HOMER WOULD BE DISGUSTED
Also for: Luna, Stadia, Windows, Xbox One
To follow the chronology of the Assassin's Creed-series has become pure depression. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is the eleventh entry of this ongoing saga. It might
also be my last. I can no longer stand this design bloat, implemented only to
extend my time in the game, increasing the likelihood that I buy something from the Ubisoft store. It feels tragic to witness the slow death of creativity in the chokehold of corporate greed. The next entry,
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, is allegedly even more bloated. I already
know I'll hate it, should I decide to play it.
It's disgusting. Do you feel like you're not leveling up fast enough? Buy a permanent
XP booster! Feel like the monetary rewards aren't satisfactory? Buy a
permanent Drachma booster! Can't upgrade your favorite bow? Buy a resource
pack! On it goes. Of course, you don't have to buy them, but the game gets boring if you don't. And here's another disgusting thing: This storyline is only
haphazardly tied to the overarching Assassin's Creed plot. It almost feels
like an afterthought, like they attached the game to the highly popular
franchise just to increase sales.
And it's a goddamn shame, because technically, the series has never been
better. Taking place in ancient Greece and resting on the foundations of Greek
mythology, this entry showers us with eye candy at every turn. Waves crashing
in on golden shores, distant Spartan ships battling the
Athenian fleet, the sun reflecting on your metal armor, green islands turned
blue in the night and city lanterns painting a vivid picture of the
Mediterranean. The character animations are fantastic, with an astounding
amount of combat maneuvers and acrobacy creating an expressive moveset.
It's only after a substantial amount of playtime you realize that everything
looks the same. Every city consists of the same buildings, there's hardly any
variation in natural scenery, and if you enter a cave, you'll run through the
same few cavern setups time and time again. The beauty exists on a surface
level, allowing for pretty screenshots and nothing more, never
attempting to create a tangible place that's actually affected by the ongoing
war.
Wait, there's a war? Well, yeah, but blink and you'll miss it. AC: Odyssey
begins with an opening cinematic depicting the lead-up to the legendary battle
of the 300, where the Spartan king Leonidas led a small army against
innumerable Greeks. It gives us a taste of what's to come: combat, combat and
more combat. Charged abilities, fast attacks, heavy attacks, dodges, parries,
and then the ultimate defeat of the Spartans, because it's written in the history books. It's an
intriguing start, although we've seen the exact same kind of tutorial time and
time again.
This scene sends ripples into the main storyline of the game, but you'll have to
play for a long time to find out how. You take part in a Greek family tragedy, the
outcome of which depends upon your choices throughout the game. Playing as
either Alexios (my choice) or Cassandra, who are brother and sister, you go
through a lengthy campaign to unite or sunder your family. You encounter some famous people like Socrates and Perikles, helping them to help yourself. Bits of it is affecting, with some fine voice acting and dramatic line exchanges, but it's scattered over way too much playtime to maintain any momentum.
You get to visit the entirety of Greece.
Every region is plagued by an almost unnoticeable war between Spartan and
Athenian forces. You can manipulate the power dynamic by sabotaging the ruling
faction's supply lines, until they're weakened enough for the other side to
make a pushback. It all ends with a large-scale battle, where you pick sides.
It's suprisingly well-functioning, but feels utterly pointless because it
doesn't affect the story.
Oh, and also you discover the guild of Assassins. I almost forgot about that
little venture, because it feels largely optional. This puts a big question mark
on the necessity of the whole modern-day plot nonsense, which interrupts the historical drama a couple times. It involves Layla Hassan, who joined the Assassins after some serious Abstergo
betrayal in the previous game. She plunges into the Animus to
learn about the Greek stuff, in hopes of finding the Staff of Hermes. It's so uninteresting, I had to look up a plot resume to get the facts straight.
Back in historical Greece, you start off on the mainland. After some mercenary jobs you cross paths with a certain "Cult of Cosmos", whose members are the instigators of much misery across the lands. One by one,
you have to uncover their identities and kill them off. This is fun in theory,
but in practice most of it happens as a byproduct of solving other
questlines.
And the assassinations themselves are made unengaging by the sheer
quantity of them; little care has gone into creating challenging and fun scenarios. You can deal with all of them the same basic way. The series' trademark climbing mechanic is
trivialized as nearly every surface is climbable. Gaining high ground on your
assassination mark has never been easier, and from there it's not too hard to pick them off.
This fact is worsened by the overpowered nature of some of the RPG-abilities you gain. Putting points into assassination, ranged combat or melee, you can dish out ridiculous amounts of damage. One high-level explosive shot, for instance, might insta-kill lesser soldiers and severely damage bosses. This is almost a necessity, because the ordinary fighting, with its parry-and-riposte mechanic, makes the melee fights tedious.
Melee is a long affair of blocking, dodging and trading blows that gets repetitive fast. A lack of enemy variation doesn't help. Certain attacks are unblockable, and some enemy soldiers are only vulnerable during brief animation windows. Since every opponent is a hit sponge, min-maxing your character is the only sensible approach. This requires a lot of menu-fiddling and upgrading to make the fights
go smoother. Higher ranked opponents can take forever to bring down, including
the legendary animals found at the golden quest markers on the world map.
