1.5/5 ★ – SaintzGB's review of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

So, finally after 180 hours, I finished all of AC Valhalla. Wow, what a lacklustre, confusing and often times boring game. So start off positive: I actually liked the story. Until the end. They did a good job creating each king of Mercia, and making interesting little mini-stories. Although there was too many I think, and they were too long. But you end up seeing characters return and change as you move into the next kingdom. So say you help someone in Eurvicshire, they might return to help for a huge battle in Suthsexe. Which is really neat, and I like that. But that ending is dumb, I'll try and not spoil, but Layla's story seems to have ended, and on a really odd note. Also she's a massive self insert it feels like, because she was so bland she shouldn't have lasted 3 games. Also I don't personally like that they basically made demale Eivor canon, as male Eivor was an amazing VA and also I think makes more sense, as he's a viking and all the Odin stuff fits better this way. Female raiders were so much rarer. But they bias all their content towards the female model instead, for no reason. The locations all individually looked amazing though, I won't ever say anything against that. Each place looked unique. Although I will say that the geography of this game makes 0 sense. I grew up on the South Coast of England. Chichester (Cicestre) is no where near where they placed it, and shouldn't be above Crawley (Crawleah) on a map. I know they shrink the areas to fit the game map blah blah blah, but it's not hard to at least make real world locations make sense in regards to their real world counterparts. Moving to the bad. The controls were horrendous, it feels as if the parkour has taken 2 steps back. One when they moved away from the controls of Unity etc. during the creation of Origins, and then again with this game, where the parkour has gotten worse. I don't understand why the movement isn't automatic anymore, I have to tap the jump button to move towards something, but that brings back the problem from the first few AC games, where you end up running up a wall and falling back to the ground, rather than scaling it. Or you end up going in the totally wrong direction. Its clunky and heavy and awkward. The combat was okay, but I'm bored of it, I miss AC1's combat actually, took me time to master but it was so fun. This game got so trivial that I think I ended up hardly even taking a hit, I'd just dodge. Although the enemies have aimbot with their arrows. It feels like this game is so user unfriendly. Also honestly I just don't like the UI. The game doesn't need a cursor system for console. The controls don't allow for you to customise it much, and the game is bloated with so many different moves that it becomes unplayable at times. Like if I want to scan an area, I use the left stick, which also does a stomp. So if I want to scan an area after knocking an enemy out, the game makes me stomp them, and wake them up. Great. Or how when you spawn at viewpoints you're almost never facing where the haybale is now, so you jump off, thinking its safe, and then die. The raids too, you could wait for ages to do a raid action like breaking a door, but the AI get stuck and don't help you unless you move away and retry the action. Little things like that make the gameplay so much more annoying than needed. The historical stuff is weird too, and the shop items ruin any immersion. Why can i get a Kitsune as a Viking, in England? The game treats Eivor like a saviour, when Vikings were basically bandits on boats. He's not some kind of kind hero who's misunderstood, he's at best, an anti hero. At worst, a pillager. Everyone treats him like some kind of amazing guy who saves them all, rather than a blood thirsty murderer. I think the game would have been better if we got the choice of being as nice as we can and not raiding, or being bloodthirsty and everyone fearing us. Ubisoft really were scared to make Eivor a bad person. He should have been more like Havi I think, a complex character who is neither good or bad, just selfish. I didn't really care for anyone in the Raven clan though, it felt a little like a budget version of the crew from red dead redemption 2, but without the camaraderie or good writing. Seems like an issue considering that you're supposed to want to protect them. The side content is just a letdown I think. I hate the fact that Ubisoft's idea of content is just collectibles. Every time they could do good content, they just bloat the game with collectibles instead. You had to collect items in England, France, Ireland, Norway, Vinland, Isle of Skye, Svartalfheim, Jotunheim and Asgard. All of which are substantial sized areas. I hate it. None of it even means anything either, like there's never some big reward for doing it. If you think about AC2 for instance, you spend ages getting all the keys to get Altair's armour. In this, you do all these collectibles and get stuff that's not at all worth it, because they want to sell you their tragic shop items. The art of grinding to get the best item of the game is lost. Cairns also are horrible, 0/10 for those, and i know everyone else hates them too. So, the DLC's were varied in how I felt towards them actually, some I liked, some were mid and some were just dull. Ireland's wrath of the druids was the best. I liked the setting, the story, the collectibles weren't so egregious, and it flowed really nicely. Didn't overstay its welcome, but had stuff to do. Also, Ciara. The Siege of Paris DLC was okay, nothing really special to me. I liked the missions where you build the resistance I guess, but the main story was average and I didn't much care for the rest. I'd say that the Forgotten Saga was great too actually, really refreshing content and a change of pace from the rest of the games. I like the roguelike gameplay, worked well here and was really enjoyable. Tested me and improved my understanding of how to play the game best. Those mastery challenges however, really showed the vulnerabilities of the actual gameplay though. I felt as if it wasn't very lenient with the scoring, and often was luck based. Especially with the stealth challenges, as the difficulty was on high, and enemies were either overly alert or just moronic and lucky. I didn't feel like I was actually good at the game, I just felt lucky. I hate that they made the Dawn of Ragnarok DLC not count in the season pass. It was no more special than any other dlc, and it cost like £30. For no reason. It didn't have any incredible selling point, it didn't hook me in, and the story was average. So yeah, that's done. I don't feel any better off frankly, if anything I feel worried for the series future.