I'm angry I wasted so much time on Assassin's Creed Valhalla (Review)

this video is brought to you by squarespace on may 7th 2020 ubisoft's head of communication tweeted this fyi it won't be the longest or biggest game in the series they addressed criticism on this one what was the criticism you might ask it was the criticism from a huge huge section of players myself included that felt like assassin's creed odyssey was a pretty great game but that it was just too long and too bloated and way too full of [ __ ] so then you hear this guy say hey we're addressing the criticism and people like me are like oh cool great we're gonna get a more focused assassin's creed game that trims the fat and values our time more that's how i felt when i booted up this game maybe that's how you feel right now as you think about whether or not to buy assassin's creed valhalla allow me to disabuse you of this notion right now not only is assassin's creed valhalla not shorter than odyssey it's way longer and way way more boring assassin's creed odyssey took me around 55 hours to complete finishing all major quest lines and killing every member of the order i'm now at 67 hours played in valhalla and i haven't even rolled credits yet because the last order member seems to be hidden behind open world [ __ ] that i wouldn't dare try to complete there are no major quest lines for me to complete now and yet it still says progress the story to find the last clue i have no idea what to do and absolutely no desire whatsoever to try after 67 hours of endless repetitive tedium you really need to say enough is enough it's not the length of this game that bothers me by the way i like putting hours into games just recently i've put 50 hours into hades and 60 hours into risk of rain 2 and 50 hours into hunt showdown i spent 50 hours with the avengers and i didn't even like that but i liked it a hell of a lot more than i liked valhalla the problem with valhalla is that it's a perfectly fine game that becomes utterly insufferable owing to its length none of it is good enough to demand 67 hours of your time the exploration isn't good enough the writing isn't good enough the combat isn't good enough the progression systems aren't good enough none of it is good enough to demand that amount of your time and it's a shame because there are improvements in this game versus odyssey things like the whole assassin thing coming back into focus and the rating system it's pretty good and there are some sections of this game stuff that i won't spoil but they're actually excellent if you're just focused on those sections and you double down on the stuff that works you'd have like a 30 to 40 hour game that i would right now be recommending to you i'd say look it's not perfect but it's some good open world rpg fun it'll do the job go and enjoy yourself right instead the length of this game brings all of its shortcomings into sharp relief the endlessness of it becomes a meditation on its failures as you suffer through yet another boring cutscene full of characters you don't care about sending you to yet another fort or bandit camp so you can button-mash your way through its subpar combat knowing that no interesting loot or progression awaits you at the other side assassin's creed valhalla is longer than odyssey it's way more arduous it's way more boring and unlike odyssey there's absolutely no payoff for the time invested [Music] assassin's creed odyssey was set in greece and you played as a mercenary who gets tangled up in the warring states of athens and sparta all the while facing into your own family drama where your sibling has fallen under the sway of the order of ancients who are basically the bad guys and on top of that you're toppling ancient mythological creatures like the minotaur and the medusa in a gripping final quest chain assassin's creed odyssey was full of [ __ ] its opening was very strong and its final 15 hours were exceptional but there was a 25 hour window in the middle that really blowed full of inane side quests and forced grind that may or may not have been intentional so as to sell you the now infamous xp booster from the cash shop at the start the similarities between odyssey and valhalla are quite striking it's clear that the story will revolve around your sibling and the way your relationship becomes increasingly more complicated with time you'll begin in norway in what is one of the best and most immersive starts to an assassin's creed game yet possibly the best you're immediately dropped onto the map with nothing to begin your exploration and gearing and you so organically begin to connect with this character and this landscape it's here that you can begin to take stock of just how gorgeous assassin's creed valhalla is i played this on the xbox series x it was the first game i reviewed on the next gen xbox and from a technical perspective this is very impressive stuff this doesn't look like a next-gen game i'd say it looks like a brilliant remaster of a this gen game i don't mean that as a dig by the way this really does look stunning but it's an engine that you've seen before in both origins and odyssey and it definitely looks better here but it lacks the sort of knockout punch quality that say demon souls have i mean you just look at this footage and like dude what the [ __ ] is this this is crazy valhalla won't knock you on your ass like that but it will consistently impress you with gorgeous endless vistas rolling green hills dense detailed vegetation and bustling cityscapes the fact that all of this occurs at a rock solid 60 fps is just so so good i played this on the xbox series s as well which sadly runs at 30 30fps which is a big deal because we were told that this system would be sacrificing resolution rather than frame rate it hurt the game big time to lose these frames 60 fps assassin's creed is just difficult to go back from and as far as next-gen games go you will not be disappointed by the work that ubisoft have put into the technical performance here anyway back to norway my brother has returned from overseas and he's brought with him a strange companion now i won't spoil this but if you're one of the people that felt like assassin's creed strayed too far away