Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Review – Big Enough

Also, in Odyssey, the game levels up with you. On the upside, this means that going back to old quests later gives you a challenging experience and enough XP to make it worth your while. On the other hand, it also means that the sense of getting more powerful is almost non-existent.

One way this manifests is in the way the game handles assassinations. One thing that made Origins stand out was that you couldn’t just assassinate any old guy. Most enemies you could shank, but higher-ranked enemies required fighting. There was this good balance of being able to stealth through things and fight things. That’s back again here, but instead of applying to a couple guys here and there, about a quarter of the soldiers you’ll encounter can’t be outright assassinated.

Odyssey has an entire skill tree devoted to assassination over combat, but the game will constantly put you up against these enemies that can’t be assassinated, and so, instead, you’re forced to fight them. It both feels like I’m being forced into and punished for getting into open combat. Worse yet is that levels aren’t so much a gap as they are a cliff. If you’re two levels lower than a random henchman, you’re more likely to die

If the combat were fun, that would be fine, but here in Odyssey, it just feels messy. Gone are the days of being surrounded by enemies that wait for you while you fight their friends. That means, though, that five or six enemies can all take a swing at you at once, and at least in the beginning, that meant I was dying during combat a lot. It wasn’t until I was about 20 hours in that I started to feel like I had enough power to consistently make it through fights.

One thing that does feel good, though, is the way the game integrates active abilities you can pick up as you level up. One of the earliest ones is the classic Spartan Kick we all remember from 300. You can assign each ability to a combination of one of the left shoulder buttons and one of the main face buttons, giving you a quick and easy way to use up to 8 special abilities, without a single one of them confined to a specific button press. I felt like this let me make Kassandra’s fighting style more “mine” – but again, that took a solid 20 to 25 hours before that started to happen.

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