Every ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Game, Ranked From Worst to Best

An attempt at reimagining a more complex game is made with Assassin’s Creed: Arno’s Chronicles, and that’s probably the nicest thing one can say about it. It is conceived as a spinoff of Assassin’s Creed Unity, starring that game’s protagonist, Arno Dorian, and ostensibly carrying on Ubisoft’s tradition of trying to tell new stories or experiment with fresh mechanics in a world we’ve already seen. Normally, those attempts happen in 3D and a style that’s more recognizably “Assassin’s Creed.” Arno’s Chronicles is a 2D side scrolling platformer, and not a nice one like the Chronicles trilogy. 

It’s more like a janky retro game, the kind you’d rent from Blockbuster on Friday evening and beg your parents to let you return early to swap out for something better before the store closed that night. Combat involves just mashing the attack button until the enemy dies, and stealth moves are non-existent. Guards and other opponents don’t notice Arno even when he’s running up behind them, nor do they realize when a compatriot less than five feet away is being murdered.

Ubisoft and Behaviour Interactive call Assassin’s Creed Rebellion the series’ first official strategy-RPG. That’s a generous interpretation of what amounts to a casual puzzle game with Assassin’s Creed flair. Rebellion takes place during the Spanish Reconquista, when Christian kingdoms drove Muslim rulers out of the Iberian peninsula and established the domains that eventually became Spain. It’s a fascinating concept for a setting, which makes the fact that Rebellion does nothing with it particularly frustrating.

The idea is that a team of three Assassins, each with special abilities in stealth, parkour, or some other bonus, infiltrate a location. Locations are divided into rooms, with each room presenting a single challenge, usually a guard to deal with. How the player approaches those challenges can change depending on who’s in the team, but it’s just the difference between jumping out a window and waiting for a guard to pass or putting on a disguise and sneaking by them. There’s really just not much to this.

Pirates was barely an Assassin’s Creed game and, despite the Caribbean setting, has no ties to Black Flag or its sequels. The hero is an aspiring pirate, they have a boat, so naturally they try to blow up every other boat in the sea and look around for treasure. Ubisoft touted exploration as a big feature for Pirates, but like everything else in the spin-off, it is pretty shallow. Exploration is just a matter of pushing the boat across a top-down map, then arriving at the destination and engaging in battle. Battles feature a handful of skills, but little strategy.

There’s a network of upgrades to could tack onto the ship using the booty gained through sea fights and a small posse of mates that can manage the ship for a fee. It’s all perfunctory, though. With little to do in battle beyond pressing a few icons, Pirates is more of a time waster than an actual adventure.

Assassin’s Creed Memories is a valiant attempt at creating a shared multiplayer experience from a time when offbeat ideas were generally safer to experiment with in gaming. It just isn’t very good. The concept is that a modern-day person working for Abstergo — the villainous group of the Assassin’s Creed series — is exploring memories of every Assassin via a training program. Some nifty bits of lore pop up from time to time, though without any context to make it comprehensible for any except diehard Assassin’s Creed fans. 

The main focus is spending stamina points to explore locations from Assassin’s Creed and find new character cards to battle with, only there’s a chance the mission ends without any decent cards at all. Then the process repeats, and occasionally, card battles with other players might happen. The “shared universe” concept plays out with guilds where the player and 19 others could team up to basically do the same things one person did alone, except with the added inconvenience of trying to coordinate mission timing.

Ubisoft tried making Assassin’s Creed multiplayer a standalone thing twice, but didn’t support either for long. The first effort, Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer, is kind of like Among Us. The game divides players into Assassins and targets, and the Assassins have to figure out which characters are the actual targets and which ones are innocent people a good Assassin definitely shouldn’t kill. It featured three maps from Assassin’s Creed II, two from Venice and one from Rome, with online leaderboards, but Ubisoft didn’t keep it updated with anything new. 

Then, they launched Assassin’s Creed: Multiplayer Rearmed, which is basically the same concept, but with different locations, a bunch of items for customizing the player character with, and a massive grind to reach the maximum player level. Ubisoft took Multiplayer Rearmed offline after a few years as well. Both were casual and breezy ways to spend time with friends, but perhaps a bit too simple. Had Ubisoft expanded either of them, instead of launching with little continued support, they might’ve stood a better chance of lasting longer.

