Assassin's Creed Valhalla

+ Good-looking environment, but a bit aged at this point.
- Copypaste storyline, literally the same game re-done a million times by now. Someone binge-watched Vikings and decided to write a game.
- It was fine once or twice, but at this point the series should just drop the "Assassin's Creed" title because it means absolutely nothing.

Not completed.

Best AC game since Unity. Does not feel like an AC games at all! I just loved the brotherhood, the norse atmosphere, intense violence and the story. Crazy big and long, but its the only Assassin's Creed game I have gotten the platinum trophy from! Not enough Norway tho!

I LOVE this franchise. I have played all of them and, despite problems with each new release, I still enjoyed all of them for the most part. However, this one is so bad. It's a massive, beautiful looking game. The vikings are well designed. That is where it kind of ends. The first 20 hours is really solid. There's many different things going on to try and explore. The main story itself was nothing new to the franchise and was only average at the start. It was after these 20 hours where things got truly bad. The world is boring. You travel for 15 minutes to get somewhere and clear out a fortress just to get a small amount of bad to mediocre storyline. This is the only one I have not finished because it is too bland in its best moments.

I was gonna wait until I finally beat the game before writing something up, but, uh, life's too short. Because this shit is loooooong, and the game just keeps throwing things at you - just when I thought I was making progress I get thrown into Asgard to fight some giant Smurfs, and then suddenly I'm in Finland without any weapons. This game feels endless, and honestly, I'm not even sure these games are meant to be finished - the way people talk about these games, they know full well that they're walking into something they're gonna abandon after 40-60 hours, and I feel like the design of this particular iteration is built around that expectation. (Some of these features might be shared across other games in the franchise, I really don't know - this is my first one since Brotherhood, an entire decade ago.) This game is sectioned off into distinct 'arcs' that each take about 3-6 hours to complete, and they're all basically the same thing: go meet the leader of the area, help them out of a small pickle, solve their bigger problem (probably by storming and/or sneaking into a fortress). Each individual story doesn't last longer than a few sessions, which makes it easy for someone to casually throw on every now and again to jump in and out of.

Which works; I don't think that anyone's walking into one of these games expecting a Serious Gaming Experience. (I don't think it's been that way since, what, Black Flag?) You're coming in just to knock off a few hours in a game that has so many different ideas thrown into it that it's bound to scratch some kind of itch. No one's really going to feel like they've missed out if they don't get around to finishing the game, but some might walk away feeling unsatisfied if there was too little; and since different players will have different standards for what's too short, why not just cram in as much as you possibly can, and people can stop whenever they get bored? (That does give me some reservations on dev crunch - Rockstar and CD Projekt Red horror stories still fresh in our minds, and we know for sure a different kind of rot was present at the heart of Ubisoft - but I suppose that's a different issue entirely.)

The 'design by committee' heart of this game means that it feels futile to even try to discuss this as a whole, so I'll just tackle each element individually.

1. Combat and Stealth: The combat's not great, but I've played (and enjoyed) worse. Parrying - on which most of the combat is based - is awkward to time; the visual indicators the game gives for an enemy's attack tell you what their attack is but not when they'll actually hit, so the timing is something you have to learn on an individual basis by enemy. And even then, some enemies - namely the Zealots, who are optional minibosses that typically carry giant shields - seem to barely respond to your parrying, which means a lot of potshots and guesswork as to how to move around them. Once you acquire better abilities, it helps on taking the big guys down, but even still it just doesn't feel worth it, especially on higher difficulties where they become bullet sponges. (I started playing on hard before knocking it down to normal because the added difficulty wasn't meaningful, didn't make the game more fun - I might as well just commit to turning my brain off.

As for stealth, well, that's always a tricky concept for a game to get right, especially when it's not a dedicated stealth game. I would've thought it might feel a bit different in the 10 years since I played my last Assassin's Creed, but, nope - same stuff; actually, probably a little worse, since it feels easier for guards to spot you in areas where you're kind-of-but-not-really safe. Playing around with different abilities while hidden has its charms, but often not worth the trouble when guards will spot you anyway and ruin all your fun. The combat is messy but generally predictable, while the stealth gameplay feels like it can go wrong too easily.

