Before we get started on this one, a little background on me: when I was a child, I was OBSESSED with Greek mythology. Like, legitimately obsessed. I’d read all the retellings for children (not Percy Jackson but Dutch children’s retellings, of which there are a surprising amount). My favourite was the story of Odysseus, even though in retrospect he was the absolute worst.

I’ve also never been particularly interested in the Assassin’s Creed-franchise. I really liked the idea of being able to walk around cities of the past, but the whole sci-fi plot and the templar thing kind of put me off the games. I may not have even played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey if it hadn’t been for the reviews I’ve read. Lots of people described it as “barely assassin’s creed” or even as similar to Bioware games. And I LOVE Bioware games.

Let me first explain the type of gamer I am: I’m a total casual. I’m here for a good time, not a hard time. The story of a game is what usually matters most to me, and the gameplay has to be fun enough to carry me through to the end. I’m not looking for particularly interesting combat, and frankly Assassin’s Creed doesn’t really offer that (at least the way I play it). I’m happy to just shoot some arrows at people from a bush!

The main draw this game has for me is being able to walk around Ancient Greece. The world is absolutely gorgeous, and I could (and have) spent hours just walking around and taking it all in. It’s lots of fun to be able to compare current locations in Greece with their versions in Assassin’s Creed, like The Acropolis or Delphi. A lot of research and heart have gone into this game and it really shows.

I’ll be honest: the story of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is… fine. It’s not amazing, but it’s serviceable. Where the game really shines for me are the characters, specifically Kassandra, when you play her as the main character. Her voice acting is phenomenal and often very funny. While the game itself isn’t necessarily “funny”, there are quite a few humorous scenes, made more so by the choices made in the acting.

I was a little worried about the “Assassin’s Creed” content in the game, meaning the scenes set in the present. As I mentioned, I haven’t played any other Assassin’s Creed games and I genuinely don’t care about the overarching plot. To their credit, there were very few of these scenes in the game, and I think they were mostly optional. I don’t think you could play through the main story without going through any of them, but I also don’t think there’s more than half an hour of them in the “Odyssey” quest. This does mean that they fully pull you out of the game and feel like an absolute chore when you play them, but I also get that this is a franchise and they were kind of telling this big story and they can’t just cut it out altogether.

I’m not totally sure when I can say I’ve really “finished” Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I’ve played the full “Odyssey” quest, but there’s definitely stuff I’ve seen online that I haven’t run into, so I think I’m not fully done. I do feel like there is a big difference in quality between the “in-world” quests and the whole Animus/Atlantis/Sci-fi/Templars storyline. This makes it hard to really give it a star rating for the whole game. However, because the main quest was so much fun I do think it merits 4,5 stars just for that.