from the assassin stuff you're gonna love this guy you're gonna absolutely love him i won't spoil it but there is some great fan service right here anyway with this new figure on the scene my brother feels like he's getting a bit too big for his boots and we decide that we're gonna head off to england to conquer it because why not we're vikings conquering [ __ ] is what we do so we get in our longboat and the title card rolls and away we go one brief loading screen later and we're on english shores winding our way up a sunlit waterway as we look for a place to moor there's a chain blocking our path and so i hop out of the boat i empty the bandit camp guarding it and i clear the path forward we find a suitable place to pull our boards and it turns out that this was a pretty good place to plant a banner as well it's here that i unlock the settlement it's one of the flagship features of valhalla you'll raid monasteries up and down the english countryside to collect resources to build your settlement and unlock services like a trading post or a tattoo shop or a place you can hand in roman artifacts that are strewn about the english countryside some of these dwellings will also unlock brief quest chains like going hunting with the hunting supplies merchant the start of a budding romance should you wish it to be with your settlement built you gain access to the alliance map which is exactly what you think it is it's a map of england showcasing your alliances with the people in that area it's a big map but it's only got a few markers on it so the optimist in me looks at the power level 340 zone in the bottom left corner and says ah i'm sure i don't have to go there i'm sure that's just a bit of open world fun i mean to get to power level 340 my character would have to be level 170 since i get two power levels every time i level up and there's no way this game could ask me to level up 170 times that would be [ __ ] ridiculous so no that can't be right i put it out of my mind and i begin pledging to these regions at this point i'm gonna tell you i was loving valhalla my notes tell me that i sent messages to my editor saying that i sent dms to people who work in games being like hey this is really good so far i think they've done it good job ubisoft those dms did not age well i have never played a game so undone by its structure the map of england is vast similar in size to the greek islands and equally dense what's different is that in odyssey you never knew what these islands meant they could be vast quest hubs with hours of activity or there could be brief stopovers good for nothing but a few resources collected and then you're off you never really knew what lay ahead for you in odyssey and it felt like an unpredictable adventure where anything could happen anywhere i thought the same sort of thing would happen here in valhalla as i began the process of building alliances in each territory i did my first one or two and enjoyed the novelty of it savored the satisfaction of seeing that little raven piece slammed down on the map and marked that territory as my own but we're in a set in after like the fifth or sixth time doing this i noticed that for each new raven marker i put down a new chess piece would appear after doing this like 10 times i was pleading with the game to make it stop because it felt like for every step forward i took more runway was being built before me i felt like charlie brown where i was hoping the next territory i cleared would be the final one and that would sort of launch me into the final climactic act of the game but that moment wouldn't happen until hour 65 and i was having these thoughts at like our twenty i would not feel this way if the process of forging these alliances was at all interesting but it's so excruciatingly dull now i'm actually into viking history and mythology i've read some books i've watched some shows i know the names of a lot of the historical figures that this game uses as window dressing like uber and iva and alfred and rolo and king alfred and the entire pantheon of norse gods assassin's creed valhalla somehow finds a way to make all of that so [ __ ] boring because it never commits to any of the great sagas of these people these heroes what it does is it just takes them and then it uses them as a name in some little skirmish or something that can fit into a two or three hour block of gameplay in a specific region of the map so you can do the quest chain you do the siege battle at the end and then you slam that raven piece down on your board there's no development of these characters and their stories because the game is structured in a way to specifically prohibit that sort of development valhalla has this metronomic sing-song rhythm that becomes so predictable so fast and spoiler alert it never changes i have finished this game i will tell you it never changes it's literally 67 hours of going to a new location meeting some brand new characters you've never met before doing five to eight quests for them they have like an emotionally charged cut scene to try and get you connected to these characters there's a final battle and then you go home it's 67 hours of that over and over and over and over again the repetitiveness of its structure though is not the worst part the length is not the worst part the worst part is that it's just not worth it in the end like odyssey was long and its midsection sucked but it was worth it in the end because that final 15 hours of the game were just excellent every payoff i was hoping to get after 25 hours of boring [ __ ] in the mid game i got those payoffs in valhalla the most interesting parts of this game involve your brother stuff that is totally disconnected from your efforts to pacify england there is no connection between those two storylines after the first 10 hours and you just get drip fed progress on the brother storyline every like 15 hours maybe and then at the end once you've cleared the entire map of england at hour 65 there is essentially a one and a half hour cut scene that resolves that storyline and that's it it's pretty good by the way like i enjoyed it it's a good cutscene thing but that one and a half hour thing does not make up for the endless soul-crushing