Assassin's Creed Valhalla (2020) by Ubisoft

I'll always remember the first time I played Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

It's been another hard few months of COVID-19 lockdown here in the greater New York City area, and I've been looking forward to this game for a long time. I even bought a new TV for it—my first ever 4K HDR.

The first few hours of playing this game were an absolute dream and I found myself melting into its world, wholly immersed and embraced by the wonderful art direction, the gorgeous visuals, the carefully crafted environments, and the sense that there was something new to discover around every corner, past every crevice, down every well.

Odd, then, that now—a couple of weeks after my initial reaction, which was so adoring that I was almost brought to tears a few times— my feelings are far cooler than they initially were.

A tale of two teams

When reviewing some old opinions on other games in the series prior to writing this review, I felt so damn strongly that my complaints about Assassin's Creed Origins in my review (which is now infamous on Steam, with dozens of comments and thousands of votes) were the same ones I've now had with Valhalla.

I don't think that's a coincidence. A whole lot of stuff in Valhalla is a huge step back for some of the new evolutions in systems and some of the additional polish introduced in Assassin's Creed Odyssey—a game I really loved, which made incredible improvements on Origins, the game that came before it. This kind of improvement between is something that's happened before in this series, most notably with the games Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) and Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015). Syndicate improved Unity by leaps and bounds, and Origins ended up being a step back from some of those improvements.

And now it's happening again. Odyssey (2018) improved on Origins (2017) by leaps and bounds, and now those improvements have been set back once again by Valhalla.

There's a reason this kind of thing keeps happening. The way these Assassin's Creed games are made requires two separate teams working simultaneously to make these games, and each of these two teams has vastly different strengths and weaknesses.

Team A (featuring people such as Ashraf Ismail and Darby McDevitt, the brains behind games like Black Flag, Unity, and Origins, and the team which made this game—Valhalla) features strengths in storytelling, large-scale gameplay/feature innovation, and art direction. Their games are typically very ambitious—especially on the design-side (things like basing the entire game around ship combat with Black Flag, incorporating massive crowds which literally break the game in Unity, and certain features such as Senu the bird in Origins)—and they tend to look unbelievably stunning and have downright jaw-dropping worlds which feel real, mysterious, and beg you to dig into them. The art direction and cinematography of their games are managed with a superb eye, and the writing is generally far better than Team B's efforts.

Team B (headed up by devs like Scott Phillips and Alexis Cote, responsible for games such as Syndicate and Odyssey) tends to feature strengths more unique to the medium of video games: smoother, more polished core gameplay (eg. free climbing, level design, encounter scenarios); far better designed systems such as skill trees, loot, and gear; and designing compelling abilities for the player to use in combat situations. Team B's games aren't usually as innovative or as artistically relevant as Team A's, but they are far, far better at implementing classic video game systems such as loot, skill trees, and active abilities. Their games always seem to have smoother gameplay from moment-to-moment when doing things such as traversing the world or clearing enemy encampments, and far better designed stealth arenas and levels than Team A's games do. There are noticeable instances of Team B's games fixing some faults I have found in previous Team A games, eg. Syndicate fixing some of Unity's issues with its climbing and its stealth encounters, and Odyssey greatly improving on Origins' skill trees and loot systems. But Team B almost always tends to tell poorer stories, and they lack the sheer artistic muscle and otherworldly feel that Team A's worlds always seem to blow me away with.

It becomes, generally, an experience of Team A's beautiful, immersive worlds versus Team B's polished, satisfying gameplay.

The more I play Assassin's Creed games, the more I get a feel for this dynamic between the two teams. They have starkly different strengths and weaknesses. Prior to release, my great hope for Valhalla was that it would incorporate some of the vast steps Odyssey made in terms of its systems creating a far more compelling loop than Origins', and, you know, actually being fun to play. 

Sadly, Valhalla mostly fails in this.

Full immersion

When I try and consider my feelings about Assassin's Creed Valhalla as a whole, I veer wildly between the things it does really well which left me drooling in nirvana, and the things it does really, surprisingly poorly which left me cursing at it in disgust and setting it down for days at a time. It's not often I have such a strong, polar reaction with just one games, but Team A's Assassin's Creed games always seems to bring it out in me. The cliché of the mixed bag has never been more apt a label than it is when describing this series.