Discovery was Ubisoft’s second attempt to port a mainline Assassin’s Creed game, and it’s not surprising those attempts stopped here. Rather than carrying on in the same pattern as Discovery’s predecessor, Altair’s Chronicles, this one is a side-scrolling platformer. It also doesn’t retell Assassin’s Creed II, instead it tries to tell an additional part of Ezio’s story. That’d be an admirable goal — if Discovery were a story-heavy game, which it very much isn’t.

Still, it could be a nifty little spin-off, if it weren’t for the obnoxious platforming design. Good platformers let the player see what challenges are ahead, and the fun comes from figuring out how to deal with them. Discovery lives up to its name providing a limited field of vision, so jumps are literal leaps of faith, discovering how poor the timing and placement were, dying, and then doing it again with the knowledge of what lies ahead. It’s grueling, and not in a satisfying way. Ezio’s agility does, at least, make combat and getting around fun, but it’s not enough to make up for the terrible platforming.

Project Legacy was one of many Assassin’s Creed experiments that had potential, but never realized it. It was a Facebook game that played more like a text-based adventure and a precursor to Assassin’s Creed Memories. The idea is that another random initiate at the Abstergo Company — the modern-day front for Assassin’s Creed‘s Templar bad guys — could jump into past memories and relive the experiences of historic Assassins. 

Those relived experiences did not, in fact, involve stealth, exploration, or assassination. Instead, the player picked from a pool of characters, sent them on missions with a fixed chance of success depending on the chosen operatives’ attributes. Success would result in points that could unlock story segments exclusive to Project Legacy and some swanky in-game outfits. It’s not terribly exciting, but the concept of using an assassin network to accomplish goals across a broad area is an innovative adaptation of Brotherhood‘s big idea and not far off from Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ ally system. Ubisoft stopped updating Project Legacy after two years, and Facebook removed it as a result.

Bloodlines is an odd spin-off. Ubisoft decided to ditch everything that made Assassin’s Creed itself for this PlayStation Portable game. Stealth played a minor role. Platforming — never a high point for the series — is more important, and handled worse, than ever, and most of the game’s run time is spent in combat. It’s almost like an early, rough prototype of what Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed starting in Origins, but the crucial difference is that Bloodlines is tiny in its scope.

That’s hardly surprising, since Ubisoft had to cram it onto the PSP’s little UMD discs, but it didn’t do the game any favors. Instead of a vast, sprawling metropolis to explore and hunt down targets in, Bloodlines just gets a bunch of really small locations. The lack of other features just highlights how shallow and repetitive Bloodlines‘ combat is, and it doesn’t help that the story is a hot pile of nonsense.

Assassin’s Creed Identity is one of the series’ many mobile spin-offs, but this one had a unique conceit at its core: the player built their own assassin. There is no pre-made hero in Identity, and while that limited a sense of connection to the story — there isn’t much of one anyway, to be fair — it allowed for a unique approach to combat. The anonymous assassin could specialize in speed, strength, or stealth and unlock new class-specific perks as they leveled up. Combine that with a detailed equipment system, and this was an Assassin’s Creed with more RPG than some of Ubisoft’s actual RPGs.

The problem is how limited all this ended up being and how it pushed players to spend real money. Identity‘s campaign is short, and even a selection of smaller contracts did little to incentivize playing more. Learning skills also took real-world time, unless the player wanted to spend real-world money to make it go faster in the game.

Altair’s Chronicles was Ubisoft’s attempt at porting mainline Assassin’s Creed to the original Nintendo DS, and while any such attempt would naturally have to involve brutally paring back the source material, this one turned out surprisingly okay. It’s much shorter and less open than Altair’s console adventure, and it’s certainly a crunchy-looking game. However, it’s quite inventive as an exercise in reimagining the original. Altair’s quest to recover special artifacts takes on an almost Tomb Raider-like feel, as he spelunks ancient ruins, leaps across rooftops, and beats up bad guys along the way. 

Stealth works surprisingly well, even if the smaller environments make it less exciting than it is in the console version. When it’s not buggy, the combat in Altair’s Chronicles is solid, thanks in large part to the throwing daggers and stealth bombs Altair can use to break up the usual mix of spamming heavy and light attacks. Still, it is frequently buggy, and like many early Nintendo DS games, the control scheme means the player is fighting the game as often as Altair fights his enemies.

Assassin’s Creed III developed a bad reputation over the years, and for good reason. It really is that bad. Connor, the protagonist, is easily the series’ worst hero, an obnoxious and petulant man-child who does little and grows even less over the course of the story. Despite the promise of the colonial American setting — an uncommon one in modern media generally, but especially in video games — Assassin’s Creed III feels bland and uninspiring. Okay, sure, the first two Assassin’s Creed games do little of interest with their settings, but the time period makes it feel exciting. It’s hard to feel quite as moved by mud roads and log buildings.