boredom i endured for the preceding 65 hours not by a long shot with odyssey i was like well it took a long time to get there but it eventually got there here i felt robbed of my time like i really wish i could go back in time and not play this game i wish i could have that time back it was such a disappointing ending and like had i arrived at it 30 hours earlier i'd feel a lot less resentful than i do now assassin's creed valhalla has cool flashy combat that i would be perfectly satisfied with where i play in the game for far less time but 67 hours with this janky [ __ ] gives you plenty of time to think about how bad it is so let's talk about that valhalla's combat is similar to the combat you've experienced in both odyssey and origins you have light and heavy attacks that you can execute with a range of weapons as well as abilities you can use when you have enough adrenaline banks this time around you can dual wield weapons pretty cool huh no when you do this the weapon is only usable while long pressing the left bumper pressing it too quickly the weapon will instead execute a parry maneuver i don't understand why they did this but they did it and it makes using a second weapon feel extremely clunky valhalla uses a paired animation system meaning that combat is more focused on combat looking good than feeling good go sashima is a good example of what hitbox based combat looks like and feels like it feels precise responsive intelligent sort of realistic valhalla's combat feels sloppy imprecise your limbs and weapons and those of your enemies will awkwardly teleport around so as to connect with each other and it never ever comes close to a feeling of skill it never is rewarding to take down a foe because the combat system is not deep enough to facilitate that sort of feeling there are abilities that you can use which look pretty cool and some of them like the harpoon do unbalanced amounts of damage but these abilities ultimately interrupt the flow of combat rather than augment them if you go and watch god of war's combat you'll see how kratos's abilities are weaved into his combos like he can leave his axe spinning in the air dealing damage while he's also pummeling his enemies etc here in valhalla the abilities are just dumb i win buttons that's all they are they're just a resource dump that interrupts combat and then you continue spamming the same attacks as before now this part is really important to understand and i'm not lying about any of this by the way this is real and it's not something i've seen in any other review and it's i don't know why it doesn't make sense to me i played this game on normal difficulty and i was never ever over leveled for any content i did i did everything at the appropriate gear level after about the first 10 or so hours this game becomes laughably easy i think i died a total of twice in 67 hours because the raw stats that i bring to the table when i'm at the right level is just overwhelming i'm essentially invulnerable i never ever need to worry about enemies hitting me they have to hit me like 15 times to kill me and i have these healing rations on me so they'd realistically need to hit me like 60 times before i would die together lads we have this get behind if you can it's not just my defensive power though i absolutely shrek everything i look at and i don't even need to think every enemy i encounter every single one i can just spam the heavy attack button because i hit with so much force that i will knock them on their ass or i will shatter their shield or i will interrupt their attacks and then i can just like stomp on them while they're on the ground i i'm not meant to be able to do this because there's a stamina system that should stop me from being able to spam my heavy attack button like this but the stamina bars tuning is just broken so it's just this endless button-mashing carnage because i'm so over-tuned that i don't even need to properly play this game i can just keep spamming heavy attack and dumping my abilities and i win this gets worse later on when i unlock the witch time thing where i can slow down time when i dodge i can't believe how long this window is and how easy it makes combat it's just it totally breaks the game the only time i was ever remotely challenged while i was playing this game was at the very end at hour 66 or whatever where i had completed the major story arc with my brother and my reward for that is another zone on the map for me to clear like thanks man that's exactly what i wanted i really appreciate that haven't done enough of that cool let's go and i look at it and it's that 340 zone that i saw at the beginning the the one that i'm like there's no way they'll get asked me to get to that level no no way okay i was level 270 when i got to that point right power level 270 which was the intended level for me to finish the game there's even an achievement that says so okay so what the game was saying to me was hey what we want you to do is we want you to grind out another 70 power levels which is the equivalent of leveling up 35 more times and there were no quests to do at this point by the way i'd finished all the quests so it was just side quest [ __ ] they wanted me to do at this point and i was like no no i don't think i will so i went to that 340 zone even though i was 70 power levels lower and i just did it like enemies kind of did a lot more damage some of them could too shot me but it was actually kind of fun to have the risk of death be a thing after 66 hours of just spamming the heavy attack button and being invulnerable like just think about that the only time this combat was remotely challenging was when i was 70 power levels below the recommended power level stealth and assassinations is another really interesting point now because i'm so strong and combat is so easy there's no point in stealth it's just faster to walk up to enemies and two shot them than it is to like carefully stealth behind them but at one point i couldn't even stealth behind enemies because i hadn't put enough points into the stealth tree so after about hour 20 i could no longer assassinate even low-level foot soldiers in an assassin's creed game i could not stealth even if i wanted to because i