Video Game Review: “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey”

New installment is a beautiful and accurate depiction of history and mythology

Joshua Schuetz
Staff Writer

I’ve always been a fan of mythology and history. After playing, and loving “Assassin’s Creed: Origins” last year, to say I was hyped for a trip to Ancient Greece in the next game was putting it mildly; I was ecstatic. If Ubisoft did as good a job with this as they did with Egypt, it would be spectacular. 

I wasn’t disappointed. The scenery of ‘Odyssey’ is beautiful, and accurate to history and mythology, to a degree far beyond what we expect from most games. The most unique feature of the game, as well as its most controversial, is the choice system.

Not only can you choose your character’s gender (you choose between Alexios or Kassandra at the beginning), but you can also make choices in the game, both in the gameplay itself and the dialogue, that have direct impacts on the ending and which questlines you can pursue. This is much like “The Witcher”, and it is a welcome addition.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the game forces you to make difficult choices. At the beginning, for instance, you see a plague-ridden town where some priests have tied up a local infected family in order to stop the plague from spreading.

You can kill the priests to save them, as many would do, but if you do this, another town that you visit later ends up getting destroyed by the plague. On the other hand, if you let the priests go, it’s implied that they kill the family.

This system is good. It provides the player with more agency and more incentive to care about the different missions and sidequests that are featured in the game.

The sidequests themselves are an improvement from the previous game; they are varied, and have a number of different rewards. Some of them even affect the main story.

‘Odyssey’ is a long game, with the main story clocking in at well over 50 hours. This is good, but it might be a bit 

Feature photo courtesy of the Associated Press.