Assassin's Creed Valhalla review

Recommended

by Zachary

Strong start. I like the setting. I like the slightly different feel to the combat. It’s heavier. The story opener is action packed too. I liked that.

The graphics are really good. The world at least. I like the icy mountain setting it starts in. I like the skill tree so far.

I really like that this game seems to be a lot less focused on scavenging and constantly changing your weapons ala power numbers. This is starting off strong, early prediction is it’s better than odyssey.

Just got to England. That was a sick prologue. Wow

Really liking this game. It’s the most I’ve clicked with an Assassin's creed game since… well probably since brotherhood? I really like the changes they have made to pull it away from a loot based destiny style RPG and a bit closer to Elden ring in that it’s more about upgrading gear than constantly switching out one sword for an identical sword with higher stats.

Really liking Valhalla. I love the combat, and I’m finding the encounters and side missions to be surprisingly good. Lots of funny encounters, some cool boss fights. I’ve being doing a lot so far because they have felt worthwhile. 

I like the gold, yellow blue system where it doesn’t tell you exactly what you are going to but it does give an indication of how “big” the POI is. I can roughly decide whether I want to go check out the area while still keeping some level of surprise and exploration. It’s working for me.

I’ve played almost entirely with two handed weapons. The game starts you off with ax and shield then duel wield axes and they were fine but when I got the big two handed ax that was my fave and then I got the big two handed sword and that then became my favourite.

I even enjoy the river raids side missions. The idea is fun, I like that it isn’t endless, it looks like even more maps areas to explore essentially. And there is a cool scythe weapon I’m interested in buying once I get enough resources.

Wow just started the Asgard section. There’s a whole new area that’s fucking Asgard. This game keeps getting better. There is a ridiculous amount of content but for a number of reasons I’m not finding it excessive like I did during odyssey. I’m enjoying the content and I’m finding it more rewarding in terms of progression.

The skill tree might be the best ever. It’s huge and there are many areas I want to upgrade. Plus the skill points have been coming in at a very good pace so far. Not too fast that they lose impact (like Diablo IV early on) and not so slow that it becomes a slog (Diablo IV later on). This could change but so far I’ve found the pacing to be excellent.

Wow, so after playing a lengthy Asgard section, and knowing there’s another jotenheim section coming, I then found the niflheim section which looks like it’s a rogue like. The amount of content in this game is huge.

Damn…game froze during my first run. First time all game I’ve had any issues like that. Poor timing for the first crash. 

Kk the crash didn’t wreck the whole run. Only a little bit of it. Nice

I’m at 24 hrs and I’m still very much into it. When I played odyssey this was around the time that I was kind of over it and I just switched to golden pathing the main quest for like the last 5 ish hours of the game. Currently, I don’t foresee that happening with Valhalla. I’m still into the main campaign and general exploration, I want to complete at least a few more river raids so I can unlock that scythe, and I’ll probably keep going to get that armour set as well. Plus I’m definitely going to beat the rogue like mode and any other Asgard stuff as well. I can’t tell if the Asgard stuff is extra side content or mainline but either way I’m doing it. Things can change quickly but if I was to guess, I’d say I’m going to be having a great time with Valhalla for a long time still. 

Played a few more rounds of the rogue like. It’s awesome. Part of me thinks it’s actually better than GOW Valhalla’s rogue like and TLOUP2 No Return. The game as a whole isn’t as good so it’s hard to directly compare which specific mode is better but I think as a whole ACV has better build variety, progression, and it ties into the main campaign as well which is a fun bonus. 

Got that grim reaper looking scythe from the river raids guy. It’s really good. Probs my new fave. Definitely my best weapon.

37 hrs in. Really enjoying this game. A few minor critiques now. Overall I have really enjoyed the side missions and encounters but after 37 hrs I am noticing that there are a bit too many short encounters where you just talk to a guy, walk somewhere, pick up an item or burn a house or something super simple that isn’t really fun. My other critique is the writing and dialogue is fine but not great. I enjoy lots of it, but sometimes I’m rolling my eyes and I also skip a ton of dialogue these days. Still, I think the quality of this game is excellent, especially considering the insane amount of content. I am hitting that point though that I’m realizing if I keep playing the game the way I have been, it’ll take me like 200 hrs to beat it, so I’m going to speed it up a bit because I don’t have that in me. 

45 hrs in. Just beat the Kassandra section. I was shocked when there was another new map section. It was an alright mission overall. I am curious how kassandra is a time traveler. At 45 hrs I switched up my weapon away from the reaper looking scythe I had because my weapon was too good and the combat was becoming a bit trivial. Plus I ended up not liking the ridiculously large weapon. I wanted a slightly more grounded look for awhile. So I am going to one handed weapons for the first time. Upgraded the blacksmith hammer and this shield that gives you health when you parry. Seems like a good option for boss fights which are the only parts of the game that are sometimes hard, only if I’m under leveled though. In general I’m cruising through the game at this point. I still want to finish the main campaign, the rogue like mode, and the Asgard story section. Which I feel will take at least another 20 hrs but that’s a blind guess. I will say my peak enjoyment has probably been met. I’m not over the game yet, I’m not finding it tedious yet, but I can feel it is around the corner at some point. And my best moments are likely in the past. Nothing wrong with that, I’ll probably be around 65 hrs with this game by the time I’m done which would be nuts.

At 57 hours currently and I won’t lie the fatigue is now here. But I’m conflicted because I do want to see how it ends. I’m loosely interested in the main storyline but god damn this game is fucking long. 

62.5 hours and I’m not done but I’m calling it. I have at least three more territories to do but at this point I’m bored. My character is such a high level and the combat and stealth is trivial at this point. I’ve tested out a ton of different weapons which was awesome and really helped add to the longevity. Overall I still really enjoyed this game. It’s too long for its own good and that hurts the main story which sucks. I’m going to just google what happens. Which I didn’t want to do. But oh well. Still my favourite modern assassins creed game I’ve played.

Okay a googled the ending and some more lore stuff and it was actually pretty cool. I would have never picked up on half of that stuff if I just played the game, funnily enough. It was the right decision to call it for multiple reasons. Cool game.

Final Score: A-

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.