couldn't assassinate low-level targets like does that sound right to you that doesn't sound right to me now again i would have been fine with all of this if this game were not so endlessly long a tight focused 30-hour experience with some great story beats and some set-piece moments i can forgive some pretty average combat because it doesn't have enough time to wear out its welcome but when you make people play with bad combat for 67 hours they are really going to notice your bad combat [Music] give me a hand with this the last thing that really bugged me about this game was the absolute lack of meaningful progression on any of its core systems now let's start with gibb odyssey had an interesting gear system where you were regularly collecting gear that had randomized stats on it as well as gear sets that provided really meaningful bonuses there was an actual loot game to be had there perhaps too much so in that you know a few people complained that they were spending too much time in their menus tossing away unwanted gear fair enough that's partly true okay valhalla responds to that feedback by completely gutting the gear system there's so little loot available in this game it no longer drops from enemies and it isn't randomized it's static pieces that can generally only be looted from chests and there's just so little of it like i went and collected gear as i played when i reached a new location i would always go out of my way to collect the gear pieces in the area and i think i ended up with like five helmets by the end like three or four shields like a bunch of weapons but only like one or two variants of each the set bonuses that the gear has they're just so nothing let's like increase crit okay how much does it increase crit by a lot or a little like the gems you slot in your gear they increase my weapon damage by 3.2 well my weapon does 111 damage so you can increase my damage by like three percent less thanks i guess i was legitimately engaged by odyssey's gear system i went and hunted gear sets that felt good and they had useful bonuses some of the weapons felt like big meaty upgrades where i got them and i was like [ __ ] yes here we go i remember that i have just finished valhalla and there was not a single item that dropped not a single item in 67 hours that i was interested in or that made me go cool like not one the skill tree is just it's just it's just the worst okay so it's divided in three parts which are generally aligned to melee ranged and stealth except that's not true because each section is also littered with stats that you'd be specifically trying to avoid if you were trying to build in that region of the map so if you're building melee you're still going to find nodes that increase your range damage for some reason the nodes themselves are these small incremental stat increases that never feel rewarding or meaningful like your weapon upgrades the stats just mean absolutely nothing to you and the worst part is that the whole tree is obscured to you until you unlock each section so you can't go and plan a build like i found nodes on this at hours 45 or hours 60 and i was like hey cool would have liked to have known that existed 60 hours ago so now i've got this sweet new ability that i've just picked up and i can't enjoy it during my playthrough because i committed the mistake of not looking up a guide because i played the game when no guides existed nice [Music] okay so yeah look this game is getting good reviews all round right i'm saying it's like 90 percent recommended on open critic right now okay fair enough i i don't agree with that personally but fair enough i'm obviously the outlier here i obviously you know have a very different view of it i will definitely concede that i that i can see certainly some people will love this i understand that right i think a lot of people loved odyssey it was like their favorite game ever and i didn't love it anywhere near that much but i can understand why someone would i think it really got a lot of things right you know it's a it's a solid game overall right if you loved odyssey i think there's a chance that you'll really enjoy this as well but but like i firmly believe that this is a worse game than odyssey like i think it's a massive step back in fact its progression systems are so bare bones and unengaging and the fact that i leveled up 140 times before i finished it it's just that's just that's insanity it's combat is jankier than it was before the game balance is completely fubar to the point where there's no challenge whatsoever the combat is this mindless button-mashing extravaganza structurally the game feels like this endless checklist where new characters are rolled in and out on a strict three-hour rotation i mean i met them all at camp before the final battle thing at sort of like the end of the game i couldn't remember half of them because there were just so many of them and their stories were so immemorable critically the payoff for this amount of time invested just is not there i cannot remember the last time i felt so deflated after finishing a game i just felt like i just felt pissed off that ubisoft took that much time from me and gave me so little in return i really really hope that my review saves you the time that i lost on this game this video is brought to you by squarespace now they are the single best place to go to if you want to build your own custom website building websites used to be really hard with lots of tricky tools you need to hire people and administrators and whatever else and thousands of dollars not anymore now with squarespace you just create an account you can log in begin customizing one of their dozens of award-winning templates and within minutes you have a professional looking website they also have more advanced tools like seo optimization increasing your chances of being found online they have things like calendar so you can schedule events heaps of stuff that just make it very easy to build your business or your community or just share your interests with the world to get started visit squarespace.com and when you're ready to get serious visit squarespace.com forward slash 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 1,611,351

