4/5 ★ – JimboHarman's review of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

Maybe this is because I never played the new Assassins Creed games but in the context of the series, Valhalla is a truly innovative experience. There’s a much bigger focus on exploration than in the previous games which is almost comparable to the level of depth you get in something like Red Dead Redemption 2 with legendary animals to hunt, random encounters with strange and wacky characters, ambushes and a multitude of treasures to find that the player can use to upgrade Eivor’s gear. The combat is miles better than the old AC games, remember Black Flag where literally every enemy was killable in two button presses? Yeah now you have to be awake to defeat your enemies. The combat isn’t the best but it’s crunchy enough and quite strategic. It reminded me of God of War (2018) in the sense that it’s simple on the surface but there are so many new moves you can learn to add complexity to the combat, on top of that the new weapon system where you can dual wield any two weapons in the game is absolutely fantastic, encouraging the player to experiment and find the weapon combinations that best suit them. In terms of the story you’re main goal is to conquer England which was fun enough, I’m genuinely quite impressed that it rarely feels repetitive, on the surface of it you’re pretty much going from place to place meeting various characters and forming alliances to spread your clan’s influence in England but they managed to make most of the zones feel unique from each other, one of them has you trick or treating, another has you searching for traitors to calm the mind of a King mad with paranoia. My favourite one is with King Oswald, he’s my favourite character who isn’t reoccurring with his arc of finding strength and courage within himself. Apart from King Oswald I liked the other characters you meet on the journey, you just don’t spend enough time with them for them to be fully fleshed out and to be fully emotionally invested in them. Like whenever one would die I just wouldn’t react, which is a shame because this is a massive 50 hour game, there was for sure time to flesh out more characters. *Spoilers* There are three characters I’d say are genuinely good, well written characters. Those being Eivor, Sigurd and Basim. Eivor and Sigurd represent the thematic opposition about fate. At the start of the game Eivor is told he will betray his brother in the future, he doesn’t like this prophecy and so his main character struggle comes from trying to be the master of his own fate culminating in an arc where he denies himself Valhalla, the place he’s always been told he’s heading. By denying Valhalla he basically says no to his destiny, thus becoming the master of his path. Sigurd on the other hand hears his destiny and becomes obsessed with it, he walked into Falke’s trap willingly because he was told he was not to die there despite the torture he endured as a result of his blind faith in fate. At the end he reaches Valhalla but because of Eivor he also denies it. I also really like the parallels between the Norse Gods and these characters, Eivor reflecting Odin who fought the prophecy that he would be killed by Fenrir, Sigurd reflects Tyr and Basim is Loki, the mysterious trickster. The way Basim follows in Loki’s footsteps, taking on Loki’s motivations for avenging his son shows how he has also fallen victim to the claws of fate. There are issues with the story, I think it was lacking a central antagonist. I genuinely think Falke was a great villain but she’s gone too soon and I found the the final zone you conquer in England to be a huge anticlimax as it does nothing to set itself apart from any other arc. I also don’t care for the modern day stuff, like seriously does anyone actually care? All it does is take me out of the experience. Luckily for the 61 hours I have on that game you only spend about an hour on the modern day which is good, I’d rather it be zero hours but hey ho. I hear that people complain that it’s not really about the assassins anymore, personally I couldn’t care less. I really don’t like the Assassins Creed franchise though so that might have something to do with it. I do agree this should’ve have called itself an assassins creed game because it isn’t one, it would work on it’s own as a new IP just called Valhalla that takes place in the same universe as AC like Watch Dogs, that’d be cool actually, get a Ubisoft Joint Universe going.