Video game review: Assassin's Creed Odyssey sheds baggage, shows off new approach to open-world games

The new Assassin's Creed game from Ubisoft is quite unlike the others in the blockbuster franchise. 

For one, it's set before the time established by the previous games as to when the Brotherhood of Assassins was created. That's easily dealt with by the narrative. The more prominent shift is away from the strictly stealth-based assassination simulation of the early games, where you needed to escape the chase by hiding in nooks and crannies or crowds of people.

Instead, Odyssey puts you in a more organic freeform system in which you have more freedom to come up with your own approach. It's akin to the way other games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Far Cry are presenting open-world experiences.  

With developed led by Ubisoft Quebec and available for PS4, Switch, Windows, and Xbox One, you become immersed in the world of ancient Greece just a generation after the Greco-Persian War of the fifth century BC. It's takes its initial inspiration from the battle in which Leonidas and the Spartans confronted Xerxes and the Persian army, a tale documented by Herodotus. 

The Greek historian is prominent in Odyssey, just as real-life figures have appeared in all Assassin's Creed games before. The central character you embody is a mercenary of Spartan origin who gets caught up in the political shifts of the time. 

You get to choose whether your character is male or female (I played as the very able Kassandra, wonderfully performed by Canadian actor Melissanthi Mahut; Vancouver actor Michael Antonakos plays Alexios, the male version). You make other decisions, too, and they all have an impact on the game you play to some degree.

And although you aren't an assassin here, the way you were in previous Assassin's Creed games, you are a capable killer when you need to be. I confess to missing the pure stealth tactics of those early games, but Odyssey is fluid and dynamic and easy to enjoy.

You may find that the activities get tedious after a while. Tedium is part of any open-world game. The trick for the developer is to craft a world that people want to spend time in so that it doesn't feel boring doing the same things over and over again.

That's certainly true of Odyssey. The developers crafted a deep and engaging story with crisp characters and varied connections. I was playing for about 20 hours before I started to really notice the grind.  

And what drove me forward was the notion that I had just unravelled another twist in the web of intrigue anchoring the narrative.

Assassin's Creed may be more about solving whodunnits than sneaking around to perform assassinations, but it's a shift that makes Odyssey one of the best Assassin's Creed games in years.