Annoying hero and bland environment design aside, one of Assassin’s Creed III‘s worst features is its mission design. Think of the worst missions in Red Dead Redemption 2, where straying from the critical path results in an instant game over. Then, imagine multiple quests with even harsher criteria for what counts as a fail state, and that’s Assassin’s Creed III in a nutshell.

In an ideal world, Revelations would’ve been a downloadable add-on instead of a full game. Even the concept behind it is what one might expect from an expansion. Ezio takes the stage again after Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, this time to stop some convoluted Templar conspiracy and interfere in the Ottoman succession, but it’s mostly an excuse to finish the story of Altair, Assassin’s Creed‘s first hero. Ezio recovers keys that can’t fall into Templars hands for reasons and finds that Altair encoded magical messages into them that let the key wielder see parts of his life. It’s silly, even by Assassin’s Creed standards.

Ubisoft didn’t help Revelations‘ case by adding so few new features to it. This is essentially a slightly more polished version of the same games that came before, albeit with a couple of fresh tools that hardly ever get used. Revelations had a shorter development cycle than other games in the series, and Ubisoft originally conceived it as a Nintendo 3DS spinoff, which probably explains the lack of new features and the exceptionally thin story.

Assassin’s Creed: Recollection is one of the series’ most inventive spinoffs. It’s a virtual board game-slash-card battler with over 200 cards, all featuring exquisite art designed just for Recollection. The point is using cards, a mix of popular characters and locations from the series, to control a territory, and unlike many Assassin’s Creed spinoffs, this one is quite well thought out. Battles involved deep strategizing and encouraged creative deck building.

If Ubisoft hadn’t tried making Assassin’s Creed: Recollection a vehicle for in-app purchases, it could’ve been one of the greats. In-game currency let players purchase new cards, but they only received a limited amount of it, which made spending real money to get cards more of an incentive. That incentive increased once story mode ended and players competed online against other people. Like most PvP games that let their player buy items to improve chances of winning, there is a real imbalance between those who could afford to splash out and those who played responsibly.

When the first Assassin’s Creed  launched in 2007, its version of stealth action attracted praise from critics and consumers, and understandably so. It is one the biggest changes in stealth since Metal Gear Solid 3 released three years earlier. That, plus parkour, an unusual (if silly) story, and the historical setting made it seem fresh and exciting.

It hasn’t aged well, aside from the parkour. Altair’s story is one of the weakest in the series, and in a franchise known for its ludicrous narratives, that’s saying something. The camera is frequently atrocious and makes playing a chore, and once the allure of leaping across the roofs of Damascus wears off, it’s hard to overlook that there’s not much to Assassin’s Creed under that sense of wonder. Quests and combat are shallow, and there’s little variety. It’s expected of the first effort in a new venture, but that doesn’t make revisiting it any more enjoyable.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a tragedy, both in the usual narrative sense of the word and in how Ubisoft missed an opportunity to craft one of the series’ most unorthodox stories. Shay Cormac, the hero of the piece, isn’t much of a hero anymore. He’s gone rogue, hence the name, abandoning the Assassins in favor of their centuries-old enemies, The Templars. It’s fertile ground for high-stakes drama and a chance to turn the Assassin-Templar conflict into more than just fluff and nonsense. 

Instead, it’s just more Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, but slightly worse, with short missions that blend into each other. Shay doesn’t get much development, nor do his interactions with other characters build on the tension that should arise from his defection. It’s typical of how Ubisoft handled its Assassin’s Creed sort-of-sequels, with a setup that should benefit from the worldbuilding that already happened and then doing nothing with it.

Shay does get a grenade launcher via Benjamin Franklin, though. That counts for something.

Freedom Cry is easily one of Ubisoft’s boldest choices for an Assassin’s Creed game. It’s a sub-story tied to Black Flag and Rogue that stars Adewale, Edward Kenway’s partner from Black Flag. Adewale ends up working with a Templar-associated madam in Port-Au-Prince, and the two foment a slave rebellion — or try to. Their methods and goals differ, but the act of rebellion is still at Freedom Cry‘s center. It’s a shame, then, that Ubisoft shoves its proverbial foot in its mouth by gamifying the uprising. The slaves are just items to tick off a list, the more the better. Turning slaves into objects instead of people seems more than a little counter to Freedom Cry‘s intentions, and the game never tries doing anything with the uprising theme outside of the basic setup.