When Valhalla is on, it's on. In its first few hours I felt the constant pull of the next new 'thing' on the horizon. A statue in the distance, a crumbling Roman ruin, a crevasse leading to a cave below me which I spotted with my raven. When this game manages to immerse you in its world and impart its mood to you, it hits you in the chest like a reverberating sack of bricks. So much of my enjoyment of this game is based on mood and feel. The entire experience is brilliantly crafted towards this end—it's the one thing the developers have fully succeeded on executing.

It's not so much that it's technically impressive, either; Ubisoft's AnvilNext 2.0 engine is showing its age a bit (I believe the first game to be built on this engine was Assassin's Creed III, which released back in 2012). Rather, it's the game's art team—led by extraordinary industry talent Raphael Lacoste—which more than picks up the slack. There are dozens of moments each time I sit down to play the game in which I'm blown away by some kind of artistically engineered aspect of the setting. I'll turn a corner and see god rays shining directly onto a statue in front of me, perfectly illuminating it and casting shadows around me. Or I'll leap from a viewpoint and emerge from the pile of leaves which cushioned my fall with a picturesque street view on both sides of you. So much of this game has been staged in this way, and it's probably not consciously noticeable for most players who lack the eye for it, but it's something that does a lot to subconsciously bring you into its world and increase your immersion, no matter who you are.

As with its predecessor, Origins, Valhalla nails exploration and the sense that you've just submerged yourself into a wonderful, curious world that's begging to be explored and learned about. The first time I stumbled across Roman ruins, I was spellbound (see left). Venonis, an early Roman ruin in the game bordering the Thames, is bathed in earthy Autumn browns and reds and coated audibly in the low burble of the river nearby. There's a sub-boss enemy patrolling on horseback nearby, a few other encampments of NPCs, and a bunch of nooks and crannies to explore within the ruins. Creeping through this area with the ambient music pumping is one of my lasting memories of this game. Valhalla's world is a character all to itself, one which inspires great curiosity and transports you into its world. Who were these people, who built so high, and are now brought so low by age and weather? In this way I was transported into the player character; feeling their emotions, thinking their thoughts. I became of a single mind with Eivor.

My first time discovering a ruined Assassin Bureau was rather by mistake, as I wandered through the city of Ledecester merely taking in the sights and sounds. I don't even remember how I stumbled across the place, only that I had been making my through several tunnels of the old catacombs (because if the Romans were great at one thing, it was moving shit... literally). My torch flickering and sputtering beside me, I continued through sets of claustrophobic, crumbling, cobwebbed corridors. Eventually I turned to a corner, entered a small vestibule, and up on the wall in front of me was an aged black banner with a familiar symbol (see right). Commence fanboying.

This is the kind of thing this game does so well. It's constantly pushing you to explore and making you wonder what nugget of interesting stuff lies just around the corner. I played about half of the game with nearly every UI component turned off—including waypoint markers—and simply moseyed through the world, using my raven to spot interesting stuff nearby, and then making my way there to see what it was. The game is constantly framed by fantastic art direction, lighting, and staging which makes this sort of exploration a dreamlike endeavor, and players who like this sort of thing will probably love it in Valhalla. The game's spaces often have a poignant feel of ruin; of something once great, massive, extraordinary that has fallen woefully and disgracefully into ruin. The emotion and beauty baked-in to this experience is often a reward just by itself, and makes exploration worthwhile without any dopamine-spurring rewards in the form of loot or level-ups.

Further, the game hides these nuggets—things your own curiosity demands you search out—behind intelligent barriers you must worm through, but which never manage to feel chore-like. In prior games, you would simply seek out a point of interest, or a map marker, go there, and check it out. Valhalla implements new minor challenges to discovering these points of interest; a locked door, or a walled up entrance. Something that takes only a few seconds to solve, by pickpocketing the guard with the key, or tossing an explosive jar at the barrier, but something that makes you feel you've earned your entryway into the musty, abandoned room you're licking your lips to ransack and learn more about.

Asgardian cacophony

Helping all of this exploration and immersion along is a positively stunning original soundtrack by Jesper Kyd and Sarah Schachner (see above. Seriously, click it, and let it play as you read. It's incredible).

Kyd, a series legend, cut his teeth on the first four games of this series, even producing one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all-time in Assassin's Creed II. Schachner, however, has her own chops—her score for Assassin's Creed Origins is one of my absolute favorite soundtracks of any game I've ever played, and her work stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Kyd's. The two come together magnificently in Valhalla, which is one of the best scored games I've ever played. The soundtrack is wonderfully versatile; it nails its orchestral highs, leaves you swimming in its ambient depths, and Einar Selvik's vocals do a lot to add a unique feel during raids. I can't say enough about it. It's phenomenal, and it's one of the best components of the entire game.

