Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Assassins Creed Odyssey is the eleventh major title in Ubisoft's annual franchise and in my opinion, might top Assassins Creed IV Black Flag as the best in the series. But is that saying much? No, not really. I'll start with the positives first and say that Odyssey is an improvement compared to 2017's Origins and the rest of the series. It continues the RPG esque gameplay set up by Origins that separated it from all the games prior and balanced out the gameplay a bit by having more tolerable or interesting elements than just the combat, although unfortunately still being incredibly mediocre. Odyssey manages to improve on that while also having a more engaging and cohesive plot instead of being a jumbled mess of flashbacks which only make the story more complicated than need be. Although the story is far from perfect or even good for that matter it at least didn't aggravate me with uninteresting characters and dialogue that infect the other games like a plague (I'd still recommend playing as Kassandra though.) The world is beautiful and graphically impressive but is pretty empty with not a whole lot of variety or unique encounters/situations. And regardless of the positives, it's just not enough to ignore the fact that to the game's demise, once you reach a certain point in the game around level 15, Odyssey becomes incredibly tedious as you grind for hours doing an endless list of chores that are not as horrendous as those found in the series first few installments but are still painfully uninspired in order to level up your character's gear and abilities so you can move on to the next main story mission which at that point just isn't even worth your time anymore. This repetition is such a huge turnoff and makes you want to stop playing the game after around ten or so hours. And what's even worse is Ubisoft knows this which is why they give you such a minuscule amount of XP for side quests and have implemented microtransactions that boost XP gain so you don't have to grind as much. While the turn to this more RPG style gameplay has balanced out the game more it also sacrifices the best thing about the previous games: the combat. The combat in Assassins Creed was always very formulaic only having you press a string of around three buttons in a semi-specific order but the crazy death animations that played after every other kill always made it satisfying and fun and when you stabbed a guy you really felt the impact, your swings and stabs had weight to them, whereas in Odyssey combat is floaty and consists of whacking at an enemy's health bar until they just flop over and die, only getting one of those satisfying animations at the end of each encounter. And stealth combat was always my favorite way to approach enemies in Assassins Creed and that carries over to Odyssey except it's been dumbed down to the point where its no longer engaging in the slightest. The special abilities help with the repetition of combat a bit but all the grinding you have to suffer through to acquire and upgrade them isn't worth wasting your time with, and your movement, in general, on foot and horseback is just really buggy. At the end of the day Assassins Creed, Odyssey is an obvious contender for the best in the series but is still a very short-lived experience and I'd only recommend playing it if you're a big fan of the series because if not you'll most likely lose interest around a quarter of the way through the game.