Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Ultimate Review (200+ Hours Played)

we english have become accustomed to being the bad guys because to be fair we spent hundreds of years being spectacularly evil to just about everyone we encountered who wasn't english so it's fair to say we've deserved it but when even the bad guys in galaxies far far away all have english accents it's easy to forget that there was a time in history when we ourselves were invaded pretty much every other week and hit repeatedly on the head with pointy things until we did as we were told and learned new words from yet more languages to add to the hodgepodge that makes modern day english such a nightmare to learn and to pronounce if you come from almost anywhere else so when i saw early trailers for assassin's creed valhalla which made it seem as though we were being depicted as the evil bad guys even when we were the ones being invaded i was eager to play the game myself and find out if perhaps the way in which we had been evil to the vikings was by having houses so soaked with rain it made them a real chore to burn to the ground for those keeping count assassin's creed valhalla is the 6257th title in the series or something along those lines i lost count a while ago but a quick glance at google tells me the actual number is somewhere between 11 and the mid-20s depending on which gaming platforms you include however you count up the entries in the series ubisoft has made enough of these by now that most gamers have tried at least one of them and very few of us have played them all so i'm going to make it simple since i've missed a few along the way myself and talk about assassin's creed valhalla as though it is a standalone game for most of this review i say most because each assassin's creed game with exceptions being made for protagonists like ezio auditore is really a standalone game except for the bits where it isn't and most of ac players i've spoken to would be more than happy to drop those bits entirely if ubisoft gave them half the chance but in case you don't know what i'm talking about the central premise of the series is a thousand-year-old feud between the assassins and the templars which is itself a spin-off rumble of a much older fight between humans and an ancient species called the isu and in effect you are playing a modern-day character using a device called the animus to relive the memories of assassins from important moments in history these assassins will also occasionally have dreams or induced hallucinations as is the case with valhalla and by this point you're deep into inception territory so it's best not to think too hard about it the good thing about assassin's creed games is that it isn't really necessary to know all of that in order to enjoy the game since most of it is played as the character whose memories your modern day counterpart is reliving in the case of assassin's creed valhalla that character is avor a viking of the raven clan i will refer to evor as he because that was how i played the majority of the hours i put in but you can choose to play as a male or a female avor or let the computer choose for you in which case you will be randomly swapped between the two at various points in the story just in case all that [ __ ] i just told you wasn't complicated and confusing enough the year is 872 ce and avor and his mates tired of the constant clan fighting in the frozen fjords of norway leave for england where there will be just as much fighting between clans but at least it will be slightly easier to grow apples so that your descendants will have something to eat while hiding in the trees from the next lot of invaders riding through to burn their houses to the ground you must kill them all every lot sorry no uh leave them here tied up as as a feast for wolves and crores there are other locations in the game but i will avoid mentioning them for spoiler reasons and because the largest portion of the game is played between norway and england i found a war quite an easy character to like ably voiced by both magnus brune and cecilia stainspill as the male and female versions avor is surprisingly grounded and relatable considering his profession and the company he keeps i would say the same of you friend what kind of a person aboard grows into as the game progresses is to some extent determined by the decisions you make between the beginning and the end of the story and those two points can be very far apart if you don't stick to the main story one of the things i really liked about the way ubisoft have approached the main story in valhalla is that as england has been divided into pieces on the map with different factions vying for control of each so the main quest line has been divided up along with it the idea being that you must form alliances within the many kingdoms and shires that make up 9th century england and each one of these has been designed as almost a short game in itself each of these large areas will require a different approach some of them will end in happy unions others in a battle to take a large fortress in order to hold the region the more alliances you make before you approach the end game the more new friends you stand to lose but the easier those final battles will be all of these kingdoms and shires will be available from the moment you arrive in england but they vary greatly in difficulty level so be prepared for a tough fight or much more likely a very swift death if you wander into a high level area early on in the game armed with the 9th century equivalent of a foam larp sword some mildly intimidating tattoos and the faint stench of hope you will have a surprising amount of control over how difficult you make the game for yourself with more menu difficulty options than i have seen since i can remember and one of the oddest skills trees i have ever seen progression through which doesn't make any real sense at all and comes with absolutely no consequences for making poor skills decisions early on as you can not only respect the whole tree at once but you can go in and surgically remove any individual points you have allocated at any point in the tree and instantly reallocate them elsewhere one by one why didn't i think of that there are many skills to learn along the way some of which when paired with the right weapons are ludicrously overpowered while others are just fancier ways of putting an axe in somebody's face the weapons upgrade system is kind of weird with blacksmiths making armor and weapons prettier and adding more upgrade slots essentially just adding more compartments for you to put batteries in but then you can make the upgrades that actually count at any time or place sitting in a boat halfway up a tree or in the middle of a forest while a pack of angry walls bear down on you whatever you choose to do with your skills and weapons you will certainly get a lot of use out of them as you might expect in a game about vikings ubisoft have not skimped on the violence avor likes to kill people he does it a lot he's very good at it and he's quite meticulous about making sure his enemies don't get back up again these finishing moves are gratifying especially in a long fight but combat overall doesn't flow as well as it has in some previous ac titles nor does it feel very intuitive and i found the controls quite clunky particularly in the beginning even once you get used to it you'll quite often find yourself maneuvering into a position to stun your enemy and get a finishing cut scene or depleting your adrenaline bar with a special attack even if it means taking those few extra seconds just to break up the hack and slash of otherwise fairly clumsy and uninteresting combat you rob all the joy from war saxon for those who have been missing for a while assassin's creed games these days are less stealth action games and more rpgs and while that is a welcome