izigame.me

There is only one word to describe Assassin's Creed Odyssey and if you're reading this 4 years after release you probably already know it. It's BIG.
(TLDR; if you like Assassin's Creed and big, open world games, this game is worth your time and money when it's next on sale).
AC:O is ridiculously big, impressively so at first but rather depressingly so 120ish hours in. At it's core I found the moment to moment gameplay really quite enjoyable, combat is fun with a decent variety of weapons plus I liked the power creep of slowly improving your gear and skills. I played as Kassandra which I don't regret for a second as her performance went a long way in keeping me engaged through the many lines of dialogue and she definitely earns her place is Assassins Creed history.
The story starts off rather captivating, it's intriguing and full of some surprising reveals. I found it started to fall flat around the halfway mark and struggled to keep up the momentum at the end, perhaps because there seem to be a number of ending defining choices throughout and mine must have been less than optimal, as I felt incredible short-changed at the end of my journey. There are a few ensemble characters who never faltered though, and I enjoyed their company throughout.
The world of ancient Greece is beautifully crafted and massive, there are hundreds of points of interest ranging from ancient temples to grand occupied forts and while you will see the same sort of environments pretty quickly, the enemy/treasure placement always felt different enough that I could tackle each place in a fresh way.
I believe your level of enjoyment from AC:O will directly correlate to how you play open world games. I made it my mission to discover every '?' on the map, assassinate every target and experience every piece of content available. And for a long time this was incredibly therapeutic. I could play for hours without progressing my Odyssey and just explore, ticking off that omnipresent open-world checklist and feeling like I was getting stuff done. I wasn't really, it's all rather fruitless but as the old saying goes, "the time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time".
Once the burnout kicked in, it kicked in hard. I began to notice the needless, drawn out dialogue, the painfully slow paced side quests and stretches of land that really had no place being there. I gave up stealth and rushed in to every encounter, just trying to kill as quickly as I could and made a habit of skipping some dialogue in cutscenes just so I could get to the next objective.
It's strange, because if I had decided to make this a more focused experience and concentrated on the main story I wouldn't have come close to feeling fatigued. However, it doesn't feel right to ignore the open-world aspect of an open-world game, for better or for worse.
To conclude, I had a lot of fun with AC:O and if you like to compare hours played to money paid then objectively it is more than worth it. On a more subjective level though, the game is astonishingly big and it is a wonderful world to get lost in, there is no wrong way to play this game but if you're stubborn like me, you might be sick of the sight of it towards the end.