Assassin's Creed® Odyssey

I have a complicated relationship with games that dare you to finish them. Assassin's Creed Odyssey released in October 2018 and is exactly that kind of game: a massive open-world action-RPG set during the Peloponnesian War, circa 431 BCE, where you play as either Kassandra or Alexios, a Spartan mercenary (misthios) who gets thrown off a cliff as a child and grows up to unravel a conspiracy that threatens all of Greece. The personal family drama at the core of the story is surprisingly affecting, and Kassandra in particular delivers one of the stronger protagonist performances in the series, her voice actor handling warmth, wit, and cold fury across dozens of hours without losing the thread. The RPG systems here are built around three skill trees: Hunter (ranged), Warrior (head-on melee), and Assassin (stealth and burst damage). You spec into abilities, engrave gear with stat bonuses, and upgrade your ship, the Adrestia, for naval combat across the Aegean. The Cult of Kosmos, a web of shadowy figures pulling political strings across Greece, gives you a long target list to work through at your own pace, and the way the cult web intersects with the main story feels more organic than a simple kill-list structure. On top of that, a procedurally generated mercenary system means that reckless behavior in the world draws bounty hunters of escalating power toward you, which keeps open-world traversal from going completely stale. Conquest battles, where you destabilize regions by depleting a nation's military strength before triggering a pitched land battle, add another layer that breaks up the rhythm of looting forts and clearing camps. Here is where my notebook fills up with complaints. The level-scaling means a full stealth assassin build struggles to one-shot enemies at comparable levels without heavy investment in assassination-specific gear bonuses, which breaks the fantasy for players who want Odyssey to behave like a pure stealth game. The game also leans hard on the Ubisoft open-world checklist: question marks scattered across the map, largely identical camp-clearing objectives, and a progression system that actively gates main-story advancement behind side-quest XP requirements. That last point is the one I find hardest to forgive. Forcing players to pad their level before the next story beat kills narrative momentum at the worst moments, and the sheer density of the world means the filler-to-quality ratio tilts unfavorably in the middle third of the campaign. Microtransactions selling experience boosts drew criticism at launch, and while the game is fully completable without them, their presence remains a sore point that implicitly acknowledges the grind problem. What rescues Odyssey from being merely a bloated checklist is that the world itself is genuinely beautiful and the core combat loop is satisfying once your build has a direction. The Exploration Mode strips waypoints in favor of compass-style clues, and playing that way transforms the game into something that feels alive rather than navigated. Ancient Greece, from the sun-bleached marble of Athens to the volcanic islands of the Aegean, is one of the more convincing historical settings the series has produced. The writing in standout side quests has real wit, and dialogue choices, while rarely carrying the weight of a genuine RPG like Baldur's Gate or Disco Elysium, do shape relationships and surface alternate mission outcomes. If you are the kind of player who can wander off the critical path for three hours and not feel cheated, Odyssey has more than enough to justify that wandering. For RPG-first players who need choices to have teeth, Odyssey will feel shallow. For action-adventure fans who want a beautiful historical sandbox with a genuinely good protagonist and enough combat variety to hold up past hour 40, there is a lot here worth the time, provided you set your own pace and resist the urge to clear every icon.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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