Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Legacy of the First Blade Review - A Continuation of Your Journey Through Greece

Written by Chris Woodside on December 10, 2018

Reviews: While this first paid expansion brings back more of what made the base game great, this three-hour story fails to add anything new to the equation.

Despite spending over seventy hours in the beautifully crafted world of Ancient Greece, I was still excited to dive back into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey yet again for the first paid piece of DLC, which is part of a three-part story arc entitled Legacy of the First Blade. After approximately three hours, the overall narrative being set up here seems promising, particularly for longtime fans of the series who hope to see Odyssey tie in more closely with the overarching narrative of the series. However, as engaging as the story was at points, the DLC itself felt very repetitive and gave me little variety in what I had already spent tens of hours doing in the main campaign itself.

That’s not to say that the DLC is bad. In fact, it's far from it. It seems that Ubisoft has really leaned into the aspects of Odyssey that made it so enjoyable to begin with. After spending so much time finding clues and hunting down the entirety of the Cult of Kosmos, it was a welcome surprise to see a new, additional cult be introduced in this DLC entitled “The Order of the Ancients,” which first appeared in last year’s entry, Assassin’s Creed: Origins. For those who may have skipped Origins last year, their relevance in the story may be missed, but for longtime fans of the series, it is no secret that this Order eventually becomes the Templar Order that has become the mainstay villainous organization in all of the other Assassin’s Creed games. While it was welcome to see this addition in order to connect this year’s game with the rest of the lore of the series, I wished that there was a thread connecting the Order of the Ancients to the Cult of Kosmos before them. Without that connection, the Cult of Kosmos dissipates into a relatively meaningless organization outside of the context of this single entry in the series.

One aspect of this relatively short expansion that was largely disappointing was the geographic limitations of the story. The story takes place in the Macedonian region, save for a single mission that requires you to board the Adriesta again and sink just two ships. One of the gameplay features that made Assassin’s Creed Odyssey so good was the nature of Greece’s geography, being predominantly the Mediterranean Sea, forcing you to utilize your ship which brought with it some of the more exhilarating combat opportunities in the game. To see this almost entirely ignored, in addition to ignoring the rest of this beautiful world the developers created, seemed like a missed opportunity. However, with much more DLC in store over the next several months, there is still plenty of time for these expansions to make use of some of these other features.

Apart from all of this, Legacy of the First Blade: Hunted brings with it new achievements/trophies, a new skill to spend some skill points on (which was a welcome addition since with the level cap being raised for the DLC, any experience you earned previously in the main game after hitting level 50 is automatically converted into skill points for you to spend), and some new armor to accompany the heightened level cap, there aren't too many radical changes to the game that comes with this first expansion. If you have been dying to give yourself a reason to jump back into Ancient Greece, now is as good a time as ever to enjoy more of your chosen character’s Odyssey, but if you can wait it might be worth it to hold out until more expansions drop over the next months that might bring with it even more changes to the world of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.