I 100%ed this game to tell you that it is genuinely not worth the price for the amount of content in the game. This is a clear step backwards in the series. The only way this game is returning to the roots of Origins is because the game is buggy, god awful sound design, and the animations are so floaty there is no gratifying feeling of autonomy.

I tried to engage with the game the way the developers intended, but the developers are overworked and understaffed so it was genuinely a miserable playing experience because there wasn't enough time or resources given to make a polished game.

The first thing I noticed when I played the game, was the fact that the animations were not responsive to the keys I press. Genuinely just as bad, if not worse than Origins, because the two games in between didn't really have these issues. Like they remove the bow, so you can't stockpile long ranged assassination tools, and it doesn't matter cus the map is so small, you won't be having long ranged assaults anyways. But the fact that you can one shot literally every enemy in the game makes it such a non-threat that before I even played the game I selected the hardest difficulty knowing full well it was not going to matter.

The DLC adds a weapon that makes combat trivial. All you have to do is parry once, and then the enemy gets set on fire and they stop attacking you as they flail around. I genuinely don't know what they were thinking. The combat is genuinely some of the worst. They added a stamina system which you can't upgrade. This is not a 1v1 game. You are fighting multiple enemies if the stamina ever comes into play, the game wants you to run away, or rather forces you because you dont have the stamina to keep up. Not to mention how quick animations fly, that half the time you can't react, or even if you do, the game is so poorly optimized that the choreography doesn't sync with the hit and hurt boxes. And that's not me being bad. There is so much snapping when it comes to animation. The game will arbitrarily position an enemy several paces forward from where they landed their attack so even back stepping or backrolling, which you seem to have no control which you do, twice, will still cause the enemy to land their hit. Or just rolling into an unparryable attack somehow makes you immune to the damage. Or like if you don't parry a parryable attack the enemy can chain multiple attacks which is stupid.

The parkour element of this game is also dogsh*t. The interaction triggers are lazy. And even if the game trains you that certain textures are scalable, they intentionally misleading. You can't scale castle walls, but there are certain parts with exposed brick which you are supposed to be able to scale. The game reuses this texture in other places, yet despite this, you cannot scale all of these textures. Same goes for bricks jutting out of houses or towers. Sometimes there is a clear brick you should be able to grab and the game does not see it. Or how finicky the game is that in order to go to the left you have to go all the way right around a pole in order to scale up which is ret*rded.
So many times I just get stuck on an object and I can't climb down or jump off. There are so many small props on the ground that if you walk over a sack of flower you can't walk off like you walked onto it and have to jump off for no reason. Or better yet, the game being inconsistent on whether you were crouched or not before vaulting over a wall. There have been so many times where I just want to pop over a wall and fall in the foliage on the other side but the game decides, "you wanted to be standing straight up right so the enemy can see you?" ret*rded.

Don't even get me on the AI. The AI is genuinely a step back. The AI cannot traverse the map. There are so many places where you can get to, and they can't follow and immediately lose you. While other times there are areas where it doesn't matter how well you are stealthy, for whatever reason, even if you are hidden, the AI will just spot you from a safe distance away. If you hire Mercenaries to kill guards, the guards they kill, respawn, while you are in the area you are exploring. If you are doing a story mission, and you decide you want to go the PVE route instead of the espionage route, the game will respawn enemies the moment you turn your back. I have killed the same npc 5 seperate times during a mission because they are positioned at a choke point. And it's beyond retarded because their corpse is still there and its the same model.

Which is another thing. NPCs don't give a sh*t if you kill in front of them. Their reaction speed is so slow. Or they are so nonchalant, They don't care. It's mystifying to me that they decided that in addition to NPCs being ret*rded. You needed a smoke bomb which makes all npcs inside forget you exist, allowing you to drop a smoke bomb at you feet while charging into a group, and allow you to chain assassinate everybody in the smoke and leave before NPCs path over and discover the bodies.

