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★★★★ Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

There is always something wonderfully romantic about Ancient Greece. Maybe it’s the combination of artistic and military power coupled with a belief system that makes Telemundo look tame in comparison. Since childhood, the era and its historical and mythological stories have tickled my imagination, so I will — in the spirit of openness and honesty — admit that I was more than a little excited when I finally got my hands on the latest Assassin’s Creed, which is set in the era of the Greek Peloponnesian War.

Luckily, it exceeds all expectations.

The lore and game play of Assassin’s Creed has always been a formulaic one: You are a man who travels back in your lineage to find whatever information can help your cause — most of the time on the side of the assassins, on one occasion for the Templars.

You do as you are told, with the only deviation being how many innocent people you may want to slaughter.

It is a system that was a well-established mechanic for games pre-2015. But slowly over the past few years there has been an evolution where open worlds of choice and consequence have become not just an intriguing mechanic on to specific games — Fallout, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. It has now become the norm. Gamers no longer want empty vessels to point and shoot a forced-upon agenda. They want deeper integration into stories and landscape. They want choice.

And these ancient Greek isles are thick with it. The most obvious form of choice players have is the chance to pick either a male or female character, who — thanks to the motion capture — are not copy pastes of each other.

The siblings Kassandra and Alexios are different in both manner and execution and lend themselves to a completely different emotional and strategic gaming experience. The only thing they truly share are their lovers, and there are many of them. What’s more is that the casual pansexual lovers are another first for the franchise, and although at times a bit clumsy, still a welcome one — ahoy, love isle-and.

This new alternative is helped by the fact that the siblings are ridiculously hot and wonderfully rendered. In fact, the whole game is beautiful to look at.

With slick, smooth gameplay, the designers have truly outdone themselves with a fully interactive world to lose yourself in.

But in the end when you finally do crawl out of another bandit cave there will be choices and consequences waiting for you. Sides to be chosen, plague victims to kill (or not to kill), countries to fight for and homes to wreck.

It’s a wonderful step in a new direction for a franchise that had been stale for a little while.

This is definitely the Spartan kick in the pants the franchise needed. Good job, guys (and girls).