Rating: 4.3665571 out of 5

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, assassin's creed valhalla, assassin's creed valhalla trailer reaction, assassin's creed valhalla release date, assassin's creed valhalla song, assassin's creed valhalla review, assassin's creed valhalla impressions, assassin's creed valhalla gameplay, assassin's creed valhalla combat, assassin's creed valhalla reaction, valhalla, ac valhalla, vikings, assassin's creed vikings, ps4, xbox, pc, review, impressions

Id: 0HPNCA_XoBg

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Satanich]

The problem with most open worlds are way to many things to do of low quality, rather than less quests or places but with more focus on detail and quality.

[u/[deleted]]

Open-world action game? ✅

Third person? ✅

Very basic RPG mechanics? ✅

Shoehorned crafting? ✅

Boring dialogue? ✅

A premise that's interesting enough to possibly get you hooked but goes nowhere? ✅

Must be triple-A games for the last decade!

[u/KingAlfred15]

I really hate the combat animations of this ancient trilogy.

[u/PigeonsOnYourBalcony]

Open worlds were neat when they became trendy but now its just an excuse to pad out playtime and bullshit their way through looser narratives.

Releases like this are a reminder size of a map is worthless when there is so little substance to back it up.

[u/Real_nimr0d]

That's every ubisoft game, medicore and boring. Their games just have no soul.

[u/walrus_of_fate]

I'm enjoying it significantly more than I enjoyed Watch_Dogs: Legion. If you've liked the last two AC games you'll probably enjoy this one.

[u/Satan_Prometheus]

I've found that SkillUp is one of the most consistent reviewers on Youtube, in a sort of upside-down way - I almost always have the totally opposite opinion from him.

That's not intended as a criticism, it just means that what he wants and what I want are completely different, which is useful in itself.

[u/thaumogenesis]

I’m not defending Ubisoft here, because I haven’t played one of their games since ACIII (which I hated), but at what point do these reviews become pretty worthless when they’re playing so many games in succession? I know people have this critique of music reviewers, who pump out reviews one after the other, but it’s surely even worse for games, where you really have to invest some time before being able to give a robust review of the story, world and mechanics. If you feel burned out on a certain type of game before starting it, that you’d otherwise avoid if not for reviewing purposes, it’s surely going to have a pretty severe impact on your feelings about it.

I play about one or two open world games per year and usually love them, but the idea of having to wade through one every month (or more, in November’s case), just seems ridiculous to me.

[u/The91stGreekToe]

I’m actually really enjoying AC Valhalla. ^{pleasedon’thurtme}