Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Ubisoft missed its calling to be a focus group testing company but I suppose producing video games makes way more money if you know the analytics, explains why whenever you see someone from the company talking to you, their fingers are always touching. Then they show videos with actors pretending to be playing games. "Wow, that was leet, Mark." "Haha, you said it, Debra, I mean skullcrusher005." AC: Valhalla is an AC in name only but it's also a video game made from other video games. Witcher 3 has side quests, a massive open world and a horse. Dragon's Dogma has the "make your own side-dude and let other people online ignore him too" system. Popular Game had fishing in it. This one lets you stack rocks, though, so that's cool. The combat is supposedly more fluid but it's basically just faster and easier Dark Souls with stealth being a non-issue since there's no cover in an age without buildings or lots of fencing. You'll find some bushes and a cart of hay but, outside of the small areas where you're nudged into killing the meticulously placed baddies that make you feel like you're an assassin, you'll be running around, throwing axes at people. Makes for a good action game but you're supposed to be sneaky? And diplomatic? And I'm now ending fragments sentences like they're questions because this game made me go full zoomer and drop my attention span? Just zero passion and creativity, the whole thing is empty. Meanwhile, things they should've stolen, they didn't. Remember when you could go Batman/Witcher and look around yourself with that gaudy scanning mode and they replaced it with holding the right stick down for a second to get a tiny glimpse of what's 2 meters from you? That's worse. Climbing is still just as bad as when they tried to do Up/Down parkour controls from Unity. They even somehow made the bird thing worse.

Narrative-wise, they're still pushing the Not Desmond Trilogy, whoever that woman is in the modern day segments that we're supposed to like because she's a woman, I don't know if they gave her real depth or not because I tried my hardest to speedrun those shoehorned-in parts that add nothing to the overall experience. As for the Animus setting, you'll find enough cliches to kill yourself in a drinking game but I won't spoil anything for you. Just know that if you've seen a movie or two, you know exactly what the next 5 scenes are going to be at any point in the game. "I wonder if he'll betray me." "I wonder if that's the MacGuffin." "I wonder if that was a sign that I shouldn't get too attached." Well, wonder no more, my friend. The story is 4th priority since the real purpose of the game was to make another "sail the seas and climb the trees and look at the rare loot that not-Templar dropped" AAA title. Origins was great because it was a serious "new entry," a new direction, something fresh. Then Odyssey came out right after it and moved even farther away from what people expected while still retaining what people enjoyed from Origins. This is them ironically repeating the same "definition of insanity" with knowing they could make money if they threw another AC at us real fast. I got this for $10 and was bored throughout. Played however many hours, watched later parts on YouTube to see if it ever got better, stopped cold turkey. If my mother weren't such a diehard romance novel fan who got sucked in because of Altair and Ezio, I wouldn't have even gotten this for her and ended up trying it out of curiosity. I regret letting it suck me in for as long as it did.

I can't recommend you pick this one up for a quick romp through the dirt with your trusty replaceable horse because after the 4 minute loading screen, you're met with a quiet, spacious, grassy nothingworld to run around in with no shortage of "mysteries" that include helping a terribly annoying kid (LOADS OF CHILD ACTORS IN THIS OH MY GOD WHY DID THEY ALLOW THIS) find a rock or some horny woman talk to a dude or convincing a guy he's allowed to cry or killing a sheep to find a brooch he ate or finding snake eggs so a woman can let out a smelly fart (they even touted this as a good example of side quests in a trailer pre-launch) or... ugh... even Witcher 3 had that finding a frying pan for the old lady quest that people make fun of and it feels like Valhalla copied that and made it worse. At least it's pretty and isn't too glitchy, I guess...

This is probably the worst Assassin's Creed game yet, even in comparison to AC3 and Origins. 

For starters, it's an Assassin's Creed title in name only. Not only have they departed from the Templar vs Assassin story, but the gameplay makes stealth the absolute worst option for every scenario. The level design is so poor that it feels the designers made no effort to create alternate approaches to situations. There are a host of activities that can only be completed by "going loud," making a stealth focused character perform poorly. 

The atmosphere and story are extremely bland. Every location looks the same, the game runs poorly for how it looks, the audio quality is completely garbage (it sounds like it was not professionally mixed at all, with sounds echoing off walls when out in the open), the dialogue is full of anachronisms, and everything overall has a extreme lack of polish. The writing and scenarios also suffer, partly due to Ubisoft accommodating both a male and a female protagonist, partly due to the profoundly uninteresting setting.

The skill tree is uninteresting. Odyssey and Origins had some interesting and powerful abilities you could unlock via the skill tree, but Valhalla mostly just has stat boosts. For some reason it's also lacking the variety of options Odyssey included to tweak the gameplay to your liking, replacing it with an "Easy/Medium/Hard" selection in three categories: Exploration, Combat, Stealth. This results in you outleveling content rather quickly, and forces you to focus your gameplay in specific areas that match your level or else enemies will be too hard or too easy for you to fight.

As a fan of stealth games and the Assassin's Creed series, I really wanted to like Valhalla, but it does a very poor job at being either of those things. After about 15 hours, the gameplay loop is too boring and samey for me to get much further.