The honest review
What you're actually buying
An open-world action RPG set in ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War. You pick a protagonist — Alexios or Kassandra, same story, different performance — and you are a mercenary rather than an assassin, which is the key to understanding the whole game. You take contracts, you pick sides in a war, you loot weapons and armor with rarities, you level up, and you sail a ship you upgrade and crew with recruits who carry their own perks.
Two systems are worth naming because nothing else in the franchise has them. Naval combat is a full mode rather than a mission type, inherited from Black Flag and rebuilt for triremes. And the Conquest battles are genuinely large: PlayStation's own description puts armies of 150 soldiers on the field at once. The ESRB rates it M for Mature 17+ for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes and Strong Language, and it is a single-player game — there is no co-op or multiplayer here at all.
The value case
It is the most hours-per-dollar of any game we currently list in this franchise, and one of the best on the whole site. The thirty-hours-of-dialogue figure is the one that should get your attention, because dialogue is expensive to make and it is the first thing a padded open-world game skimps on. Odyssey has a real RPG in it: your choices change outcomes, and there is more than one ending to reach.
The arithmetic is blunt. A new release at full price buys you an evening per ten dollars. The Odyssey disc, at the bracket it now sits in, buys dozens of hours per ten dollars, and the content is the same content it was at launch. Nothing has been taken out of the game because you waited. That is the entire argument of the cheapest way to play new games, and this disc is its best single example.
What is not on the disc
Be clear on this before you buy, because it is the one place the value case gets a dent. This is the standard edition, and the two story expansions — the ones that continue the story past the main campaign — ship with the Season Pass, which PlayStation packages into the Gold Edition at $99.99. They are not on the standard disc, and buying them separately afterwards costs more than the disc did.
Our honest read: that is fine, and you should ignore them for now. The base campaign is a complete, enormous game with its own ending (endings, in fact). Buy the disc, play it for sixty hours, and if you are still hungry at the end of it, you will know whether the expansions are worth their price to you. Deciding that up front is how people end up paying four times the disc price for content they never reach. We apply the same rule across the site in best cheap game collections.
Where the padding is, honestly
Odyssey is long in a way that some players love and some resent, and the complaint is legitimate. Because it is an RPG with levels, the main story occasionally asks you to be a higher level than you are, which means doing side content before the next story beat. If you enjoy the moment-to-moment game — and the sailing, the hunting of mercenaries, the naval raids are good — that is not a problem, it is the game. If you are only here for the plot, it will feel like a toll booth.
The other honest criticism is that stealth, the thing the series is named after, is the weakest it has ever been here. You can sneak, and it works, but the game is built around open combat with a scaling difficulty curve. If classic Assassin's Creed — a dense city, a plan, one kill, out — is what you want, Odyssey is the wrong purchase at any price, and the right one is the Ezio Collection on best cheap Assassin's Creed games.
Who it's perfect for
Anyone who wants one game to last them a season. Anyone who liked The Witcher 3 or Horizon Zero Dawnand wants another hundred-hour world at a back-catalog price — it belongs in exactly that company, which is why it sits on best cheap open-world games. Anyone who likes choosing in RPGs, since the dialogue and the endings are the part Ubisoft genuinely invested in. And anyone with a PS4 still in use, since this is a last-gen disc that plays on both generations.
Who should skip it
People who do not finish long games. This is the most important line in this review. A hundred-hour game abandoned at hour fifteen has worse value per dollar than a six-hour game you loved, and Odyssey's size is its one real risk. If your shelf already has an unfinished open world on it, buy something smaller from games under $20 instead.
Also skip it if you want stealth above all, as above; if you want co-op, because there is none; or if you are buying for a teenager, since it is rated M 17+ with a long list of content descriptors. For a gift, the rating is stated on every pick in gifts for PlayStation owners.
The value verdict
Worth it, emphatically, for anyone who wants a very large RPG and will actually play it. It is the best hours-per-dollar purchase in its franchise and one of the strongest on this entire site, and the standard disc is a complete game with a real ending. Ignore the Gold Edition until the base game runs out.
Not worth it if you want the old stealth-and-cities Assassin's Creed, if you want something to finish in a fortnight, or if long games tend to defeat you. In those cases the cheaper, shorter picks on best cheap Assassin's Creed games are the better buy — and they cost less.
