Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a big world full of splendor—and more importantly, lots of stuff to kill. As you chew your way through lions, Spartans, and cultists, you'll find a huge variety of ancient weapons to wield in battle. Knowing which weapon to use, though, is half of the battle. That's where our Assassin's Creed Odyssey weapon guide comes in.

Once you get a dozen hours into the game, Odyssey throws an ample supply of Legendary-quality weapons your way. And thanks to the flexible upgrade and engraving system, you can always spend resources to upgrade their damage and traits to stay relevant all the way to level 50. So don't worry about finding the one best weapon because it really depends on your playstyle and what traits you engrave into your weapon of choice. The best weapon depends on what kinds of enemies you're facing and what skills you've unlocked. Here, we'll break down each type of weapon, with a few recommendations of what skills complement these weapons.

For all of these weapons, though, we recommend unlocking Overpower Attacks as soon as possible. With the press of a button, your character will spend three stamina bars to unleash a deadly, unblockable combo that changes depending on your weapon while also healing you for a significant amount. It's insanely powerful, and you build adrenaline so quickly in fights that you can make use of this skill several times in prolonged fights.

With that out of the way, here's our Assassin's Creed Odyssey weapons guide.

Bare fists 

With so many swords and spears to use, you might overlook the value in bare knuckle boxing your opponent into submission. Your character in Odyssey is pretty handy with a punch, and damage from fists won't kill characters but instead knock them unconscious. If you want to recruit an enemy for your ship, tame an animal, or have a quest from a character who doesn't want you to kill anyone, going unarmed is always a good option. 

Swords 

Everyone starts out with a sword, and for good reason: it's the most versatile, flexible weapon in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey arsenal. Sword attacks in Odyssey are most effective at targeting a single enemy and they're also one of the faster weapons, which makes them useful for fighting higher-level enemies. When an enemy uses an unblockable attack, dodge to get behind them and then unleash hell.

Best skills for swords:

Sparta Kick: The shorter reach of the sword and dagger make them a good fit for the Sparta Kick. Since you'll already be in close, assigning the Sparta Kick to a melee hotkey is an easy way to finish off a combo with a brutal kick to the face. Don't forget that kicking enemies off of ledges is a great way to kill higher-level opponents.

Hero Strike: Your character's assassin damage is insanely high, but you can only use it when you're being sneaky. Hero Strike takes that high damage level and lets you use it in the middle of a melee.

Shield Breaker: Enemies with shields are a huge pain for swords. Heavy attacks will work, but they're slow. Get in close with the Shield Breaker to tear the shield off your enemy and fling it away. 

Daggers 

Daggers specialize in speed and getting up close. Focus on one enemy at a time and use the rapid-fire combos to kill them before they can respond. If you're facing a heavy-hitter like a brute, dagger attacks will carve them up while they're working on their big, slow attacks. When you do have to dodge or block, daggers are the fastest weapon to resume your attacks.

The downside is that you need to get real close to an enemy, which is dangerous. And their single-target style makes them especially bad choices for Conquest battles, where you'll always be fighting three or four people at once.

Best skills for daggers:

Flaming Attack/Venomous Attack: Both the fire and poison skill upgrades take a few hits to start doing extra damage. That's why they're perfect for daggers: you're already landing a dozen strikes a second anyway, so you can light people on fire or poison them fast.

Vanish: This skill blinds nearby enemies so you can escape, but dagger users can employ it offensively to distract groups of enemies so they can focus them down one at a time. Just know that any enemy you hit will become unstunned, so be careful to only damage one target at a time.

Call to Arms: You can't use this ability while in combat, but if you're about to take on a pack of bad guys, use Call to Arms to summon an ally to distract them while you get in behind with your daggers and carve up enemies one by one. 

Spears and Staffs 

Fighting multiple opponents is almost a certainty, which makes staffs and spears very handy. The long reach and wide swinging style of Odyssey's combos make them great for crowd control. Spears are usually better for getting the longest reach and staffs are better for fighting while surrounded, but they're very close to identical.

Generally, spears do more damage while staffs have more knockback power. Which one you prefer will probably come down to the situation: If you're fighting a few enemies on top of a building, the staff will send them flying to their deaths. If you're fighting an angry lion or a mercenary with a poisoned dagger, the longer reach of the spear will keep you from getting punctured.

Best skills for spears and staffs:

Flaming Attack/Venomous Attack: Staffs and spears don't hit as fast as daggers, so it will take a little more time to get a fire or poison bonus going. On the other hand, adding a bonus to staff or spear attacks gives you the unique ability to light everyone in the room on fire at once. 