There are times when playing this game that I'm melting into this world, incredibly happy I've dipped my toe into it once again. Traversing the environment, allowing the music and its visuals to wash over me like a warm bath. It's that beautiful of an experience at its best, and its worth playing sometimes just for that feeling alone.

Sadly, though, this feeling is always fleeting. It never lasts for long, always reliably broken up by one of the many, many things which Valhalla does so poorly, so clumsily, that it sometimes beggars belief the same group of people who so carefully sculpted its world also created some of the things which make me outright despise this game.

The quality of this world carried me along on its back for dozens of hours. In the first two-thirds of the game, I found myself clearing every single map marker and leaving every shire I visited completed to a 100% tic, driven along by my love of the setting and the wondrous, compelling imagery I was constantly discovering.

But one killer feature can only carry the entire experience for so long. And, sadly, in nearly every other instance, Assassin's Creed Valhalla fails to design meaningful rewards to entice the player to keep driving through its world and completing its story and side content.

Boring, broken, badly designed loot

A lot of my love for the medium of video games is based on character building; the dopamine rush you gain when discovering a new piece of loot, or how a level-up excites you with the possibility of new, more effective abilities with which to affect the world around you. It's in these things that Valhalla fails so utterly, so spectacularly, that I'd go as far as saying it may even be worse than its predecessor, Origins, in how it handles these features. It's certainly worse than Odyssey—so much worse that it's puzzling as to why the developers who made this game did not take proper inspiration from the game which came directly before it.

Loot sucks

I can very easily describe how woefully inept the design of Valhalla's loot system is, in one sentence: I didn't change any of my gear for nearly the first 60 hours of which I played this game. Not a single piece. I continued using the same, un-upgraded hand axe and the same basic Raven clan armor, simply because none of the new gear you gain seemed enough of an upgrade, nor did any of it look visually compelling enough to warrant a change. In a game such as Valhalla, which relies on loot being the main 'carrot' which the developers reward you with to try and push you into continuing to play and discover new areas, this is an absolutely damning failure. Very few of the weapons feel different enough to warrant a change beyond their (admittedly very well-done) combat finishers, and the armor pieces all offer very little difference from one another, both cosmetically and in terms of stat differences. It's all extremely disappointing.

Valhalla attempts to avoid the sheer volume of loot featured in Odyssey by implementing an upgrade system, which draws resources in order to increase the power of your favorite armor sets. The problem with this system is that it's prohibitively expensive at the upper levels, and prone to gimping the player by having them spend all of their resources on upgrading early sets only to introduce a set of armor they may prefer much later in the game. This left me ignoring the upgrade system entirely until the very end of the game, when I had all of the sets seemingly unlocked and could finally choose which one I wanted to upgrade. The upgrade system is so poorly designed that it leaves the player basically two options: Ignore it entirely, or upgrade a very early armor set at the expense of losing the ability to upgrade anything you might find afterwards. Both, obviously, are very poor choices.

Valhalla also features another layer of upgrades centered on runes, which you can loot and plug into armor. These are hilariously minuscule and almost always outright ignorable, offering you only something such as a 3.0+ damage bonus on a sword which does more than 100 damage, for example. The UI for managing runes is so poorly designed that it becomes not even worth the hassle to deal with it in order to gain a <5% increase to something like damage or health. I played the majority of the game with my armor completely empty of runes and I felt no noticeable gimping from refusing to take part in the system.

"Which piece of boring leather-and-fur armor shall I wear today, hmm?"

The failure of these systems becomes even more egregious when you consider the vast improvements Assassin's Creed Odyssey made with its loot system. Not only did it improve on the new, relatively raw and unrefined loot system from its predecessor, Assassin's Creed Origins, but it completely redefined the way loot works for a game such as this. In Odyssey, you are able to change the cosmetic appearance of every single piece of equipment you have to any piece of loot you have ever picked up, without changing its attributes. This brilliant evolution allows you to seamlessly use whichever equipment you feel matches your playstyle best from a statistical-standpoint, while also tweaking the visual appearance of this equipment in a completely different layer, in order to have it match the way you want your player character to look. The system works perfectly and succeeds in revolutionizing loot for the entire series—Odyssey's loot system is what gear in the Assassin's Creed series has been striving towards since it was first introduced in 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity. Odyssey left me fiending for just one more enemy encampment so I could see what other exciting pieces of equipment might drop for me. All of this is tossed out in Valhalla, whose loot is an empty system which I found myself purposefully avoiding instead of engaging with. It left me scratching my head as to how the team could have gotten this so wrong after having succeeded so extensively with it in the game they released just two years ago.