thing for an rpg player they have lost a lot of the elements that make it uniquely assassin's creed along the way the synchronization points are still present along with the attendant iconic leaps of faith but parkour while not entirely gone from the series just yet is nowadays less often used always sticky and imprecise sometimes baffling and often infuriating one thing that seems never to change however are the ropey animations and character models with even ropier ai that we've come to expect from a company that publishes new games more often than most of us get hiccups enemies see you easily and then forget you just as easily and you are sometimes attacked by guards even when invited by and escorted by their boss but then you can walk right into anyone's house and take all their belongings while they stand and watch you and nobody bats an eyelid the voice over work in this game is pretty good on the whole [Music] with only one or two minor exceptions but the actors are poorly served by awkward unpolished cutscenes with unnatural pauses you could get insurance commercials into and one or two characters who after fulfilling their part in the story just get a single line of dialogue to repeat every time you interact with them even if that interaction is something which must happen quite often if i wanted to hear you talk [ __ ] i'd gouch out your tongue and shove it up your ass as an englishman who has lived in most parts of england at one time or another and is nowadays married to a scandinavian this game seemed too good to pass up and it was a lot of fun to play and to see what has been done with different locations but don't expect to learn much about british geography from assassin's creed valhalla since much of it seems to have been made by people who have heard about england but never actually been there now of course a lot of scaling down is necessary in these sorts of games especially when traveling on horseback nobody wants to spend six days in a game riding between york and dover a quick check to give you an example of just how scaled down is this distance between folkestone harbour and dover castle in real life just shy of 11 kilometers in the game 117 meters and naturally a lot has changed in the 1100 years since the time in which the game is set but the geology of the landscape has remained largely unchanged since the end of the last ice age and although most of the places in assassin's creed valhalla are roughly in the right part of the country all the poor map making in the world can't account for the fact that temple borough fort for example not far from where i was born is actually to the north north west of nottingham and not in almost entirely the opposite direction to the south east as is shown in the game this is by no means a serious flaw it won't affect your enjoyment of the game at all it's merely an observation from a grumpy englishman i have spoken to be fair assassin's creed valhalla tries very hard to keep things interesting taking you everywhere and doing everything from retrieving a lost comb for a lady with too little attention and entirely too much spare time to battling giants inside a giant mitten to recover a mild deep cauldron so you can't say they aren't trying to mix things up the modern day sections of the game are mercifully few and far between and have more background information available if you want it but the game never tries to force it down your throat your ravensthorpe settlement plays an important role in the game and can be upgraded with materials recovered by completing raids for which you will need your crew it is possible to defeat every single soldier and rock flinging goliath and burn down every wooden dwelling without any of your crew setting foot in the place but those wooden church doors are where things get really tricky and apparently it takes two whole humans to break one down in order to reach the loot on the other side don't worry if you arrive at one of these locations without your longship though as you can call your crew to help you at any time with a blast of the horn and there they were hiding around the corner the whole time ready to swoop in and stab things at your request starting and finishing each raid with some rather unconvincing war cries that sound less like barbaric yorps and more like overtired parents feigning enthusiasm about the sweaty smashed purple cupcake peppered with imprints of indeterminate origin that your five-year-old just brought back from school in their spare underpants bag and is now insisting you eat they certainly look homemade thank you yes there are some meaningful relationships to be made in assassin's creed valhalla and a little history to be learned as usual even if some of the dates and places have been altered to fit the narrative there were a few bugs on older systems early on and a great many people complaining of corrupted saves including myself but most of these have been patched since release and overall i'd say my experience with the game was mostly positive i didn't quite get to 100 completion in this game but i got fairly close spending as much time as possible in all areas of the map and completing as much as i could stand to for the sake of making an ultimate review between streaming making youtube videos and working my way through side quests to make these things possible i spent a little over 200 hours in assassin's creed valhalla and i really enjoyed it at first but i was bored for the second half of that and really wanted the game to be over long before it was sad really i could live in a game like red dead redemption 2 for months at a time and really feel the world around me but rockstar take around eight to nine years to build a place that lived in and there were certainly precious few like it in 2020. assassin's creed is a different kind of product one that is pushed out like a weekly soap opera in factory style and provides a constant source of new games for us to hack and slash in but the price we pay for that is a world that feels thin and painted on valhalla offers a lot of fun ways to ignore the laundry and the dishes for a few hours while you burn punch kick and maim your way through 9th century england with the usual mini-games and collectibles to add a little variety to your blood-soaked rampage if you can get through the main quest line before that novelty wears off i think you'll probably say you enjoyed your time there but don't linger too long or you might never bother to reach the end today my saga is ripped glory those have been my opinions of assassin's creed valhalla but if you want to make up your own mind it is available for playstation 4 and 5 xbox one and series x and s as well as pc and the first major expansion for the game entitled wrath of the druids is now available to download that's all from me but you can catch me live on stream right here on youtube or follow me on twitter facebook patreon or discord all of which are linked in the video description and on the knights arcade channel header if you don't want to do any of those things just leave a like subscribe if you're not already subscribed and ring the bell to be notified whenever i post new content but until next time from knights arcade this is sleepless night saying nighty [Music] night [Music] ah you

Channel: Knight's Arcade

Views: 205,151

Keywords: knight's arcade, assassins creed valhalla, ac valhalla, assassins creed, assassins creed valhalla gameplay, ac valhalla gameplay, Sleepless Knight, Ubisoft, review, action, adventure, valhalla review, ac valhalla review, game review, assassins creed review, before you buy ac valhalla, before you buy valhalla, ac valhalla series x gameplay, ac valhalla game review, assassins creed before you buy, assassins creed viking review, assassins creed viking, Xbox Series X Gameplay

Id: XPYr44olzvI

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021