This game is a masterpiece. gl hf :)

“I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred”

Disclaimer: I played and finished this game on Epic (78hr playtime), and bought the game here so I could leave this review where people might actually see it.

I wish this game was just bad. I wish it was the standard low effort AAA trash. A thing leaves your mind so quickly when it’s unremarkable and makes no impression, and I wouldn’t even be compelled to write about it if it was just a bad game. But Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is not a bad game, it is a painfully, heartbreakingly, mediocre one. It’s worse than bad. Because it promises to be good, and it should be. Because I can’t even begin to fathom the monumental amount of effort and care that went into crafting a world and setting that I should be entirely entranced with, and I have never really experienced a game with such a vast scale in both locale and narrative. Yet the end product is still, against all odds, a poorly designed and incredibly over-bloated game.

There are at most, and I’m really not exaggerating this, about 4 hours maximum of actually interesting narrative content in this game which has somehow been strewn across 60 hours of lacklustre, undriven, pointless and repetitive gameplay (60 hours is the lower end by the way, if you ignore basically all of the hundreds of near-useless collectables and side-ventures). Most of the interesting narrative occurs at the END of the game. There are several points in the main progression where the gaps between interesting story beats are separated by, without hyperbole, 16 hours of filler arcs. That is longer than some of the earlier AC games in their entirety. Just. On. Filler. Filler story that has no bearing and no connection to any of the actual interesting plot. It honestly boggles the mind how the narrative structure and design of this game actually made it through several rounds of production.

My best bet for where this game lost its footing is very simple and boils down to this: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was made by a mis-managed group of teams that, in their own right are obviously incredibly skilled developers, but as a conglomerate very clearly did not talk to each other and collaborate, at all, during production. This is the best, most concise way I can describe the dull ache this game will leave you with, as what you will find is a game filled with a hundred different things to do and stories to tell, but no cohesion or unifying foundation to hold them together, and no reason to explore any of it.

Completing this game was painful, a self-flagellation and a rot that would not leave me until I finished it at least once and could shelve it for all eternity. And now I am free.

Play this only if you are a die-hard fan of the series, or if you are clinically obsessed with Vikings, anything less will be a sincere waste of your time.

With love,
A clinically viking-obsessed, die-hard fan of the series