I am not completely walking away from Assassins Creed: Odyssey but I feel less and less inclined to play it as I look at the games in my library. I like it, the story is nice, but just like in most games I don't really care for anything where you are essentially doing the same thing over and over and over again.
I need to break up the tedium and therefore have been trying to branch out to see what else there is in the PS Plus Extra catalog for me to play. As a long-time fan of Star Wars just in a general sense, I thought I would ignore the rather lukewarm reviews for this game and see for myself if it is something that I would enjoy.
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I don't know exactly why I shied away from this game for the past few months. It has been on offer in the PS Plus area for at least a month. I think I just found the idea of getting involved in a new game to be a bit too daunting when it is as large as this. I also watched one bad review of the game a long time ago and it gave me the wrong impression. Some of what it said was true but I also understand why the game is that way.
The major complaint was that there is no fast travel inside of the various areas where you have to fight your way in, and then they make you fight your way out rather than just letting you skip it all to return.
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I suppose this can be a little bit annoying but from what I have experienced thus far is that you don't (or can't) return to the start point by the same route that you took to get there, you go an entirely different route back and encounter new areas along the way. This kind of forces you to open the map and discover new areas that I think you will need to travel towards at some point anyway. Therefore, I dont get the gripe about that. Fighting isn't terribly complicated so it is not like you are being locked into a room and forced to fight an irritating foe over and over again. I've never encountered a single fight that it wasn't possible for me to simply skip outside of the one and only "boss fight" that I have been in, so I'm ok with the need to walk back to my ship.
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I thought about it a bit when I was going on some ziplines and now it occurs to me that you are not meant to easily be able to get back up to that upper area and this, in a way, is forcing you along the path towards the objective without letting you know that this is exactly what it is doing.
one thing that really appeals to me is the metroidvania style of this game, certain areas that I have already encountered on the two planets that I have visited are areas that I was unable to access previously until I end up acquiring some sort of Force Power that now makes that area accessible. This will make any revisiting of areas a lot more interesting in the event that I have to go there again or hell, I might just choose to go there and see if any new areas have somehow been opened for me.
I am playing the game on normal difficulty and I am yet to encounter a single situation where I came even close to dying. I have to presume that this changes later, just like you would expect.
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The inclusion of vehicles is an added bonus as well because this just brings back wonderful memories from my youth. In one of the early missions you are tasked with driving at AT-AT and attacking a position with it. That was loads of fun although it was a bit confusing. I have to imagine that you are invincible during this portion of it because I was sitting there, wondering why it is not letting me move forward, and getting rocked every now and then by something I couldn't see because I was looking at the ground. As it turns out there was some ship that had been hovering near me for a long time just popping off shots at me. This went on for a while so I have to believe that you are not meant to be able to lose during that. I suppose this is good as you learn the ropes, but I hope that it isn't "god mode" every time I get into a vehicle.
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I found it very fun to climb my way into this lurking menace even though the positioning of the vines and dirt on it were quite convenient and allowed for me to easily scale the side of it.
So far I think this game is a casual gamer's playground because none of it is very difficult but some of the puzzles will have you scratching your head trying to figure them out. These are fun and if you truly get stuck, well, I suppose we have the internet to help us with that.
This, as far as I can tell, is kind of a game for casual gamers like me. It probably would help if you are a Star Wars fan to begin with... which I am but mostly just as far as the stuff from the 80's and 90's is concerned. So far it has been a lot of fun and I am going to stick with this for a while now. Don't worry Assassin's Creed, you are not getting deleted yet.
If you want to give this game a crack just know that it is quite easy and nothing like some of the crazy difficult stuff that I see a lot of you posting such as FromSoft games that just make me want to cry with their learning curve. I think almost anyone can just pick this one up and play and honestly, that is what I was looking for when I fired this one up.
It is available in the PS-Plus Extra catalogue right now as part of your subscription.