Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Repetition is the most widespread complaint, found in 21% of the longer reviews, 28% of the negative ones and 19% of the positive ones, where it comes as a caveat. Players describe the same handful of activities on every island: forts with the same layouts, bandit camps, caves, statues to destroy, the same routine of killing a leader, burning supplies and looting chests, and side quests that boil down to fetching or killing. "By the time I completed my 573rd fort, killed my 142nd mercenary, and escorted my 89th slow-moving NPC, I started wondering if I was playing a game or clocking in for a second job." Some burned out dozens of hours in, left the main story unfinished, or wish the game were a third of the size, and four reviewers use the same phrase for it: "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle". Players also point to conquest battles, which flip territory back regardless of their effort.

"You progress in a quest line, but at the last quest the game tells you to lvl up 10 more levels." Grind, level gating or spongy enemies appear in 12% of the longer reviews and 20% of the negative ones. The main story regularly demands a higher level than the player has, so they must stop for side content. Level scaling means enemies keep pace, so progression feels hollow, and fights drag: "You can hit the same enemy over and over and it feels like you're fighting their health bar rather than the actual enemy." Enemies a few levels higher are described as nearly unkillable. Gear upgrades add to it, as "upgrades become ridiculously expensive very quickly" in drachmae and materials. Several players say they used Cheat Engine, trainers or mods to cut the grind, and a minority enjoy the challenge or say the grind fades once you explore naturally.

Launcher and account problems appear in 6% of the longer reviews but in 18% of the negative ones, and some of those reviewers say they could not get into the game at all. Reports include forced Ubisoft Connect sign-in for a single-player game, slow or failed logins, offline mode that does not work, the game linking to the wrong Ubisoft account ("Keeps coming up saying its linked to a different account, I literally cannot play it!"), CD key prompts after a break, "This product cannot be activated right now, please try again later.", locked or hacked accounts with slow support, and cloud saves rolling back ("My save file rolled back 5 irl days!"). Several of these reviewers say they like the game itself and voted it down only because of the launcher.

The most specific report in this group is the game hanging for minutes on the splash screen ("it still takes 5-10+ min for the game to load from the splash screen for a 2018 game"), which players link to Windows 11 24H2 and recent Intel CPUs, with workarounds such as disabling hyperthreading or E-cores in the BIOS. "With the recent Windows 11 24H2 update, it's unplayable." Crashes, freezes and performance problems appear in 5% of the longer reviews and 13% of the negative ones. Others describe random crashes, crashes at a specific story point, stutter and frame drops in cities, and muffled, compressed audio. "Nvidia users are just going to suffer constant crashes with seemingly no solution." Other players report a stable game that runs well on modest hardware and handhelds.

The in-game store comes up in 3% of the longer reviews, and the objection is specific: a single-player game sells XP boosts, resource packs and gear while its progression is grindy, which makes the grind look deliberate. "they force you to buy XP boost," wrote one negative reviewer; another said "id rank it higher if it didint have a cash shop." Others say the store is easy to ignore and the boosts are unnecessary.

A small group dislikes the Layla Hassan sections that pull them out of Greece. "My only complaint was the stupid IRL segments." A few lore fans defend them.

Facial animation, cutscene camera work and some voice acting draw criticism, especially next to Kassandra's performance: "It's so lifeless and stiff, and combined with the camera shots during dialogue make everything feel like a plastic playground." Reused NPC faces and missing or broken dialogue audio are mentioned too.

Loot clutter and constant inventory sorting, timed daily quests ("Daily quests are stupid and belong in MMOs, I didn't touch them."), other players' photos appearing on the map by default (one reviewer noted "it defaults to connections with other players (their screen shots show on your map by default and other annoyances like this)"), no shield, and achievements that require the DLC each come up in a handful of reviews.