Writing about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is surprisingly difficult. Even finding some hyper-specific facet of the gameplay or story to focus isn’t a sure thing, and that boils down to the amount of time you spend spinning your wheels and preparing for something. You do fetch quests to level up so that you can do fetch quests required of the main story, and all so that you can actually kill enemies when violence is required rather than impotently sneak attacking them for 25% of their health, thereby getting involved in a fight against said enemy and everyone nearby. The entire thing becomes a soul-crushing grind, and all the while you’re dealing with plastic-faced NPCs and writing that literally asks you to choose between letting a baby burn to death and murdering someone to save time (it’s definitely looking like CD Projekt RED are the only studio capable of pulling off gray morality at the moment). I’m also dealing with a frame rate that averages around 23 frames per second despite having the FX-8350 CPU explicitly mentioned in the “recommended” specs and a better GPU. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is exhausting in all the wrong ways, and the fact that I’ve spent 23 hours with it and accomplished virtually nothing says it all.

These are my Uplay stats for the game at the moment. Consider that I’m not even half done yet despite being 23 hours in. This isn’t a “value for your money” situation, either, because most of this is the same soulless base taking and fetch quests that have been in every single Ubisoft game since Far Cry 3. It’s more of a “pacing that’s horrible beyond description” situation, with every single NPC needing a favor that inevitably culminates in you having to clear out a base full of enemies. Fetch quests and base clearing missions are interwoven into each other like some kind of endless matryoshka doll. Also be sure to note the distance traveled; I’m not wasting my time sightseeing, so I’ve racked up that distance from running around doing fetch quests.

I should also mention that I currently have no idea what the plot is. There are a bunch of “odyssey quests” (which is just a fancy way of saying that they’re the ones that push the story forward) that I have sending me in totally different directions, with the main goal being finding the main character’s mother. There’s also an evil cult that have been dabbling with advanced Isu technology in the story’s periphery, and I’ve been taking out some of their members (sometimes by accident), but very little of this ties together. The cult wants the main character’s mother for some reason, so we’re killing them and finding her despite only barely understanding anyone’s motivations. Anyway, you can see in the video above what it’s like when you’re at a low enough level that your assassinations don’t finish off stronger enemies. It gets bad when 4-5 similarly sponge-y enemies join in and you have to fight them all.

Even if you don’t find the sponginess of enemies to be a turn-off, you don’t stand a chance against enemies who are a higher level than you. There’s some enemy scaling here, but it’s not universal, and running across an enemy several levels higher than you can be a death sentence because of the game-y ways that this manifests. Basically, a large level difference means doing significantly less damage to that enemy’s health bar, while their attacks (even projectiles, stupidly enough) can kill you in a single hit. Given the way dodging is unpredictable—if you’re using a fast weapon like daggers, rapidly tapping the button queues attacks and makes it impossible to dodge when you see the attack cue—you don’t have a realistic chance against these enemies. The entire system is set up to force you to do a ton of grinding so that Ubisoft could make Assassin’s Creed Odyssey a 60-100 hour game.

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