2. Collectables: The actual act of finding the collectables gets old fast; there's no new puzzles to challenge you when you find stuff, and they generally just revolve around fighting the right angle to shoot off a lock on a door or sneaking around to find a key. But there is a monkey-brain joy in acquiring a new skill or weapon, regardless of whether you'll actually use them. But beyond that there's a lot of true filler - puzzles where you line up some rocks, a cursed object you have to destroy, things like that, and they just seem to be there to fill up space. Even if you take a generous view towards this game's massive size, you could probably cut out 30-50% of them without having felt like you've lost much. The only things I really liked all that much were the optional bosses and the 'world events', where are mini-sidequests that are generally inconsequential but honestly have more character than stuff you'll find in some 'legit' RPGs. (The only downside is that they can take a while in a game that's already enormous.)

3. Minigames: Most are dull; a drinking minigame that's just timing a button, a fishing game that's mostly like all the others, a 'flyting' game where you have to choose the best rhyme in a rap battle. (They don't make them too hard.) But there's a dice game called orlog that I actually really enjoyed, probably more than anything in the real game, and it's a shame there's no way to play it against anything but the CPU (which is not always the brightest). (Though apparently there's a real life version in the works.) I didn't spend much time playing Gwent in The Witcher, so this felt like a nice way to make up for that.

4. The Map: Everything more or less looks the same, which I'm sure you could've guessed. Different towns are distinct enough that you can remember parts of some of them as you go, but it's not really worth the brainspace - they're meant for you to do your thing and move on. These areas aren't often great for the actual assassin jobs (i.e. stealth and climbing) - not like the tightly-packed cities of the Ezio games - but for a Witcher-style RPG they work. And actually, I really hated some of the actual cities in this game; you can very quickly pass from a safe area to an unsafe one, and guards can spot you just minding your own business without a second thought. Makes traversal annoying.

5. Story and Setting: It's fine. All the modern-day conspiracy crap still makes no damned sense, of course - and though I didn't finish the game, reading the plot summary suggests more of that stuff than I'd really care for - but Eivor is likeable and it's fun to be in the Nordic environment. The mini story arcs they set up means you don't ever have to remember characters for very long, which puts their generally unambitious stories into digestible chunks that can occasionally be fun, with characters that are nice to hang around and motivations that are easy to process. (Like a Netflix show!) The larger story arc is one the game barely spends any actual time with, and for good reason - Eivor's brother, Sigurd, is generally annoying and anything to do with the actual Assassin's Creed feels crammed in there. (The Assassin's ideology and the Dane's ideology don't seem to mesh very well, and Eivor accepts some tenets weirdly readily and actually just hates some of the assassins for other parts of the game. It doesn't make much sense, but then I guess it doesn't really have to.) I do wish that they'd committed to making Eivor a particular gender, though - it feels like most of the game is meant for Eivor to be female, and if they'd leaned into that a little more then there'd be room for a little extra nuance in the dialogue. Some of the romance options might even be worth pursuing then!

I enjoyed what I played. You know what you're getting into. Just don't feel like you need to finish.

Okay so Valhalla is another Assassin's Creed game, only coming 2 years after Odyssey, and the first Assassin's Creed of the PS5/Xbox One X generation. Valhalla was fun for the first few hours when you're in Norway, and it explores viking mythology, and has a lot of similarities to Odyssey. Its the same open World game of going to different towns, riding your horse, having your bird scope out enemies and secrets, the same endless collectibles and special targets you need to assassinate, with hybrid combat/stealth gameplay. You know, the generic formula that we've all grown to love and hate that's been around since Origins.

The thing is I thought cool we got Norway and these snowy areas that hasn't been explored in an Assassins Creed, but then after a few hours you leave Norway and go to England, and then the game goes into an endless cycle of going to different regions and forming alliances that lasts for dozens of hours. So basically the meat of the game is you are a viking and you and your brother go to England to explore and expand your influence, but not long into it your brother gets kidnapped and you end up encountering a mysterious cult similar to the one in Odyssey, and then the game opens up and you basically need to go to different regions on the map, complete a series of quests for the characters in that area that all contain separate stories and arcs, and after completing the story arc for that area you then form an alliance and unlock more areas with more arcs. Now the problem is this would have been fine if you had to do this 10 times tops, but there are over 20 regions if you include the special regions, and this is just way too many. Each region takes around 3 hours to complete the arc of that region and it took me over 50 hours to complete this game.

