Assassin's Creed goes Greek and slays us with Hellenistic charm
In celebration of another hilarious E3 this year I went ahead and started digging into a few titles I was ashamed to play since their release dates. Mostly because of the hyper-woke pseudo-journalism surrounding them and also because of the lack of time to be objectively critical.
I tend to shy away from the cringe-worthy rhetoric prevalent in a lot of reviews I’ve started to encounter. So, rest assured that any game I sample will be evaluated on its own merits of value for the time spent playing it.
Ubisoft’s latest version of the sneaky, stabby-stab genre of games, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is definitely worth every shiny coin spent on it and could arguably be the best so far.
Assassin’s Creed has always been a franchise that hits on some notes and falls flat on others. The first two games were ground-breaking forays of historical fiction/sci-fi. To be honest, AC has always been a hard thing to pin down in terms of genre and style.
On one hand, you have rich adventure stories that take the player through amazing locations thoughtfully designed for historical accuracy. On the other, you could also get a repetitive gamut of run-a-kill and lazy RPG elements smushed into a burrito of confuddled storytelling.
For the uninitiated, Assassin's Creed is about the struggle of two opposing factions, the Assassins and the Templars. Throughout the series the groups fight over control of strange artifacts left behind by a more advanced civilization of space-faring star fascists.
One group wants to use the artifacts to enslave the world and the other wants to enlighten it, but these motives become blurred as each order progresses through history. Over time the groups have hidden or lost these artifacts and it’s up to an insidious tech corporation and a wacky murder cult to find a way to recover them.
How do they do this? Why, by inventing a hyper-realistic VR machine that allows the user to play inside the lives of their ancestors by encoding their memories through DNA, of course! You still with me? Consider the AC franchise a great big fluffernutter—a gooey sandwich of genres ranging from political intrigue, AP history classes, Grand Theft Auto with swords, and Ancient Aliens.
AC: Odyssey takes an ambitious road that blends stealth-stabby action with swashbuckling fisticuffs and is smartly laden with RPG mechanics. This time the adventure places us smack in the middle of the Peloponnesian War circa 431 BCE at the center of the known world: the Greek civilization. For the first time the narrative allows for a choice between male or female protagonists, branching dialogue trees, and multiple endings.
But all this takes a back seat to the overall beauty of AC: Odyssey. The cradle of the ancient world has never looked so amazing, with vibrant vistas and rolling blue waves that crash across lonely seas shores. Mediterranean cedars sway in the Macedonian moonlight.
The introductory level of Cephalonia offers a sweet tour of the old world with a massive naked and anatomically correct statue of Zeus straddling the center of the island. I didn’t take the time to research whether the Ubisoft team painstakingly mapped out the real-life ancient ruins to reproduce what these locations would look like at the time but man, I’d say it comes very close to it.
And that’s just the beginning; the entire, yes, the entire map is an odyssey that spans thousands of in-game kilometers. Exploration is heavily rewarded with cool mysteries to unlock and solve throughout the ancient world. You can explore Odysseus’ ruined palace, dive the flooded temple of Aphrodite, and hunt the Caledonian Boar or become a Hellenistic pirate for epic sea-faring fun.
I outfitted my trireme with a full crew of female assassins and during long hauls to the next drowned temple their sea chanties in beautiful Greek blended with the sounds of the wind and the hull cutting the waves. The game world feels so alive you could almost fall in and not think twice.
Ignore the main questline or quests altogether and you will almost forget you’re playing an AC game at all. The experience feels more like a virtual tour through time and a true marvel at how far gaming technology has come. Watch the sun set from atop the crested helm of Athena Parthenos in Attika and revel in the triple A milestone that is AC: Odyssey.
When not vaporizing zombies or leading space marines as a mousepad Mattis, Brandon Watson is making gourmet pancakes and promoting local artists.