In no single aspect is this disregard for Odyssey's improvements more glaring than how Valhalla handles bows. Assassin's Creed Origins featured a number of different bows which had different styles: the light bow could fire low-damage arrows very rapidly, Predator bows fired one heavy arrow from first-person perspective, Hunter bows were a mix of both, etc. The problem with this system was that you'd completely ignore all other types in favor of the bow which best matched your play style (stealthy or combat-driven), because it was a huge pain to leave gameplay and have to navigate through the UI to change bow types every time you wanted to. This obtuse system led to effectively negating a vast swath of the loot you picked up; "Oh, another light bow, time to dismantle it immediately without even looking at the stats". Odyssey, though, rightfully realized this error, and made it so that arrows were what was different, rather than the bows themselves, and made it quick-and-easy to change arrow types with just one button press in-game, without having the navigate a menu. It's a brilliant fix to Origins' broken bow system.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla, puzzlingly, has rolled back this change. Bows have reverted to Origins' clunky, obtuse style of having an entirely different piece of equipment for each type. If you want to change to a Predator bow to headshot a distant guard when in stealth, you've now got to interrupt your entire gameplay by navigating through multiple menu screens to switch bows, take the headshot, then do the entire thing again to re-equip your main bow. Ditto to equipping a light bow if you enter open combat. It's mind-numbingly stupid to have gone back to this system and it's one small example which encompasses nearly every complaint I have with Valhalla in one neat package: This game blatantly disregards these sorts of refinements made by Odyssey in favor of earlier, poorer systems. It begs me to question what, exactly, the developers were thinking with these kinds of decisions. You guys already fixed this stuff in Odyssey! Why are these poor design decisions back!?

So loot, something I adored in Odyssey, something which kept me playing that game for more than 200 hours, was pretty much utterly ignored by me for nearly the entirety of Valhalla. It's that bad.

You know, like the Sphere Grid! Except really crappy.

Further adding to the annoyance of dealing with this poorly designed loot system is the fact that the new skill tree is, surprisingly, even worse.

The skill tree sucks, too

The best way I could describe it is that the developers have basically taken Final Fantasy X's sphere grid and made it unintuitive, confusing, and inconsequential. With each level up, you gain 2 skill points to spend on nodes, which you must then connect to others. These nodes often feature relatively minor increases to stats, with each portion of the tree granting different sorts of bonuses: the bear section is more combat focused, offering melee attack and health nodes more frequently; the wolf section focuses on ranged abilities; the raven section on assassination and stealth attacks. Valhalla also locks some of its best abilities behind these nodes, such as Chain Assassination (which allows you to toss an axe at a second opponent after assassinating a first), and Stomp (which allows you to instantly kill an enemy knocked down).

The problem with this is that the entire tree is shrouded in a fog, completely preventing you from seeing any but the most immediate nodes on the tree, and making it impossible to engage in any sort of build planning. This effectively prevents the player from plotting a route to the next new, fancy skill they want to unlock, because they can't even see which skills are available to them. It destroys any drive or desire the player might have to level up, because the game purposefully hides its rewards from you.

Skill trees are inherently meant to drive you forward, to keep you excited and building towards the next big ability which will help you affect the game. By hiding all of this from the player it leaves them fumbling through the tree with no idea what they're unlocking next and nothing to get excited about. Gaining levels goes from a driving force and a reward for the player, to some nebulous, abstract increase in "Power" that will probably make you strong, I dunno? It's an awful design decision and, compounded with how poor the loot system is, serves to almost completely annihilate the fantastic dopamine loop that Odyssey worked so hard to refine and implement with its post-launch improvements. Odyssey also hid some of its abilities from the player, but did so in carefully managed tiers in order to drip-feed the player new data at specific levels. Valhalla takes a sledgehammer to this nuance and prevents the player from gaining a grasp of any of its abilities at all, instead preferring to allow them to fumble in the dark and take little to no agency in developing how their player character grows.

Clearly the devs wished to take the off-screen power increases that occurred with each level gained in Odyssey and put that process into the player's hands. That makes sense on paper, but the problem with this is that including each of these minute stat increases blows out the skill tree to a gargantuan sprawl, one which collapses into mundanity with only these minor stat increases incorporated. To solve this, they sprinkle abilities in there, too, which are far more exciting. But injecting these abilities into it necessitates that you hide some of it from the player, and how do you do that in a staggered fashion? Odyssey was able to stagger this with a deft touch, but also because they didn't have to include literally hundreds of minute stat increases, too.

