Pre-order Assassin's Creed Odyssey

After basically rebooting the Assassin's Creed franchise with Origins late last year, Ubisoft is back with yet another title, Odyssey, to venture down the road of evolving the formula into a full-blown RPG experience. This seems like the return to a yearly release schedule for the AC games — a schedule that made gamers feel fatigued by the endlessly regurgitated concept — but it isn't. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has since confirmed that we won't see an Assassin's Creed game next year. Odyssey has been in development for almost three years when it releases in October of this year, a fact that developer Ubisoft Quebec likes to emphasize.

The similarities with Origins are uncanny. a vast, open world inspired by ancient historic times; a reactionary combat system akin to The Witcher or a very light version of Dark Souls; and an identity that feels removed from previous experiences in the franchise. Although Odyssey looks and feels a lot like Origins, the bigger world (mostly due to large bodies of water) and (re)introduction of ship battles and deeper customization options go a long way toward making this feel like its own entity rather than a spin-off. According to Ubisoft, this is the next step in completing the transformation to an RPG, and it showed when we sat down for a hands-on demo at Gamescom 2018 to try one of the side-quests.

We're required to chose our protagonist, Alexios or Cassandra, as has been showcased many times before. This is a late-game quest at level 50 (max cap), fully equipped with legendary armor and weapons in preparation for the following quest. While Odyssey is said to not delve too much into mythical or fantastical topics over the course of the main campaign, these are still part of the world and can be found in optional quests such as this one. We find a women accused of angering a dangerous creature in a forbidden part of the island of Lesbos, and the creature kidnapped her lover in the process. Before we decide to help her, we have to decimate a few angry parties to take her with us.

This is where we get the first shot at Odyssey's combat, and it feels very similar to Origins, but with a few improvements, such as customizable special attacks. With a few simple button presses, we can rip shields from enemies or Spartan-kick them from a cliff. There are crowd control skills, like bashing down our weapon for area damage or healing powers. It's not a revolution over last year's system, but it feels smoother and more powerful as we deal with a number of enemies.

Once the local troublemakers have been dealt with, we venture out to hunt the creature, but we're in for a surprise. Killing innocents in the world of Odyssey causes a bounty to be placed on your head, and mercenaries will gladly hunt you down. As we attempt to leave, a mercenary searches the area for us, but we're able to sneak past him. Before we arrive at our destination, we're funneled to another mercenary through a canyon, forcing us to fight for our life. While we are fully leveled, this encounter was neither straightforward nor easy. The "world police" is tough, and gaining levels through killings in the world will make them stronger and more plentiful — up to the point where they become an almost impossible challenge.

After an exhaustive battle, we manage to kill the mercenary and enter the orbit of the monster we've heard so much about. Fog starts to roll in, and we slowly make our way through rocky terrain with people made to stone, their faces expressing fear and terror. It's an incredibly strong and moody atmosphere that is surprising for a quest that doesn't seem connected to the main story of Odyssey. The number of stone bodies in our path increases until we finally find the temple that is the supposed origin of this plague. It's locked, and we have to find a way to enter and kill the Hydra creature.

The quest splits into two: There is an artifact on the neighboring island of Chios in a hunting village, and there's a person on Lesbos who claims to have killed the Hydra, so we'd like to talk to them. We can either kill everyone in the hunting village or sneak in. At the back of the camp are three caves, all of which seem to feature bears that are very tough to take down. One of the caves contains the artifact, and after retrieving it, we're back to Lesbos to talk to the alleged Hydra killer.

Unsurprisingly, the person claiming to have killed Hydra with his spear is either an impostor or the Hydra cannot be killed, which we only learn after we've taken him out and collected the spear that allegedly slew the beast. These quest up to this point easily takes 30 minutes and combines various parts of the Odyssey gameplay loop: combat, stealth, and traversal via foot and boat. Even within this short time frame, the game managed to distract us with minor side activities, such as naval battles, as we accidentally rammed a boat and slipped into a battle.

It's unmistakably built on the AC foundation, especially Origins, but the look and feel are different from other yearly releases of the games. As we return to the temple of Hydra, we have to prepare for the intense boss battle. It required us to think and be aware of our surroundings, dodging rays that would turn us to stone and smaller enemies that tried to distract us and make us vulnerable to attacks. Our area attacks were helpful in getting rid of minor enemies, and after we dodged incoming rays, we unloaded special attacks at the Hydra. After five minutes or so, we had defeated the creature, and we retrieve an artifact that looks like an apple from the Garden of Eden. The theory is that this artifact may have corrupted a human being into becoming the Hydra, which is why the creature couldn't be killed and kept returning.

This marked the end of our time with Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and it was time well spent. I'm still somewhat skeptical about how the game will turn out and if it can add to the Origins foundation in significant ways. At the very least, Odyssey be a very solid RPG, but we'll see what else it can deliver on when it releases Oct. 5 this year for PC, PS4 and Xbox.