Assassin's Creed Odyssey DLC – Legacy of the First Blade: Hunted Review

By Brandin Tyrrel

As the first part of the first batch of post-launch content for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Legacy of the First Blade – Hunted is a short, straightforward dose of just some of what makes Odyssey so good. Though it doesn’t do anything particularly new, Hunted doubles down on the behind-the-scenes shadow-syndicate structure that made picking off the Cult of Kosmos across the Ancient Greek world so enjoyable and introduces a great new villain.

Hunted is a good starting point for a much larger plot that was just alluded to in the base game. While the lack of an Assassin’s Brotherhood subplot in Odyssey never bothered me, this introduction of a well-known Persian figure from that lore – and his backstory – is interesting enough to make me want to continue filling in those gaps after the Hunted’s three-to-five-hour run time is over.

With new allies must come new antagonists. Returning from its introduction in Assassin’s Creed Origins is the Order of the Ancient – which, if you’re keeping score at home, eventually evolves into the Templar Order. It operates similarly to the Cult of Kosmos, with its own web of masked figures that must be investigated, uncovered, and eliminated one by one.

As this is only the first third of the full downloadable content, that web is fairly small, focusing solely on one branch called the Hunters, which offers a scant seven targets. I fully expect more branches of the Order of the Ancient to come out of the woodwork in episodes two and three.

However, Hunted does introduce one of the more intriguing and memorable villains in Odyssey, and that’s because he poses as much of a psychological threat as a physical one to Alexios or Kassandra. Listening to his ghostly disembodied voice taunt me about all the people I’ve killed in a bid to be a hero has me excited to see what new characters Ubisoft has in store down the line.

The entirety of this episode takes place in the gorgeous, fiery, red-orange forests of the Macedonia region. Though it’s a large hunk of land, aside from one mission where you briefly take to the sea you’ll never leave it, which might be disappointing if you’ve already scoured it like I had.

Beyond the story and characters, Hunted does add some new weapons and armor to collect, but not much that changes the gameplay to any interesting degree. The exception being a new skill in the stealth tree called Death Veil, which makes the bodies of enemies you’ve assassinated disappear. It’s a useful trick that improves quality-of-life so you’re not micromanaging corpse disposal during several of Hunted’s missions that strongly encourage a stealthy approach, which should make fans of older Assassin’s Creeds happy.