So the solution here needed to be either another layer on which to place these abilities, or to put these small stat increases back behind the veil and simply allow them to be allocated automatically as the player increases their level, as it was in prior games. I really like the how Valhalla features 'skill books' which allocate new abilities as lootable items in the game world, but too many of these abilities were too similar to one another, or too mundane to make a significant difference in gameplay. Perhaps we could have cut down the amount abilities in the game, overall, and shuffled skill tree abilities into the mix? Or simply increased the amount of lootable abilities and kept everything?

What's so disappointing is that literally any of these potential solutions would have been better than what we actually got, which is a ham-fisted Frankenstein's amalgamation that loses the compelling factors of each independent aspect of the skill tree by jamming them all together. Valhalla's skill tree simply does not work as it exists today and it should never have made it into the game in this form. It's yet another awfully designed system that, again, utterly fails in what it should be striving to accomplish—to keep the player engaged with its loop and keep propelling them forward into more gameplay. And it's a system that, again, I ended up ignoring for large periods of time because I just couldn't be bothered with dealing with its obtuseness. It wasn't rare for me to enter the UI menu to check my map and suddenly discover; "oh, that's right—I have 12 skill points, and I haven't bothered to allocate any of them from the past three hours of gameplay". They're so inconsequential that they become a chore. And if that's not a failure of a system whose very purpose is to get you fiending for more of it, then I don't know what is.

That makes two systems I loved from a previous Assassin's Creed game that Valhalla completely dismantles, to its detriment. Perhaps we can find a third?

The mundane, unrewarding reality of growing your settlement

As I've gushed over in numerous reviews from Assassin's Creed II to Kingdom Come: Deliverance to Rimworld and back again, base-building is one of my very favorite things to experience in an open world video game. Having the overarching goal of growing your settlement, or fortress, or city is a nice big-picture motivator for the player to aspire to and to pour resources into, and something which continues to push the player to engage with exploration and other game systems in order to accrue more resources to plug into their base. I was extremely excited to hear that Valhalla was going to feature a settlement system akin to that in prior games of the series such as Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed III. It was one of the new features that had me most pumped for this game.

Sadly, it completely fails to impart any feeling of progress, and ends up being more busywork which offers little reward to the player while also failing to add a cast of likeable characters around the player.

The driest, most uninteresting NPCs in the game appear in your settlement

The problem with growing your settlement is that is all leads to absolutely nothing. It's really as simple as that. The entire settlement system is a completely empty pursuit that fails to offer any significant rewards, in any terms whatsoever. It's little more than a resource-dump that sometimes grants additional busy-work to the player in the form of sidequests with NPCs whom you barely know, or buildings to turn in collectibles for paltry rewards such as tattoo designs you'll never see anyway, or a random settlement decoration you'll promptly forget about.

The settlement grants you new NPCs around your home, which, by itself, could have been a fantastic reward. The problem is that none of these NPCs have much more to offer you than a flimsy gimmick to their character. One is obsessed with Roman culture, another is a hunter and a romance interest. One's an ex-raider who has chosen a life of baking. But all lack any kind of depth, and none of them are very intertwined with some of the thematic elements of the game. You typically see them over one or two minor questlines for about fifteen minutes of gameplay, and then they disappear from the narrative; utterly forgotten about for the rest of the game.

The most frustrating aspect of the settlement system is that, on paper, these rewards should be rather compelling. Indeed, they seem that way the entire time up until you install the house necessary for them. For example, the cartographer; it makes sense that you'd want a map-maker to help you with collectibles on the world map, right? Wrong. He's completely useless, offering only a small set revelations on the map, and for that you must pay him. Hunting and Fishing are similar; both provide you with an arbitrary list of tasks which amount to little more than numerical fetch quests, eg. "Catch 3 large perch and 5 small bullhead", or "Bring me 3 deer antlers and 10 rabbits' feet". If you aren't already bored to tears by such unengaging busywork-like objectives, just wait! You can ignore them entirely, because the rewards for these tasks are so abysmally poor they aren't even worth engaging in at all. You'll spend hours collecting this trivial nonsense for one arm tattoo design (which you'll never see, because your character is always clothed) or a bar of carbon, which you can simply buy one shop over for a measly ~150 silver. I literally never once went into the fishing house or the hunting house after I constructed them. What a complete waste of time.