Most of the arcs in this game are just not interesting, its go to this area, look the king of this area is having trouble with his brother, this person wants to be a king but isn't confident enough, this area is having problems with this enemy group, about halfway through I was just rushing through the story and didn't care about most of these arcs because there were just too many and it was causing me to lose motivation since most of it had nothing to do with your character of the main story. There are a few side missions, most have to do with your base, which you have in England, you can build up your settlement and add things to it to give you more side activities. You get resources by going in your ship and doing raids on different villages, which kind of was boring because they were too easy since you had a team of vikings helping you and you could just rush to the materials you needed without worrying about combat. Speaking of which the combat and gameplay in this is just boring, it was way to easy, I could go through most areas and destroy enemies, and with how much content there is I always found myself around the level I needed to be for new regions. The weapons in this game just weren't fun to play around with either.

Actually the gameplay and combat are probably the worst thing about the game because its just so bland and the stealth just feels bland because the game doesn't have good enough design to make stealth smooth for most areas so its like the game wants to force you to fight through most areas. The side content mostly has to do with exploring and collecting various things like treasures, artifacts, or mini tasks like helping random NPCs with problems. Some of these are entertaining, like one has you forcing a smelly father to get a bath, others are just boring a forgettable and just feel like time eaters. The only side content I really found engaging were hunting the legendary animals. Most of the exploration and collecting side stuff just didn't feel rewarding and there just was too much of it, and I even encountered some glitched tasks that prevented me from being able to finish it. This game is full of annoying glitches actually.

The story is pretty boring for the most part, it has moments, but I still don't care about the animus stuff or anything to do with the modern day story, and the viking story just didn't pick up or have relevance until the final few hours. I wanted to like this, but its just overly long and tedious, the game took me something like 70 hours to beat and thats without doing all the side content or collecting everything, the game would have easily run 100 hours if I did all that. I felt like after 40 hours I just wanted the game to end and started rushing through everything. Whenever I thought the game was getting close to ending, it just added more story content and regions to complete. The combat and gameplay just isn't engaging enough and the only thing that really kept me going was the game's World and having no better games to play at the time. The game does have a decent World and graphics, and it is a beautiful game to just explore, but the 100s of collectibles sort of sour the exploration a little too. Honestly if this game were cut by 20 or 30 hours, had the amount of collectibles cut in half and had less collectibles hidden in annoying spots, and had the main story more focused rather than the game just focusing on random story arcs that aren't really connected, it could have been alright. Say what you will about Odyssey, but Odyssey was at least kind of fun and didn't feel overly long, and I was even able to get the platinum trophy in that game. This game just feels like its trying to add pointless side content and cram too much material in to say how big it is and how much content it has, rather than actually put meaningful content that is fun. The reason 2 and 4 are some of my favorite Assassin's Creeds is because they have amazing Worlds and have good gameplay and focus on actual assassination. Sure they can be beat in 20 hours or less, but those 20 hours are meaningful and fun, this game I'd say 50 hours were tedious and bland, and maybe 20 hours were fun. Assassins Creed just lost its touch to be honest, and I honestly miss the old days where the games were more linear but actually focused on the assassin part and actually had focused stories and missions and didn't have endless collectibles and maps that were too big to explore. I honestly hope this teaches Ubisoft, but I feel like they won't learn anything because this game got positive reviews and sold well, so it will probably encourage Ubisoft to make their next game even longer and add more pointless filler and side content. Its a shame too because these guys have potential with all the historical stuff and an entire World of beautiful scenery and landmarks, but instead they ruin that with tedious content and bland stories, with a repetitive open World formula they repeat over and over without changing or adding anything. They need to take note from Immortals Fenyx Rising and take a step back and remember what made Assassin's Creed the brand name it is today, because this franchise will die out and burn fast if they keep doing this same formula, because eventually even the hardcore fans will grow bored and tired.