Shouldn't they be alarmed that everyone is dead? Shouldn't they go into high alert when the POI is assassinated? There are so many times where NPCs just commit suicide investigating a murder. They jump off a high place and take fall damage and die, or just get themselves stuck on a platform that not even I can access without getting stuck. It's abysmal how bad their pathing and AI routes are. Like you can stab and grab someone from a hay bale, and their partner doesn't care. What's the point of having duos wander together if they can't even have object permanance or care their partner mysteriously vanishes.

Godforbid you actually add upgrades or skills that add new ways to play the game. You add swords and daggers that basically don't do anything interesting since you're limited on stamina. And you add armor that either muffles the sound of assassinations or your movement but it doesn't matter because NPCs are deaf because the devs didn't program the sound of a body falling, yet alone pots breaking. Like genuinely, how did they mess up weight. Bodies and objects used to have WEIGHT when you THREW THEM. Bodies float. They're like feathers. They make sounds like you dropped a pen or a blanket instead of a f*cking corpse.

You have to be sh*tting me.
Odyssey was such a good game aside from the DLC's why the f*ck did they go, "yeah let's re-release Origins without fixing the bugs. When they could've done another Odyssey. This game doesn't even have 30 hours of content in it. Most of my playtime is d*cking around to see all the bugs of magically respawning enemies, or the fact the horses have magic hitboxes and send explosive pots flying with incredible velocity and seeing just how much I could mess with an npc until they jumped off a ledge and died.
You can beat the game 10 hours or less. The side content is non existant. There's no fun challenges.
Other than like contracts which are mandatory to get skill points to unlock skills. Genuinely, "don't kill anyone" is such a sh*t is such a terrible objective. The game forces you to kill people, You have no nonlethal options other than gadgets. Odyssey, you could knock people out. This game forces you to kill after the prologue. You can not be force me into stealth in a mission where all of the stealth routes except 1 is blocked off, and you have to carry somebody constantly sneezing and alerting the guards to my position constantly.

I have so much more to complain about but you have to keep these things "consise"

Play a different game. Poorly optimized, Terrible AI, floaty animations, inconsistent level design, lazy back and forth gameplay, nothing special or new that makes it stand out as unique from the other games. Literally, I mean genuinely, copy and pasted Origins and did NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING new.