The only thing I liked about the entire settlement system, 
and they're there from the beginning

Every building is like this. Every single building you'll pour raid resources into completing is completely disposable in every regard. They don't even end up changing the look of the settlement; they merely replace a tent with a similar looking wooden building. The characters they introduce are paper-thin, the quests they give you are neither compelling nor do they grant you any meaningful rewards, and, even worse; you have to pay these people for what they offer your settlement.

Wait a second here, you mean to tell me that I'm attacking two heavily fortified monasteries and encampments to gain the 85 raw materials it takes to build you a damn house totally for free, and you're still going to charge me to use your services!? Just what the hell am I getting out of this deal, anyway!? What kind of a moron crosses the ocean to build a bunch of strangers a literal fucking city and asks for nothing in return?

Oh wait, that's right, not 'nothing'. You get to have feasts with all your newfound friends and sycophants! That's right! Each new building you build for your hangers-on grants you extremely awesome bonuses, such as a timed +3.5 assassination damage! Or a timed 10% health boost!

As you can probably tell, I'm being sarcastic. These feast boosts are so completely, utterly worthless that it's not even worth the time it takes you to run up to the bell to do them.

And, in addition to that, you have to pay more silver to have a feast. Even at this point, the game chooses to nickel-and-dime the player. The entire system is narratively illogical in addition to offering nothing of value in terms of gameplay bonuses. 

The settlement system is so poorly designed that utterly fails to be compelling at every single thing in which it strives to do. It's a completely missed opportunity to call back to something like Monteriggioni or the Homestead of previous games; something that provides you wealth and resources and houses interesting characters for you to engage with. It's a massive waste of the development team's resources and an embarrassingly inept attempt at creating a compelling system with which to motivate the player.

If all of these core systems suck so bad, what, then, keeps the player engaged for this game's gargantuan run-time?

Unfortunately, I've got more bad news for you: There are a number of aspects of this game that suffer from the same poor design as the loot, skill, and settlement systems, and continue making it a chore for the player to keep pushing through its narrative and clearing its obscene amount of content once the initial glow of the game's world begins to fade into routine.

One of my favorite aspects of Assassin's Creed Odyssey which kept me coming back for more was just how satisfying it is to stealthily carve through each enemy encampment. The game's bevy of unlockable and upgradeable damn-near magical stealth abilities serve to exponentially increase your power level, and nearly every single enemy encampment is carefully laid out by the level designers in a way which facilitates careful progression through its areas, as you slowly and methodically take out enemies in your way, hide bodies, diffuse defenses, and booby-trap their alarm systems. They all feel suitably believable so as to remain real spaces, but are also littered with entryways, hiding spots, and opportunities for traversal to empower the player. You end up feeling like a legitimate stealth operator, capable of affecting the world around you, as you explore these neat areas.

Valhalla utterly fails in replicating this. Its enemy encampments are not so much designed as they are thrown together. They're often nothing more than wooden-fenced encampments, with multiple enemies grouped together and no clear avenue for the player to progress through them stealthily. I'm not sure whether or not this is deliberate in order to push you into open combat, or simply due to ineptitude on the side of the designers, but there's little to no opportunity to play stealthily throughout Valhalla, aside from in the story missions which outright task you with remaining stealthy. Even then, there's something wonky about Valhalla's stealth gameplay. The player seems to be detected too quickly in some cases, such as being seen by enemies through small windows, or instantly-detected while social stealthing for no discernible reason. Regardless of what quirks cause this, it led me (a hardcore stealth fan) to completely disregard playing stealthily in favor of drily just walking straight into a camp and killing every bad-guy in sight, before ransacking their stuff and moving on. Obviously, this is a horribly straightforward and unsatisfying way to push the player into progressing in a game which should be tasking the player with a variety of tactics to solve its enemy encampments, and this leads to the gameplay getting old very quickly and offering few new challenges along the way. 

Valhalla's improved combat buckles under the pressure
caused by failures in other game systems

This style of design puts an undue amount of pressure on the game's combat system to carry the experience, and the combat—although it's superior to Odyssey's, and although it includes a variety of new and enticing enemy types—is still nothing special in the vast scheme of things, and as a result, the combat buckles under the weight of this pressure before too long. It's still just too airy and the player characters moves too weightlessly and unintuitively, although a lot of work has been done to improve the heft of the combat animations, and it shows. Clearly inspired by God of War (2018)'s impact frames and camera shake, weapons finally have a real weight to them, which is sorely needed. But even granted this benefit, it still cannot manage to put the entire game on its back for a whole campaign, and combat ended up growing disappointingly routine simply because I was doing way too much of it. Although improved, it's simply not good enough to bear the brunt of a 100+ hour campaign.