Less problematic, but still an issue, is that Freedom Cry does absolutely nothing better than its predecessors, either. Everything, from combat to singing in the tavern, is just a variation of what came before, not an improvement.

The Chronicles trilogy (including China, India, and Russia) is Ubisoft’s most recent attempt to make Assassin’s Creed two-dimensional, and even though they’re much better than the likes of Discovery and Arno’s Chronicles, as a set, they’re wildly uneven. The trilogy is more an effort at transmedia storytelling than standalone entries in the series, where a franchise divides its stories across different mediums, such as books, movies, and video games. China, Russia, and India star different assassins, from a film, graphic novel, and comic, respectively, as they investigate some relics that are tied up with major historical events. It doesn’t get much deeper than that, and Russia strays into cringeworthy territory by bringing the Anastasia myth from the downfall of the Romanov family into it as if it were a real historical event that the princess escaped.

China is the trilogy’s highlight, with some of the series’ best-designed stages. Everything, from the platforming to enemy placement and how they react when the player is around, is tuned perfectly. Instead of refining these features, India makes them worse, with overly precise puzzles and instant-fail mechanics that hearken back to the worst parts of Assassin’s Creed III. Russia is even worse. For some inscrutable reason, it chucks stealth out the window and prioritizes combat, forcing players to fight multiple enemies in each stage without providing new tools to survive in combat. It’s frustrating and a disappointing conclusion to what could’ve been an innovative trilogy.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR is the series’ first VR entry, and it plays much like a regular Assassin’s Creed game without being burdened with a bunch of unnecessary VR gimmicks. The story is a fluffy excuse to let players revisit the settings of Assassin’s Creed II, Odyssey, and Assassin’s Creed III, as their respective protagonists follow a trail of quests to find relics and stop the end of the world. The real draw is doing all the typical Assassin’s Creed things in first-person, which adds an extra layer of tension to stealth and combat segments and makes parkour more thrilling than usual.

Nexus does little that’s new for the series, aside from being in virtual reality, but that’s unsurprising for Ubisoft’s first attempt to make an Assassin’s Creed game in this format. The biggest issue with Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, however, is that even though Ubisoft released it on Meta Quest 2, playing it on that platform is dreadful for those without high motion sickness tolerance. Performance on the more powerful, and expensive, Meta Quest 3 is smoother and less problematic, so it really should’ve just been made available for newer hardware.

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation had so much potential, and it does so little with it. It takes place in 18th century New Orleans, prior to the American Revolution, and follows Aveline, the daughter of a landowner and a slave mother. Her fight for freedom and the chance to live a better life leads her to join the Assassins, and she plays a role in New Orleans’ burgeoning revolution against the Spanish. It’s a brilliant setup — but that’s about as deep as it ever goes. Aveline’s backstory is the only development she gets, as Liberation prefers to focus on what she does instead of why she does it or how it affects her. It’s basically like every other Assassin’s Creed sort-of-sequel, in other words.

Except this one is originally designed for the ill-fated PlayStation Vita, which means Ubisoft made it for portable play. Liberation plays more like an episodic adventure designed to let players dip in for a bit before leaving it, so it’s missing a sense of urgency and coherence from the mainline console games. It also introduces mechanics, such as disguises, that have the potential to shake up the series’ usual formula — and then never does anything with them.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage is Ubisoft experimenting with stealth again, after spending nearly a decade making Assassin’s Creed an action-RPG. It’s more of a spin-off than a main entry in the series, and that shows in the comparatively limited approach to quest design.

Baghdad is vast and recreated in spectacular fashion, but most essential quests are just minor variations of each other with none of the contrasts from something like Assassin’s Creed II or even Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Side quests are shallow, and exploration tasks outside the city send Basim, the protagonist, to vaguely different-looking locations with the same kinds of hide-and-stab encounters. The fact that “hide” is included in that formula is enough to keep Mirage from landing lower in this list, though, after modern Assassin’s Creed all but ditched stealth completely. Some of the late-game stealth segments are superb in their staging and how tense they become. Everything else is just too repetitive.

How much someone is willing to forgive Assassin’s Creed Unity‘s flaws depends on how much they enjoy the French Revolution as a setting. Ubisoft’s vision of 1790s Paris is grand and exciting, all the more for how rarely games and other media use it as a backdrop. Slipping through crowds and leaping across buildings is standard Assassin’s Creed stuff, but when the crowds are full of bourgeoisie and Jacobins, and the buildings overlook the guillotines, it’s hard not to feel a little more excited than usual.

