You might have already seen the glimpse of a mythical creature in the latest Assassin's Creed Odyssey trailer, but at Gamescom we played deeper into that tease and believe us, it was not easy. This is Assassin's Creed as you've never played it before.

In that the usual poetic license has been elevated to levels we might never have thought we'd see in Assassin's Creed outside of tangent DLC not tied to the series proper, yet here we are.

Here's a snippet from our hands-on:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has all of the above, but also adds up to eight combinations of extra skills, attacks and abilities while in combat. These are managed by a complicated and dexterously-challenging placement of the four face-buttons on any controller, with both the left bumper (or L1) and left trigger (L2) acting as a platform for which of the eight you want to utilise, alongside the usual evade, light (right bumper, R1) and heavy attacks (right trigger, R2). The left trigger, obviously tied to your ranged abilities allows for a deep system around your bow, while the left bumper mapped attacks, buffs, abilities and more. These can be allocated as you see fit, and the actual depth of what was on offer in-menu was daunting. Suffice to say, it took a bit of getting used to.

After my fourth Desynchronisation, I just jumped back on to my barge and decided to leg it out of there and explore. While at sea a whale breached ahead of our bow and dolphins swam in schools beside us, occasionally leaping joyfully out of the water (probably because they are actual jerks in real life and were showing off). The impressive wave physics challenged our forward momentum, but my men sang merrily and we pressed on. It wasn’t until I got a real-world tap on the shoulder by our demo overseer that I was told we had to go back to Lesbos, and we had to face the combat challenge laid before us. Damn.

Our full in-depth hands-on can be found here, and stay tuned for gameplay video capture of our own Odyssey following soon after.