasn’t evolved much, there’s a useless equipment upgrade system, and assassinations have taken a back seat over combat. Hell, you don’t even get the hidden blade in this game. The skill tree, which I didn’t talk about, is also a mix of overreliance on certain abilities as they do large amounts of damage, to not caring about a good majority of others. It’s a poorly balanced skill tree and I didn’t use 90% of them. The entire game is just unbalanced, a boring grind, and most of the game feels like a chore with no pay-off. I hope to eventually try out the DLC as it seems more entertaining, but we will see.

So, it sounds like I hate the game, but I don’t. I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when I finally did grind that next level and could move on. Most of the fun was literally just exploring the land and no, not even looting stuff that I came across as I skipped most of it. The world is beautiful and is looks amazing, but there’s so much here that’s just generic and pointless. This is my least favorite AC game to date (alas, I haven’t played any games between Black Flag and Origins, so that might change.) If Ubisoft had cut the game down even by half and removed the RPG system this game could have been much more than the sum of its parts. Lastly, I’d like to mention that the engine is poorly optimized and runs like garbage on hardware well above the recommend specs. Even after numerous patches there’s slow down everywhere.