Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey - An Epic Journey That Unfolds Based On Your Decisions

Written by Chris Woodside  on October 01, 2018

Reviews: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is the best game in the series to date...so long as you make the right choices.

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For over a decade, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has taken players through some of the most storied moments in humanity’s history. From the dark moments of the Crusades to the inspirational rallying cries of the French Revolution, Ubisoft has successfully rewritten some of the most important moments of history as a grand tale of the oppressive and power-hungry Templars against the liberating mission of the Assassin's Order. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey takes players further back than even the establishment of the titular order, and in doing so serves as a love letter to the history of the games that came before it, building off of some of the most successful features of each game, and in turn becoming the best entry in the Assassin’s Creed series to date.

As the cradle of Western Civilization, Ancient Greece has long been among the most requested settings for an Assassin’s Creed game from fans. The complexities of Greek society have made such a setting both a promising option and yet, one that would be incredibly difficult to execute correctly. From the philosophical and artistic achievements in Athens to the ferocious and powerful militarism in Sparta, each city-state allows for a plethora of gameplay varieties that will entice fans no matter what they are looking to gain from their own journey throughout the Mediterranean region.



These choices serve as the underlying philosophy of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. From the first moments of the game when you are given the option to select which hero you will take control of, everything is crafted around your desires and decisions. So many times, games will advertise themselves as one in which your decisions matter and change the world around you. While the choices you make in Odyssey will not fundamentally change the course of history in Ancient Greece, they do have grave consequences on your relationships with other characters in the world. While some of these decisions may seem mundane or trivial, it’s the obscurity of these decisions that make them so authentic. Your role as a mercenary is one defined by anonymity. You hold no allegiance to any one particular island or city-state, and your identity is shaped simply by how you choose to conduct yourself within the world.

The first time I noticed how far-reaching some of these consequences were was when I assassinated a relatively unimportant and obscure NPC. Not thinking anything of it, I completed the quest and went back to continue the main questline. Hours later, I came upon another high-level side quest. When I went to speak with the NPC, he refused to give me the quest, realizing I was the one who murdered his brother in a cave, and rather than have the opportunity to help him, I was forced to slay him. It was moments like this that defined my Odyssey and peppered the entire world of Ancient Greece.



While it’s clear that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey took important lessons from the massive success of the many gameplay enhancements that first appeared last year in Origins, this was not simply a reskin of what was already a fantastic game. The most important and noticeable change is the introduction of Exploration Mode. Playing in Exploration Mode, which is the playstyle recommended by the developers, takes away quest markers from the map. Rather than being guided immediately to your quest, you are given a set of clues as to where your goal is and must attempt to pinpoint that spot on your map. Thankfully, you are not left completely blind in each quest, as you approach the approximate location, you will be given a notification that your destination is near and can mark it on your map using your eagle, Ikaros.

This new mode certainly adds a new level of immersion, forcing you to become familiar with and memorize major landmarks on the map. It was still abundantly clear that Exploration Mode is a new feature though and has need for further polish in future entries. On quite a few quests, particularly on main story quests, I was able to identify the location of the quest immediately, as there was a question mark for an undiscovered location right where the clues were pointing me. It felt as though I was not being encouraged to further explore the area to identify where it was I needed to go, but to rather hop onto a horse and race to a quest marker disguised as a question mark. If you do choose to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in Exploration Mode, I would recommend turning off map icons for the most immersive and realistic experience possible.



Other gameplay improvements make it clear that Ubisoft is doubling down on the series transition into the RPG genre. Rather than spreading out your ability points among many different skills, you can only have a limited of those skills equipped at any one time. In the first few hours of the game, those skills are limited to four ranged skills and four melee skills, though you do gain access to a second melee wheel after progressing far enough into the story. Thus, rather than attempting to unlock every skill, you are encouraged to experiment and find a playstyle that works for you and spend your abilities improving on that particular playstyle. For those new to the series, you do have the ability to respec your abilities if a playstyle is not working for you. This allows new players to experiment between stealth, melee and ranged skills to identify which will be the best option for them.

This focus on role-playing mechanics informs every aspect of gameplay. Most of the missions and other optional objectives that you will undertake are a constant chess match taking place against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War. For reasons that will become clear early on in the story, your hero holds no loyalty to either Athens or Sparta, and in turn, this allows you to determine your own loyalties if you wish to have any at all. As a misthios, or mercenary, it is entirely possible to have your only loyalties lie not with a city-state, but to whoever is willing to line your pockets the most. Each region of Greece is controlled by either Athens or Sparta, and it is up to you to determine if you will strike down their leader and put a new city-state in control, or if you will align yourself with the region’s leader and defend them from enemy assaults.



