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Here is a few reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc_TaeF9Yks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUyWgzn-Wns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45Di1rgw9tg
Then you have both positive, negative and mixed..
Minus the mythical junk. If that's what you are after.
AC Odyssey didn't win anything at the Game Awards in 2018.
Shadows will win something.
Best Action/Adventure of 2025 is a guarantee. So is Best Audio Design.
Possibly Game of the Year.
Best Game Direction and Best Art Direction are also possibilities.
YMMV ancient Greece vs feudal Japan.
IMO, combat, stealth, gear, skill trees, exp levels, etc. are heavily in Shadows' favor.
Story, I don't know. I can't remember much of Odyssey's and I didn't finish it. I seldom complete AC games. This one, I might. I have much better momentum to keep playing this. Despite less free time as I did when I was playing Odyssey.
Visuals? I'd say Shadows crushes Odyssey in several ways, obviously on technical grounds, the seasons are also a very cool touch. Odyssey does have a certain charm to it, and that may come down to being Greece of antiquity, tying into the earlier matter of preference.
Music, neither really stands out to me. I like what I hear often, but it's probably rather forgettable in both. Valhalla, on the other hand, I liked a lot. And those Black Flag sea shanties!
On the balance, I put Odyssey near the top of my personal AC ranking of what I've played, but Shadows is probably my #1 at this point. I'm not a die hard fan of the franchise, and I mostly dabble in it because I like stealth/assassination games and I love history/historical fiction and world travel. The games getting better as games, also helps, but, isn't even really what I show up for, but is a nice bonus, as far as I am concerned.
https://steamcommunity.com/id/Germality/recommended/3159330/
Since it is an AC RPG game it is of course in various ways similar to Odyssey. However, the one thing you asked for, the mercenaries which kind of acted like a Nemesis system are absent,
In my opinion Odyssey, overall, is better.
The combat in Odyssey is a bit more fun and varied, you have very, very limited skills in Shadows, 3. Odyssey had so many more and therefore you could do more things.
As mentioned Shadows is lacking the roaming mercenaries that hunt you down. There are "Guardians" in Shadows but they only really appear after an alarm in castles and do not really compare to the mercs in Odyssey. There is also no progression system here like in Odyssesy with the mercs.
Odyssey had more varied things to do, the ship and ship combat is missing, legendary enemies are missing, Shadows has zero ISU stuff in the game. So if you liked the somewhat more fantastical elements in the previous RPG games it is entirely absent here.
On the plus side, if that is what you prefer, Shadows is much more grounded (with a few rare exceptions) and serious. In fact, especially Oydssey did not shy away from being silly at times, or light-hearted. Shadows on the other hand is dead serious, there are very, very few more light-hearted moments in the game.
So whether or not you'll prefer Shadows over Odyssey is down to personal preference. But Shadows definitely is similar to Odyssey, it just lacks various of the things you had in Odyssey. Also absent is - for the most part - story focused fun side content. Odyssey had a host of recurring and fun side characters that involved you in a few really fun quests that were not always primarily about stabbing people to death. This is not really a thing in Shadows or in a much more limited capacity.
Anyway, you can't go wrong with Shadows if the AC RPG games are something you have enjoyed before. Just know that Shadows is more grounded, more serious, has (as of now, who knows what DLCs will add) basically zero ISU stuff and the overall gameplay loop is not as varied as in Odyssey where you had conquest battles, ship warfare and exploration, the mercenary system you asked about and all the usual AC stuff of course and even more skills overall for combat.
Curious, I would recommend you look into some fun builds for Odyssey because with the right build you will reach god tier levels of power, YouTube has various excellent build guides. I felt SO much more powerful in Odyssey! Although mid to endgame level builds in Shadows are also very, very powerful, but not quite on the level you could be in Odyssey. In Odyssey you can literally create a build that makes you immortal, i.e. you simply cannot die in combat, at all. And still deal astronomical amounts of damage. You can be so powerful that you can one shot enemies.
On the contrary, i found Valhalla to be a slog I could never finish, and I tried twice (may try a third time...).
What it does have are hunting targets and a fairly dynamic board system to go about it all. Its been interesting
Shadows is nothing like Odyssey.
Odyssey was about fantasy, fun
Shadows is about delusion, message
Graphics are nice, visuals are terrible.
For walking around the world, it is okay, the vibe, nature, but gameplay and everything, once you start doing anything, oh my god, fun goes out the window very quickly.