Improved storytelling fails to carry the load

One of my regular complaints about the Assassin's Creed series is that its writing and characters have never really been much to write home about. In the good games of the series, this doesn't matter much because the world is the real star and the gameplay systems serve to help carry the additional bulk. In Valhalla, however, these systems all fail to hold the player's attention and remain compelling. Like the poor stealth gameplay placing undue pressure on the game's decent combat, the failure of typically compelling loot, skill, and settlement systems places excruciating pressure on the game's storytelling to pick up the slack and provide the player with the drive to continue moving forward with its narrative. And, like the combat, the storytelling is good, but it buckles under this pressure.

If the story were perfect, perhaps it could have taken the experience on its back. But where it occasionally stumbles, it has nothing to pick it up, and it feels as if you're simply drudging through unengaging, unrewarding, clumsy gameplay in order to see more of a story you no longer care about.

Basim

It's no doubt an admirable effort by lead writer Darby McDevitt and the rest of the team, and I'd consider this game to be one of the better written games in the series. I found myself drawn to certain characters such as Basim (see left), fascinated by them due to their grayness and inherent mystery. The dialogue is also shockingly superb, with many quotable instances and lines of dialogue delivered superbly by the game's fantastic cast. I regularly noted how natural and affecting the dialogue was and how it served to make these characters feel more human and relatable, and the writers deserve praise for the increase in quality from Odyssey's awful, fan-fiction tier dialogue which often left me cringing and was one of the worst parts of that game.

Valhalla's story is episodic in nature, similar to something like a Mass Effect 2, and I was pleasantly surprised by certain episodes confronting me with interesting characters and compelling scenarios. The good-natured Oswald attempting to live up to his Danish bride's toughness was an engaging part of the East Anglia plotline. And the plucky reeves from Lunden, Erke and Stowe, their relationship, and the setting of the crumbling, once-great city itself had me hooked instantly. Sadly, the storytelling isn't this good throughout (which is a tough task considering how massive this game is), and I stalled later in the game in places such as Northumbria and Essexe, along with failing to entice me in certain spoiler-ish areas of the game which are extremely bland and unengaging outside of the beautiful vistas they provide. There are definitely some weak parts of this narrative, which such an already flawed game can't bear.

My favorite world event, "Rose"

Perhaps most crippling to the overall writing effort is how world events fit into the narrative, thematically and tonally. Assassin's Creed Valhalla eschews the typical side quest list most RPGs feature in attempts to streamline and make lighter its side content, which is fine for the flow of the game, but usually only serves to make the experience more tonally jarring and thematically inconsistent. Sometimes these events succeed, such as the case with a poignant world event involving an old man who believes you are his long lost daughter come to see him, but ends rather sadly and left me affected. And most of these world events are suitably open-ended and require the player to use their intuition and agency to complete. The issue, though, is that world events too often try far too hard to be humorous. They're clumsily and ineffectually used as forced comic relief which serves only to jar the player out of their immersion with bad jokes and odd references to things like internet memes and '90s music.

I'll give you an example. This actually happened to me:

Yes, that's Nicolas fucking Cage

Imagine you're exploring this wonderful game world. You just exited a thick forest full of hares and deer lithely striding alongside your galloping horse as you sped past a set of Roman ruins. The sun is dipping down past the horizon, sending shards of dying sunlight daggering through the trees just in front of you. You exit the copse and come upon a small settlement of Saxons, and there's a man searching for someone, worriedly yelling a phrase. The entire scene has you transported to the time, the place of this world. You are utterly transfigured and fully immersed. The man's still yelling, he's...

Wait a second. He's yelling a...

An internet meme. He's yelling a reference to a fucking internet meme. It's a world event referencing a fucking internet meme.

And just like that, your reverie is shattered. The carefully crafted atmosphere is long gone—probably for the rest of your gaming session—as you cringe at just how terrible this desperate, misguided attempt at humor is. It's something only a teenager could love. 

There were several occasions where the reference or tone of these in-jokes pulled me right out of the experience by bursting my cloud of reverie I was bathing in while taking in the fantastic, otherworldly atmosphere of the game. It's like something out of one of the worst parts of a Borderlands game; a desperate attempt to be hip and humorous that flies in the face of the feeling and emotion that the rest of the game seems to be eager to impart. The game is already asking its great world to counter some of the things it does very poorly, and now that excellent world has to deal with these imbecilic clashes in tone, too. The quality of the world can't always bear this assault, and the experience of playing this game is poorer as a result.

