After a very rough start, and now over 150 hours of play, I’ve finally finished Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. The base game, anyway. I have some thoughts about it of course – why would I be writing this otherwise? – but mostly, I just feel sort of numb.
I picked up Valhalla along with Watchdogs Legion when they first launched on Xbox Series X, because I was anxious to see what the console was capable of. At the time, I hadn’t yet finished Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but I started Valhalla anyway just to see how things looked. The opening of the game was impressive, but shortly into the introduction I encountered a tutorial boss that was inexplicably difficult for me to get past, so I shelved the game and focused on Odyssey and Watchdogs.
I completed both games, but they took a long time to finish, and Odyssey really burned me out on Assassin’s Creed games for a while. I’ve always been a fan of the series and I didn’t exactly hate all the content, but getting through the DLC was a slog and I needed a break. I didn’t pick up Valhalla again until mid-2022.
The Viking setting is interesting for Assassin’s Creed, and makes for a lot of cool set pieces and scenarios that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. It doesn’t really fit with the stealth-ish style of previous games, but they have been moving away from that for a long time now, so it’s easy to look past it once things take off.
Playing as Eivor, a Viking raider, lends you combat prowess that makes even the toughest fights pretty easy. And fighting is fun, but being a powerful warrior makes the assassin/stealth aspect of the game way less important than it should be – there is virtually no scenario in which being stealthy is truly rewarded. It’s nice that when you’re discovered, the resulting chaos doesn’t mean you have to completely start over, but creeping around enemy territories making bad guys disappear without a fuss oftentimes felt like it simply wasn’t worth the extra time it would take. Which is sort of a problem for a game about assassinating people, in my opinion.
Gone are most of the crafting mechanics of the previous game(s), and good riddance. In their place is a leveling system for gear, which requires you to collect resources as you play and explore. There is also an extensive skill tree that you fill out as you earn experience/gain levels, but if you play through to the end, you’ll eventually collect every skill anyway, so it’s effectively the same skill progression system as most of the Assassin’s Creed games have had.
The story of the game is interesting, and I liked the general idea of uniting the various regions of England by forging alliances. The side missions are hit-and-miss and often feel like padding – especially when they bear no connection to the player or the setting.
I appreciate that we can have such a large world with no loading screens but traveling the stretches of England between objectives gets boring pretty fast. Portions of the game’s stories often feel like they’re separated geographically just for the sake of making you play longer (though I suspect this is, in part, to pre-load content in the background). The space the game takes place in could have been a quarter the size and the game would've been better for it.
The game is beautiful, no doubt about that. Weirdly, ray-tracing doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in how the game looks, so after testing it out initially, I played the entire game with it turned off, enjoying the (mostly) smooth 60 fps instead. My television doesn’t support variable frame rate, so I did see some screen tearing now and then. Having played through Immortals Fenyx Rising, I expected this, but it was still quite disappointing, as so many other games seem to be able to run at a stable 60 fps with no issues on the Xbox Series X.
And that leads me to something that I’ve been thinking about a lot while playing Valhalla: these games, the modern Assassin’s Creed collection, could be truly great. They ought to be. They get so close! But they all have this universal level of jankiness that always holds them back.
That’s not to say that a ton of work hasn’t gone into this game to make it a good experience. The cinematic portions of the game – which are a pretty good chunk of the game, when you get down to it – are all done well. The voice work is mostly really good. The music and sound are immersive.
But as I play, I notice little details that stand out more and more. Pieces of Eivor’s armor that look like solid metal bend/distort a little as they move around. Some of the animations used during conversations are used a little too often, or don’t seem particularly suited to what’s being said. The camera work, while good, still occasionally has that “video game” feel to it, rather than a more cinematic feel.
These are small things that add up to a level of jank that is subtle, but is always present. It’s the difference between a game like Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted or God of War. It’s that extra 1% of polish that takes 20% of the time to get right. I don’t blame Ubisoft for not getting there; maybe it’s not worth it for projects this expansive. But I hope that with Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, which they have promised to be a tighter game/experience, they can find the time to get closer to getting it right.
Even though I seem to be regularly burned out by these games, I still enjoy them on the whole. Now I need to recharge… so I can (eventually) get through the Valhalla DLC before the next game! 😅
