AC: Odyssey is a beautiful grind. Its meticulously realized Greek world is simply fun to explore, even if the map is crowded with thousands of question marks that pull and tug on your attention span. Ubisoft has a formula, and they're sticking to it. Like any Assassin's Creed or Far Cry game, you'll have forts/outposts to take out, vantage points to climb, and a ridiculous amount of side quests to discover. Honestly, playing an Ubisoft game feels like it was designed to trigger one's ADHD. Considering that a completionist playthrough of AC: Odyssey would likely take me well over one-hundred hours, I've focused on just completing the main quest. Quests are level-gated, however, so you'll still have to do a few side quests, and they're pretty good, usually involving some task to complete before Alexios (or Cassandra) is rewarded with the info they seek about their quest to discover their family origins and stop the Cult of Kosmos. Quite hilariously, the modern day side plot involving descendants of famous assassins accessing their ancestor's memories is minimized to the point that I've only encountered one brief section in nearly thirty hours of play. The AC series has basically transformed into loose historical mercenary simulators. AC: Odyssey is even an RPG, which three different skill trees to choose (ranged, meele, assassin) and limited character role-playing through dialogue. It seems as though the Witcher 3 heavily influenced AC: Odyssey's development, although I could be wrong, since I haven't played any Assassin's Creed games since AC 2. I actually like the combat a bit better than the Witcher 3; there's a parry function that's really easy to trigger, and the melee abilities like Bull Rush and Spartan Kick are fun to utilize. Alexios is also a world-class free climber, and able to vault up any surface, allowing you to climb beautiful monuments as well as mountain sides. So gameplay consists of combat and exploration, scratching that open world Skyrim itch that every triple-A game since Bethesda's classic has been trying to satisfy. It's fun entertainment that's just a little too big to be properly satiating, since any narrative pacing is thrown out the window when there's a million quests vying for your attention. It's puzzling that so many games stretch themselves to simply preposterous lengths when most players won't see fifty percent of the content, if that. I've already completed two lengthy titles this year (God of War and Cyberpunk) as well as one twenty-hour experience (Guardians of the Galaxy), and I think that forty hours is really the maximum a single player game should shoot for. Even Red Dead Redemption 2, with its ridiculous production values and excellent story, felt bloated at 90 hours. If you can't write the next Red Dead, then you probably shouldn't try to aim for a 60 hour plus run time. Anyway, I'm likely to finish Odyssey, but I'm hesitant to play another AC game without a little more variety in the Ubisoft formula. Check out some screenshots below:
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