Charged Heavy Attack: If you get a moment to breathe, charging up a heavy attack will give you a huge damage bonus and a big, sweeping target area. Use the staff and spear's range to get some distance, then swing for the fences.

Ring of Chaos: If you're already surrounded anyway, the Ring of Chaos skill lets you stun everyone within a few meters of you. This skill is mostly wasted in one-on-one fights, which makes it a good crowd control companion for staff and spear users. 

Heavy Bladed and Heavy Blunt 

These two-handed monsters are huge, slow, and powerful. You won't have to worry about enemies with shields, since these attacks will stagger anyone with a shield. That said, heavy maces and axes are the hardest weapons to use, and they seem to be a good fit only in the rarest of occasions. Their long, slow wind-up makes it hard to get hits in without also taking damage from faster enemy attacks. If you can stun or trick an enemy long enough to get swinging, though, there's almost nothing in the game that can do more damage.

Best skills for heavy bladed and heavy blunt:

Bull Rush: Charging through enemies and dealing a lot of damage is somewhat wasted on the other weapons, but for the heavy hitters it's a great way to get in close, stun your opponent, and leave yourself free to demolish the opposition.

Charged Heavy Attack: If you can see an attacker coming but they haven't gotten to you yet, using the charged heavy attack is one hell of a way to say "hello." The heavy attack also has a big throwback bonus, so if you use it with a heavy mace, you might fling enemies farther than even the best Sparta Kick.

Ring of Chaos: Even if you're not surrounded, the Ring of Chaos can reliably stun anyone nearby. For heavy weapons, time is the most precious commodity. Use the area stun and then flatten any nearby enemies before they can get themselves back together. 

Bows 

I'm not going to lie, the entire hunter skill tree feels like a bit of a waste of time. I've had great success specializing in both the warrior and the assassin skill trees, but the hunter skills are comparatively weak—too weak to make them worth focusing all your ability points in, anyway. Instead, hunter skills are good companions to the other, better skill trees.

Bows also get short shrift in the design department because they all handle the same way, and they're a terrible option if you're being attacked up close. That means they're often used outside of combat to snipe unsuspecting enemies or soften a target before going in for the kill.

Best skills for bows:

Sixth Sense: This skill slows time and auto-locks onto an enemy's torso any time they spot you while in stealth. Rather than letting that one guard blow the whistle, you have a chance to take him out fast and keep sneaking.

Rain of Destruction: Launches a massive flight of arrows straight up and straight down onto the heads of anyone in the targeted area. Upgrade it to use explosive arrows and then unleash carpet bombings on groups of enemies.

Overpower Strike: Overpower Strike is like shooting cruise missile with fletching. Unlike a lot of the other shots, the overpowered shot is strong enough and big enough to successfully assassinate a high-level target from a distance.

Tom: Assassin's Creed Odyssey is really good. Steven called it "a remarkably massive RPG held together by a web of satisfying pursuits" in our Assassin's Creed Odyssey review. We have found one sticking point that's worthy of more discussion, however. If you head into the 'Time Savers' section of the in-game store, you can find a permanent 50 percent XP boost that lets you progress through the story faster without having to complete as many of the game's side activities. It costs 1000 Helix credits. A pack containing 1050 Helix credits costs $10/£9. You also get some free credits during the game. 

Samuel and I both bought it, and for me it solves the biggest problem I have with the game. I played eight hours of Odyssey at a preview event. I noted my struggles to hit the level gate at the end of the demo. Now I'm going through the game again with the XP boost active, and it's a much smoother, more enjoyable experience. I love the story, but I only enjoy some of the sidequests and side activities. In another RPG, like The Witcher 3, the levelling curve is forgiving enough to let me progress at my own pace and pick and choose what I want to do. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey I feel like I can only do that with the permanent 50 percent XP boost. 

I haven't paid for an asset or a mission. It's ten bucks to tweak a number value. It's the sort of change you might expect to see in a balance patch.

I paid for it, so I guess I'm part of the problem, but it feels like a few years ago paying ten bucks for an XP boost in a singleplayer RPG would cause a lot more uproar. That's not to say most people aren't happy with the game's default XP tuning, but it's the kind of microtransaction we're used to seeing in free-to-play MMOs and multiplayer games being slotted into a game that already costs £50. That seems… not cool?