Arno Dorian, the protagonist, is rather less exciting. His story, ostensibly a consequence of Shay Cormac’s actions in Rogue, just ends up being a rehash of the vengeance tales Ubisoft had told in many forms by the time Unity launched. Even aside from that, Arno’s just unlikeable. He’s meant to be sympathetic, with his desire for justice and the lengths he and his love interest, the freedom fighter Elise, go to for the sake of their home. However, the lack of any meaningful character development and shallow writing mean he’s never more than just a two-dimensional, edgy action hero stereotype.

Assassin’s Creed II improved pretty much everything that was wrong with the original game, and reviewers at the time weren’t exaggerating when they called it a perfect sequel. Quest design is varied, and Assassin’s Creed II actually uses its setting to tell a story, instead of just letting it be an exotic backdrop. Equally as important, Ezio, the hero of the piece, has an important part to play in that story, unlike the original protagonist, Altair, who’s just there to stab people. Ezio’s quest for vengeance is hardly groundbreaking narrative material, but it’s hard to overstate just how much better a story is when it lets players skulk around Renaissance Italy and punch a corrupt pope. 

Assassin’s Creed II is still rough by modern standards, with janky controls and a world that, for all its visual splendor, is rather flat and basic. This is where Ubisoft found its footing, though. It’s just a shame it lost that footing again with Assassin’s Creed III.

Brotherhood is one of Ubisoft’s best Assassin’s Creed efforts, with meaningful improvements over its predecessors and, better still, a real attempt to engage with history and use it in more ambitious ways. Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed II is back for another conflict with the infamous Borgia clan, who tightened their corrupt rule over Rome after Ezio decked the pope at the end of Assassin’s Creed II. Few pieces of non-fiction examine the tension between spiritual and secular in Renaissance Italy. Brotherhood is hardly a deep exploration of the subject, but it handles its topics with nuance and a finesse lacking in many other Assassin’s Creed games.

Outside the main conflict, Ezio can develop a network, or brotherhood, of fellow assassins and send them off to deal with problems cropping up across Europe. These all have some other historical personage or important event at their center and give Brotherhood a sense of being more than just a historical playground. It’s also just a well-implemented mechanic, the same as Ezio’s other new tools. He gets a bunch of new abilities this time, from suddenly learning how to ride a horse to gliding with a parachute and even piloting a tank courtesy of Leonardo da Vinci, an accurate nod to some of da Vinci’s more astonishingly ahead-of-their-time inventions.

Syndicate exists in an odd place of its own. The main story is the highlight, an unusual feature given how previous games tended to prioritize action over narrative. The heroes this time are a sibling duo in Victorian London, and it ends up being a lighthearted tale, despite assassinations and the righting of wrongs still being the central idea. Sure, Jacob and Evie are bumping off villains, but they’re also driving around in their own carriage and going on ghost hunts with Charles Dickens. Syndicate is easily one of the best ways Ubisoft has engaged with history in the entire series, if only for how off-the-wall it sometimes gets.

Everything else is just more of the same Assassin’s Creed, though. Ubisoft did little to change its familiar approach to quest design, and combat, though less arduous than Assassin’s Creed Unity‘s, is still repetitive and in need of a serious overhaul. The same is true of Syndicate‘s side quests, which were shallow and missing the spark that the main quests had.

The most recent game in the series has been, in many ways, heralded as a return to form for the franchise for those who prefer the stealth-oriented gameplay of the early Assassin’s Creed games over the action focus of the modern entries. But, truthfully, it has both. Set in the Sengoku period of 16th century Japan, the game stars Naoe, a shinobi, and Yasuke, an African samurai based on the historical figure of the same name. Swapping between both on-the-fly lets players experience whichever flavor of Assassin’s Creed they’d like: stealthy (Naoe) or brutish (Yasuke).

The game starts slows, taking anywhere from ten to 14 hours to even offer the ability to swap, but once it does it’s not just one of the best entries in the series, but a stellar ninja/samurai simulator that easily go toe-to-toe with the likes of games like Rise of the Ronin (2024) or Ghost of Tsushima (2020). Ubisoft famously avoided the feudal Japanese setting to focus on showcasing other period settings less saturated in pop media, but after just a few hours of playing Shadows, it’s abundantly clear that the series was always destined to arrive here.