Lofty ambitions, poor execution

There are just so many things that flat out don't work in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. And I don't mean that they're broken or buggy (although they often are—I got softlocked at one point in Lunden and had to reload a save, losing 3 hours of progress), I mean that the design behind them makes little sense in terms of it actually being a fun or rewarding activity for the player to take part in. Let's consider:

Loot is boring and armor sets are too expensive to upgrade. 

The skill tree is horribly unintuitive and nowhere near as rewarding or conducive to planning as it should be. The entire settlement system is a complete mess which adds nothing to the game. 

Movement is shoddy and unpolished in general. Using the cloak makes you too tank-like. The player character often gets stuck on geometry, and free climbing creates a frustrating disconnect with what you want your player character be doing and what they are actually doing.

Some of the side activities are quite good and fit thematically and tonally well with the game: Cairn building and flyting are both fantastic, and I loved them each time I came across them. Others are completely awful and unrewarding: Paper chasing is an exercise in frustration ported over from the worst game in the series, which puts the game's bad free climbing in the spotlight and rewards you with a worthless, disposable tattoo design for having the gall to engage in such a stupid activity. Collecting a dozen meaningless "Roman artefacts" (which are always just the same boring mask with no flavor text) rewards you with precisely one uninteresting settlement design.

So much of this game is a constant frustration to interact with, and you do so for a reward which is so laughably poor it almost feels like an insult.

The rub is that, were all these systems well-designed, Valhalla would easily be the best game in the entire series. Parts of it are that good. But there are too many instances of systems being woefully designed and the good parts of the game collapse under the sheer weight of the game's massive world and epic campaign, unable to sustain the player for the amount of time the game asks of them.

It's as if this game had a very carefully thought-out framework hauled up in the beginning—a foundation that makes a whole lot of sense. It seems as if the people at the top identified the strengths of this game ahead of time: 

Listen up, everyone! We're going to make a gorgeous, stunning open world for the player to traverse and discover. It'll be beautiful and compelling throughout, and we're going to tell a heartfelt story populated with some interesting characters and conflicts to keep the player interested.

Then we'll keep them engaged and pushing forward via certain systems that reward them as they put more work into exploring the game and progressing its story, such as new loot, new abilities, the continuing build-up of their character's strength, and the growth of their settlement leading to new characters, pursuits, and goodies!

They'll want to continue because we'll have fun and engaging combat, levels that can either be stealthed through or beaten via open combat, and an intuitive and smooth free climbing system.

And then, all this being said, executed on only the first part of that statement, and utterly failed in the second and third parts. It makes me wonder just how much of an affect the firing of Director Ashraf Ismail had on the development of this game, because the game aspires to great things, but utterly fails in the execution of the majority of them.

It leaves me at an impasse. Do I recommend a game which fails more than it succeeds and suffers from the lack of a strong vision and constant inconsistency, but when it does succeed, succeeds in an astonishing, wonderful, fantastic way?

I end up defaulting to asking for clarification on who is asking the question.

Are you looking for a vast, beautiful, stunning, and intriguing world to explore? Do you want to constantly be wowed by the sheer beauty of riding through the countryside, always moving to the next neat thing on the horizon? If this alone is enough to warrant the purchase, then you'll consider Assassin's Creed Valhalla well-worth the purchase.

But are you instead someone who's looking for an addictive loop, an opportunity to build up your strength as you satisfyingly clear well-designed levels with a variety of stealth and combat abilities? Do you want a stealth-action game in which you have to plan out your assassinations, utilizing smooth and intuitive traversal to sneak around stabbing your targets and sometimes engage with some great combat using fun weapons, valuable gear, and powerful abilities? In most of these aspects, Valhalla is a colossal disappointment which is incredibly messy and fails to properly engage and reward the player for taking part in its systems.

For me personally, I can say that Valhalla is the most disappointing game I've played in years. I was excited and encouraged by the steps Odyssey took, but Valhalla stumbles into all of the same pitfalls as Origins, when Odyssey was right there to be learned from. Although at times it's a beautiful, wondrous experience, it ends up being a huge missed opportunity and an inexcusable step back which has knocked the series down from the lofty peg on which Odyssey had placed it for me. It's a devolution and, based on my experience alone, I would not recommend it to any but the most hardcore lovers of the open world genre, or fans of Viking lore and mythology.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 120 hours