I 100%ed this game to tell you that it is genuinely not worth the price for the amount of content in the game. This is a clear step backwards in the series. The only way this game is returning to the roots of Origins is because the game is buggy, god awful sound design, and the animations are so floaty there is no gratifying feeling of autonomy. I tried to engage with the game the way the developers intended, but the developers are overworked and understaffed so it was genuinely a miserable playing experience because there wasn't enough time or resources given to make a polished game. The first thing I noticed when I played the game, was the fact that the animations were not responsive to the keys I press. Genuinely just as bad, if not worse than Origins, because the two games in between didn't really have these issues. Like they remove the bow, so you can't stockpile long ranged assassination tools, and it doesn't matter cus the map is so small, you won't be having long ranged assaults anyways. But the fact that you can one shot literally every enemy in the game makes it such a non-threat that before I even played the game I selected the hardest difficulty knowing full well it was not going to matter. The DLC adds a weapon that makes combat trivial. All you have to do is parry once, and then the enemy gets set on fire and they stop attacking you as they flail around. I genuinely don't know what they were thinking. The combat is genuinely some of the worst. They added a stamina system which you can't upgrade. This is not a 1v1 game. You are fighting multiple enemies if the stamina ever comes into play, the game wants you to run away, or rather forces you because you dont have the stamina to keep up. Not to mention how quick animations fly, that half the time you can't react, or even if you do, the game is so poorly optimized that the choreography doesn't sync with the hit and hurt boxes. And that's not me being bad. There is so much snapping when it comes to animation. The game will arbitrarily position an enemy several paces forward from where they landed their attack so even back stepping or backrolling, which you seem to have no control which you do, twice, will still cause the enemy to land their hit. Or just rolling into an unparryable attack somehow makes you immune to the damage. Or like if you don't parry a parryable attack the enemy can chain multiple attacks which is stupid. The parkour element of this game is also dogsh*t. The interaction triggers are lazy. And even if the game trains you that certain textures are scalable, they intentionally misleading. You can't scale castle walls, but there are certain parts with exposed brick which you are supposed to be able to scale. The game reuses this texture in other places, yet despite this, you cannot scale all of these textures. Same goes for bricks jutting out of houses or towers. Sometimes there is a clear brick you should be able to grab and the game does not see it. Or how finicky the game is that in order to go to the left you have to go all the way right around a pole in order to scale up which is ret*rded. So many times I just get stuck on an object and I can't climb down or jump off. There are so many small props on the ground that if you walk over a sack of flower you can't walk off like you walked onto it and have to jump off for no reason. Or better yet, the game being inconsistent on whether you were crouched or not before vaulting over a wall. There have been so many times where I just want to pop over a wall and fall in the foliage on the other side but the game decides, "you wanted to be standing straight up right so the enemy can see you?" ret*rded. Don't even get me on the AI. The AI is genuinely a step back. The AI cannot traverse the map. There are so many places where you can get to, and they can't follow and immediately lose you. While other times there are areas where it doesn't matter how well you are stealthy, for whatever reason, even if you are hidden, the AI will just spot you from a safe distance away. If you hire Mercenaries to kill guards, the guards they kill, respawn, while you are in the area you are exploring. If you are doing a story mission, and you decide you want to go the PVE route instead of the espionage route, the game will respawn enemies the moment you turn your back. I have killed the same npc 5 seperate times during a mission because they are positioned at a choke point. And it's beyond retarded because their corpse is still there and its the same model. Which is another thing. NPCs don't give a sh*t if you kill in front of them. Their reaction speed is so slow. Or they are so nonchalant, They don't care. It's mystifying to me that they decided that in addition to NPCs being ret*rded. You needed a smoke bomb which makes all npcs inside forget you exist, allowing you to drop a smoke bomb at you feet while charging into a group, and allow you to chain assassinate everybody in the smoke and leave before NPCs path over and discover the bodies. Shouldn't they be alarmed that everyone is dead? Shouldn't they go into high alert when the POI is assassinated? There are so many times where NPCs just commit suicide investigating a murder. They jump off a high place and take fall damage and die, or just get themselves stuck on a platform that not even I can access without getting stuck. It's abysmal how bad their pathing and AI routes are. Like you can stab and grab someone from a hay bale, and their partner doesn't care. What's the point of having duos wander together if they can't even have object permanance or care their partner mysteriously vanishes. Godforbid you actually add upgrades or skills that add new ways to play the game. You add swords and daggers that basically don't do anything interesting since you're limited on stamina. And you add armor that either muffles the sound of assassinations or your movement but it doesn't matter because NPCs are deaf because the devs didn't program the sound of a body falling, yet alone pots breaking. Like genuinely, how did they mess up weight. Bodies and objects used to have WEIGHT when you THREW THEM. Bodies float. They're like feathers. They make sounds like you dropped a pen or a blanket instead of a f*cking corpse. You have to be sh*tting me. Odyssey was such a good game aside from the DLC's why the f*ck did they go, "yeah let's re-release Origins without fixing the bugs. When they could've done another Odyssey. This game doesn't even have 30 hours of content in it. Most of my playtime is d*cking around to see all the bugs of magically respawning enemies, or the fact the horses have magic hitboxes and send explosive pots flying with incredible velocity and seeing just how much I could mess with an npc until they jumped off a ledge and died. You can beat the game 10 hours or less. The side content is non existant. There's no fun challenges. Other than like contracts which are mandatory to get skill points to unlock skills. Genuinely, "don't kill anyone" is such a sh*t is such a terrible objective. The game forces you to kill people, You have no nonlethal options other than gadgets. Odyssey, you could knock people out. This game forces you to kill after the prologue. You can not be force me into stealth in a mission where all of the stealth routes except 1 is blocked off, and you have to carry somebody constantly sneezing and alerting the guards to my position constantly. I have so much more to complain about but you have to keep these things "consise" Play a different game. Poorly optimized, Terrible AI, floaty animations, inconsistent level design, lazy back and forth gameplay, nothing special or new that makes it stand out as unique from the other games. Literally, I mean genuinely, copy and pasted Origins and did NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING new.