“Bigger is better” except when it’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. The cracks that started to show in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s length and padding fully burst in Valhalla. It’s just too big, with far too much busywork and not enough variety. Clearing an entire region takes hours of real-world time, and then the task is to do the same thing again in a different setting, and again and again until it all wraps up 100 hours later — or sooner, if the player ditches it for something else. The lack of a strong story to at least give this repetition some meaning doesn’t help, either. For all the talk of ancient orders and Templar conspiracies, it really just boils down to Eivor, the protagonist, acting like Alfred the Great and uniting all the Saxon provinces. Alfred, meanwhile, is setting up the Knights Templar in a sudden plot twist that goes nowhere. It’s a mess.

That said, Valhalla is one of Ubisoft’s most visually impressive games. The recreation of Middle Ages England — well, the loose confederation of provinces that eventually became England — is consistently beautiful, whether Eivor’s rambling over rolling green hills, delving into moody forests, or trudging through misty swamps. It’s often worth exploring off the beaten path as well. While Valhalla‘s main quests are uninspired and predictable, it has some of the best and most robust side quests in the series.

Origins is Ubisoft’s big Assassin’s Creed shakeup, the game where exploration, combat, and character progression became more important than hiding and leaping across rooftops. The setting is candy for history lovers. Bayek, a Medjay ranger, takes on missions from Cleopatra in a bid to stabilize Ptolemaic Egypt as the shadow of Roman aggression looms ever closer. These quests take him across multiple regions, each recreated with enough accuracy to where Origins also doubles as an educational tool and each rich with character and distinct cultures.

For all the changes Origins introduced, what missions require is largely similar to how they play out in previous games — just with more combat and less sneaking. Battles are rather a drag as well. Origins adds new combat skills and a few extra enemy types, but not enough to make the frequent encounters enjoyable over the game’s long run time. 

Still, the glamor of traveling across ancient Egypt adds a new sense of excitement to the familiar stealth actions. Exploring off the beaten path is its own reward in other ways as well. Ubisoft tucked away Origins‘ collectibles and other secrets in mini-dungeons and other areas full of smartly designed puzzles. It’s a blast, like being Classical Age Indiana Jones, and it highlights just how good Ubisoft can be at location design.

Assassin’s Creed IV feels like a proper sequel to Assassin’s Creed II. Everything Ubisoft did right with Ezio’s first adventure is even better here, and the setting is one of the series’ best. Black Flag follows Connor Kenway, a seaman and privateer, toward the end of the Golden Age of Piracy in the late 1710s, as the oppressive politics and social mores of Spain and England drive people into the Caribbean to seek a better life. It’s classic pirate stuff of the kind that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, and it’s an excellent backdrop that makes even the normally silly feud between Assassins and Templars feel dramatic.

Assassin’s Creed IV also features some of the series’ best stealth and combat encounters, even if they’re tucked away outside the main story. The open world is big, but not yet as overwhelming as later Assassin’s Creed worlds would be, and exploring it actually feels rewarding thanks to the excellent side quests. On top of all that is a naval combat system that’s yet to be surpassed by other modern games that sold themselves on sea-faring conquest.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is to Origins what Assassin’s Creed II is to the first game. Every failing from Origins is smoothed over in Odyssey, with a more dynamic lead character, better — but still a bit monotonous — combat, and a much stronger story. It’s set against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, where Athens fought Sparta for dominance in the Aegean Sea, but it delves into more than just another conflict. Athenian society and politics, Greek cults, and the debate over what it meant to be Greek are all up for exploration.

The biggest drawback for Odyssey is just how massive it is. The side quests and exploration are among the series’ best, and one expects a Greek odyssey to be a huge adventure. However, it takes ages to finish, and some of the less well-developed systems, such as conquest battles, feel like empty padding that adds to the length without doing anything meaningful. A more carefully curated epic would’ve been preferable.

However, it’s all in service of the series’ best framework. Sure, Odyssey is gorgeous, exciting, and ambitious. However, it’s also the fulfillment of the Assassin fantasy Ubisoft laid out in the first game, of seeking out villains who threaten to upend order and using wits, stealth, and preternatural acrobatic abilities to get the job done. If Origins is Classical Indy, then Odyssey is Ancient Aegean Sherlock Holmes. The goal for protagonist Alexios or Kassandra (pick Kassandra; Alexios is terribly boring) is tracking down the leader of a Greek cult. That means hunting his subordinates and peeling information from them, putting it together, and deciding where to go next. The friction that’s missing in Shadows‘ intel gathering is fully present in Odyssey, and the Greek adventure is all the better for it.