These assaults play out in real time as the player will be thrust into a large battlefield with Athenian and Spartan soldiers in a large scale war. Similar to board games such as Risk, the ease with which you will be able to defeat the opposing sides depends on how much preparation work you have done in weakening the leadership before beginning the assault. Therefore, it is vital that you take out large forts and other military camps before attempting to take control of the region, or your side may be left with many bodies to recover from the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting.

While these massive struggles within the Peloponnesian War suggest a hyper-political and grand widespread journey, your hero’s story is far more personal in nature. Perhaps surprisingly for the first game in the series that gives you the choice between two antagonists, both Alexios and Kassandra are the most charismatic and likable protagonists since Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Without going into much detail, while your chosen character does get caught up in some of the most important moments of Greek history, their motivations for doing so is highly personal as they seek the truth behind a childhood filled with anger, disappointment, and atonement.



The most disappointing of the new features in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is the introduction of the Mercenary System. Similar to the Phylakes who hunted you in Origins, the mercenary system features several tiers of guards who start to track you down for a bounty as you continue to participate in illegal activities and murdering soldiers and civilians throughout Greece. While you can pay bounties to temporarily pause their pursuit, killing them in battle will grant the player large rewards as you begin to move up the many tiers. Similarly, not only does the player move up, but as you defeat mercenaries, so too do the other surviving mercenaries move up and improve to take the place of their fallen comrades. While this does serve as an interesting gameplay mechanic, it is hard to feel as though this is anything but a more disappointing implementation of the Nemesis System developed for the Middle Earth games. Rather than seeing new mercenaries take their place, it would have been more interesting to develop rivalries with particular mercenaries and see them level up over time before killing them once and for all in the end game. This seemed to be a shocking oversight considering how well such a system would have blended with the large-scale assault battles that take place in each region as you seek to seize control from the leader controlling the region. Such mercenaries could have served as major obstacles to topple first before taking down the leader.

For all of these new features introduced in this year’s entry, what truly makes Odyssey such a masterpiece is how successfully they have brought back and perfected some of the greatest features from past games in the series. Most noticeable here is the return of a focus on sailing and naval combat as a major gameplay mechanic for the first time since Black Flag. While there are not many changes to the combat itself, you still can destroy a ship completely or choose to board it and fight in order to yield more resources, the changes under the hood (or deck, in this case), add a great deal of depth to the naval mechanics. The most important change here is the ability to hire lieutenants. Some of these lieutenants can be acquired via side missions, while others can be acquired randomly and organically through the world by fighting them into submission and choosing to recruit them to join your crew rather than leaving them for dead. While each crew member will add different stats and perks to your ship crew, you can only have four assigned at any one time, so it will force you to pick and choose which stat bonuses you want active at once.



While the system of forts and outposts returns after first being introduced in their current iteration last year in Origins, this year they feel much more like sandboxes in a way that has been absent since Assassin’s Creed Unity. Even though Unity was derided for many as a step back for the series, one of its most important impacts was the ability for each enemy controlled area to function like a sandbox, where rather than needing to complete each objective a certain way, players were given the option to find broken windows and use these hidden entrances, or to go in the front door in plain sight with swords drawn. This philosophy returns in Odyssey, as players can find broken or open windows to enter, or in certain areas even knock down wooden doors and walls to create your own path. There is no one correct way to take down the enemies in this area, and it allows the player a great deal of freedom to determine how they want to approach it.

Ubisoft has delivered in every way on the promise of allowing each player to create their own Odyssey. Few games, with the exception of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, give players such a wide degree of freedom and allow for such varied and unique experiences that it can be accurately described as an individual experience. From the very opening of the game to choosing allegiances between Athens and Sparta, and even choosing who you will bed, all contribute to giving each player their own experience that will never be replicated by others. While there are small flaws evident in the game, such as the disappointing Nemesis System, none are enough to detract in any meaningful way from what is a truly memorable and personal experience. It is because of this that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey serves simultaneously as both a mission statement, reflecting on the successes of the past decade and a vision statement of the direction the series is headed. If future games in the series continue to build off of this model, the only direction for this series to go is up.