Every piece of equipment adds points to a certain type of damage, and you can add further perks by enlisting the services of a blacksmith. Since every weapon and armor piece soon becomes underleveled, and often too expensive to upgrade, you need to switch them out constantly. This makes it impossible to form any sort of attachment to them. It also makes looting and, in extension, exploration feel boring, if not pointless.
Combat in itself is not exciting enough, in spite of numerous weapon types and
special attacks, and happens way too frequently. Add to that the bounty
system, where mercenaries start hounding you whenever you get caught breaking
the law. These guys and gals interrupt your progress everywhere, all the time. They might even intrude upon an ongoing duel.
Eventually you get your own ship, and the mandatory naval gameplay gets introduced. Exploring famous islands like Mykonos, Andros and Lesbos at the later
stages of the game adds a little variation, and breathes some life into an experience gone stale. But the naval combat has grown a bit
repetitive at this point, as the mechanics are all but the same as they were
in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
As an open world, the influence of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is on full display. I like how some moral choices seem to have consequences. A new, primitive dialogue mechanic allows you
to roleplay a little. When the story and characters fail to engage me I
usually play as a sort of renegade, always choosing the most hostile dialogue
option. This makes for some hilarious scenes, as it turns Alexios not only
cruel, but also into a clueless fool. For instance, I killed a group of people
hiding in a cave, falsely accused of murdering a soldier, because my Alexios
didn't catch their obvious signs of innocence.
But as an odyssey, this game is an utter failure. Once a franchise full of
excitement and creativity, Assassin's Creed has been reduced to a bland
open world among bland open worlds. Going back and forth, solving menial tasks
for a pittance and generic loot, I felt like a wage labourer. The title itself
- I mean, just taste the words Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - comes with
the promise of an unforgettable adventure. Now, after a 76-hour playthrough,
very few memories linger, and almost all of them are centered around the end, because they're the most recent.
You're sheperded around the Greek mainland and archipelago, region by region,
on an unfocused quest to find your long-lost family and destroy the
Cult of Cosmos and investigate the connections to the Greek mythos
and "the Ancients". Every area is gated by level recommendations you should
heed, lest you get pounded into the ground by overpowered enemies. To reach
these recommendations you need to accept poorly designed sidequest after
sidequest, which is the quickest (relatively speaking) way to generate
experience points.
But that's not all. You also need to keep your equipment up to snuff. You have
bows, melee weapons and four different pieces of armor to maintain. This
requires a crazy amount of resources, especially for the higher-tier weapons
and equipment. Gold, leather, iron, cloth and wood is not easily obtained by
just looting chests and corpses. You can hunt for animal skins, but that's equally slow.
Boarding or sinking ships to get their cargo speeds up this process. It's a functional
mechanic, but gets tiresome as the entire endeavour can still require, say, half an hour
only to upgrade a spear one tier (up to a maximum of ten). And - as another slap in the face of the player - you also need to keep upgrading your ship with the
very same resources. Otherwise, you'll be unable to fight ships later on, as they
level up with your character. If the game would've had fun and evolving mechanics, this could have been acceptable. But it doesn't, so it isn't.
To me this is an unforgivable disrespect of the player's time. As real-life
weeks pass, and you get ever closer to an ever-moving goalpost, the XP and
monetary returns for quests solved are reduced to a crawl. Your character
progression comes to a perceived stop, and you're not-so-discreetly pointed to
the Ubisoft store, where you can pay to increase said progression. This section
of the store is even called "Time Savers", which makes it abundantly clear the brakes are intentional. It's absolutely shameless.
Imagine buying and reading Homer's The Odyssey, but having to
endure long sections of added travel descriptions, pointless conversations,
citylife depictions and having Odysseus constantly seeking out blacksmiths to
improve his gear - all to prolong the book and make it dull. But by paying some more cash, you can make Homer manifest in
your room and rip out the boring pages to make it better.
Ubisoft must be delusional. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has no business being
this long. What possessed them to create an 80-hour experience out of
mechanics that are decent for about 10? Why make such a gigantic open world
out of copy-pasted assets? Why tie this game to the Assassin franchise, yet
throw in some random creatures from Greek mythology? Why not make this an own
franchise, an open world adventure full of creatures from said lore? As I'm writing this review, the company's downfall seems imminent, and they have only themselves to blame. They've fooled us for the last time.
I had a decent time for a short while, but spent roughly 60 hours totally
indifferent or worse, bored out of my mind. The last few main quest missions
were at least somewhat different, as I tackled some fantastical creatures
like the medusa and a minotaur, but not good enough to warrant such a waste of
human life. I only saw it through to make an honest review, which is the only
sense of accomplishment I could get out of it.
On a forum I called Assassin's Creed: Odyssey the worst open-world game I've
played, along with Biomutant. That was a poor choice of words. I
should've called it "the most boring", because on a technical level it really
is very competent. I feel sorry for all the talent that went into those aspects of the game, but I can't encourage anyone to play it. My average, two-star
review score is for its technical merits, along with serviceable gameplay, but
that's all money can buy. As a package consisting of story, world, quests,
character interaction, RPG mechanics, exploration, combat and whatnot, this game is an
absolute snoozefest by design.
Comments
Post a Comment