Samuel: I agree. Me and Tom both bought this independently of each other when the game launched last week, and for me it's partly in response to Origins, which introduced aggressive level-gating that nudged you towards side activities. By the end of that game I was so done with grinding—I completed the final section under-levelled and in stealth, struggling to take on a single enemy face-to-face, because I wasn't prepared to give the game any more of my time in reaching the recommended level. I otherwise loved Origins, but I felt like I limped to its finale. 

There's another reason I paid for the XP booster in Odyssey. On PC, you can pay for a temporary 25% XP booster with 10 uPlay coins (the free currency you unlock for completing achievements in Ubisoft games) through the Club rewards option of the menu. I put this on for two hours, and immediately noticed the difference. But you can only use it once. 

I could breeze through the opening islands without wasting time on as many side activities, focusing on what I believe are higher-quality side quests and main missions. Seven hours into the game, with the paid XP booster, I'm only ticking off the activities I want to do, and having no problem with the level curve. I've generally avoided the mercenary boards and limited time quests. This is the way I want to play. It costs $10/£9 extra. 

In discussing its issues with the boost last week, Polygon noted "Odyssey feels more like an Assassin's Creed game with this option purchased than it does without". I'm not sure I entirely agree—but the existence of the booster has made me think long and hard about Ubisoft's approach to level-gating. 

Tom: I don't think the default levelling curve was designed in bad faith; I'm sure the devs would like players to explore all of the activities they have made. But in an open world RPG I value the freedom to not do things I find tedious. The presence of the XP boost does encourage conspiratorial thinking though—is the XP curve tuned to be irritating enough to push people into XP boosts? 

The problem is that level disparities in both Origins and Odyssey are so punishing that being even one level below your opponents makes the game worse—and I don't mean difficult, I mean it makes the game less fun. It's not hard to press on through a one level deficit, it's just annoying. Enemies take a lot more hits to go down. The pace of the game becomes gruelling. 

Samuel: This, I think, is the problem: a difference of a few levels in Assassin's Creed doesn't mean an interesting combat challenge like it might in another third-person game. It means a gruelling encounter with skull-labelled enemies who take very little damage, while two of their hits will kill Alexios/Kassandra. Level-gating rules everything in Odyssey. I tried completing one of the larger-scale battles while under-levelled, and I couldn't kill the captains fast enough with my attacks to make the bar go down. I'm good enough at the game to avoid taking damage and survive, but the numbers and the timer dictate my success there, not how good I am at countering or using my abilities. It's this collision of flawed level-gating and microtransactions that inevitably leaves a bit of a sour taste. 

I'm otherwise really enjoying Odyssey, but it would be with some caveats if I was playing it at Origins' pace. If the XP booster didn't exist, maybe I wouldn't be thinking about the pacing of the game so much. Maybe I'd just get on with the grind without complaining. I've written before about games that do and don't respect your time—the PC release of Final Fantasy 12 includes a fast-forward function that lets you grind through enemies at a crazy speed, and it makes the game tons better than its original PS2 version. But Square Enix didn't charge you extra for it. 

I spend a lot of time worrying about how much games demand of my time now. This might not be the case for everyone, though: if Odyssey is the one big game you buy this year, maybe the gentle levelling curve represents value for money. It just doesn't to me. I'd rather have those hours back. We discussed Origins' problem with bloat earlier this year, and the thing that solves that issue in Odyssey...is extra money. 

Tom: A cursory Google of Origins or Odyssey turns up a bunch of ‘how to grind XP' guide pieces, and for me grind shouldn't be a part of a modern singleplayer RPG. My days of farming Cactuar for rare drops are over, and it's a shame to lock off the world behind XP gates and then charge players to access it faster.

Peak concurrent players for Assassin's Creed Odyssey reached nearly 62,000 on Steam yesterday, making a considerable gain (about 33%) over last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, which reached a peak of just over 41,000 concurrent users in October 2017. Origins, which released last year, was a big success for Ubisoft—and a bit of a gamble, seeing as they’d taken a year off AC’s release schedule in 2016. Critical reception to Odyssey has been very strong, with many noting that it feels like a more mature, refined version of Origins.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey follows the journey of Alexios and Kassandra, two proto-assassins during the ancient war between Athens and Sparta in roughly 420 BC. It’s notable for letting you choose between a male or female protagonist and for its huge, free-roaming map that sees the return of popular naval mechanics from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Odyssey also has romance storylines, and wouldn't you know it, we've got a guide for them here.

Thanks, GytHyp.