One more early bird tip before we move on. Exciting-even if it sucks up 50 or more hours of your life in the process.2. It’s injected so much life into the once-sagging framework, and reminded me of the days when Assassin’s Creed felt like it pushed the boundaries of open-world games. Origins and Odyssey mark a departure from tradition, but a necessary departure. Assassin’s Creed felt like it lost its way for a while there. It’s an immense achievement for the series, and an exciting one. Just check out the picture at the top of this review. Hint: Very far, at least if you’re running some top-end PC hardware. Seriously, pick a monument-size landmark (like the statue of Zeus on Kefalonia) and then track how far away you can get while still seeing it. Draw distance is still the star of the show. No surprise there, since this is basically an Origins reskin, and Origins also ran great. Before we go I should also mention that performance has been solid. We’ll update this review with a score and some final thoughts whenever I finish, hopefully in the next week or so. Bottom lineĪnyway, those are my thoughts on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ($60 on Humble) as they stand 30-odd hours in. Imagine if CD Projekt put out another Witcher 3 every two years. Can Ubisoft really keep this up? And on a semi-yearly schedule? I’m not sure. Odyssey is as I said immensely ambitious. I’m curious whether its eventual successor will head even further down this path, and if so what that means for the series. But hey, this is the first Assassin’s Creed to even attempt this. Most branches are ones of tone more than content. For all that Ubisoft talked about “Choice” as a central theme in Odyssey, it rarely arises in any meaningful way. I like those sorts of scenarios, and I wish Odyssey had more of them. It was a tough choice, and I could’ve chosen to intervene-but would Kassandra intervene? Would she feel like she had more authority than the attending priest? And would she even care about this random family? I thought not, and so I made the call to let the slaughter continue even though in most RPGs I’d probably intervene. IDG / Hayden DingmanĮarly on for instance I let an entire family be killed by the local troops, afraid the plague they were infected with might sweep through Kefalonia. It encourages you to roleplay as Kassandra, not as yourself-playing-Kassandra if that makes sense. I’ve really enjoyed her adventures through Greece, and appreciate that like Geralt in Witcher 3 she’s a strong character with her own personality. She can be snarky, scary, and everything in between depending on how you play her. On the other, Kassandra’s a hell of a lot of fun. On the one hand, it’s bizarre to me that every fan-favorite Assassin’s Creed character fits the same mold. Kassandra channels Ezio’s swagger again, for better or worse. I never fell in love with Origins’s Bayek, and while he grew on me over time I still found him sort-of dull. It’s as if someone at Ubisoft finally came in and said “Hey, let’s uh…let’s actually put some work into this whole storyline we’ve left dormant for half a decade,” and that’s cool.Īnd Kassandra carries the game through even its slowest moments-or Alexios, I guess, though I can’t speak to that version of Odyssey. Origins felt like the first game to pay the present-day aspect any real attention in at least five years, and Odyssey takes those parts even further. There are some actual surprises in Odyssey, particularly as it relates to the overarching meta-story of the series. But as much as I hate to say it though, the slow burn pays off. Pacing isn’t Odyssey’s strong suit, and more than once I found myself wishing it could get to the damn point. There’s one layer of the story to get your journey started, then another deeper layer you discover after the prologue, and then a third deepest layer that takes longer to get going than the entire run-time of some games. It’s a slow burn, and much has been made already of the fact that the story doesn’t really get going until 20 or more hours in. The writing is the real draw though, at least for me. It also has very little in common with Assassin’s Creed as it existed up through 2015 though. And I don’t mean that in a bad way-I think Odyssey is incredibly ambitious, and a better game than Syndicate. It’s hard to believe Syndicate was just two entries ago, because that version of the series is almost unrecognizable at this point. It smacks of a series trying to find its footing, not quite comfortable with this new approach.īut it’s also cool to see Assassin’s Creed branch out. Dialogue can vacillate wildly for instance, with Kassandra transitioning from dead calm one line to irate the next. Some of these systems need more polishing.
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