Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the latest installment of the long-running Ubisoft tentpole series. It’s an open-world action RPG where players take on the role of Eivor(you can decide to play Eivor as either a female or male), a Viking warrior whose parents were cut down and murdered when a warring tribe. Eivor moves with his best friend and Jarl, Sigurd to the new lands of England during the Viking expansion into Europe in search of wealth, glory and power. Soon after they arrive in England, Eivor and his fellow Vikings are thrust into a world of pollical unrest and war as they seek to carve out their existence in the world. Assassin’s Creed is one of my top franchises and I’ve been more than a little excited to dive in, so, how did they do? Come along with me and let’s dive in.

Allow me a quick moment to preface this with the statement that I will strive to avoid any major spoilers AND with full disclosure, I haven’t yet completed the game. I’m over 40 hours in and have been working hard to get the game finished in time for embargo but the game just proved to be too much for me. I have, however, had a taste of everything it has to offer.

To start, Valhalla is, without a shadow of a doubt the most violent, bloody and mature game in the series. How can that be when the series is about assassinating people you ask? Well, for starters, the battles are bloody and chock full of gruesome finishers. From cutting a man down at the legs and beheading him, to smashing his face in with a hammer and then crushing his head like a grape between 2 hammers. Glory to those who are soaked in the blood of their enemies. There’s also some nudity to be had later in the game.

Immediately, you’re going to love the graphics on this game. No matter if you’re on a PS4/Pro or Xbox One S/X or even next-gen, this game delivers stunning visuals. Granted, on the almost last-gen machines, Vahalla is really pushing these boxes to their limits and you’ll notice that at certain points with texture pop, framerate dips and just general graphical hiccups. As I write this, we’re just one sleep away from next-gen consoles becoming available and I’m salivating at what that means from a visual fidelity perspective of this game. While I’m on the topic of current/next-gen boxes, loading times can be an absolute bore. They’re certainly not the worst I’ve ever experienced (looking at you Wasteland 3) but they can be drawn out and with a game like this where you spend a lot of time fast travelling, you’ll often find yourself reaching for the phone/tablet to poke around twitter while the game loads. I’ve spent a lot of time mucking around with the camera mode. One scene left me slack-jawed and I took a screen capture that I absolutely love and plan to get professionally printed on canvas to hang on my wall.

The map in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, while not nearly as large as Odyssey, is still quite vast and full of beauty, quests and secrets to find. Some of the secrets to be on the lookout for are Roman artifacts, weapons/armor and cursed objects to name a few. There’s plenty of things to see and do. Without getting into too much detail, there are 3 maps in the game and each one feels and looks unique to their locales. I must admit that the cursed objects are a bit of a curiosity to me. You’ll know you’re near a cursed object when the world begins to get full of a dark thick fog making it nearly impossible to see anything. Once you find the object, you break it and the fog clears up and that’s it. There’s no lore or anything else to be said about them. Personally, I feel like that was a bit of a missed opportunity to add in some little side stories.

One of my favorite things to do is embarking on raids. That’s when you roll up to specific towns in your longboat with your fellow Vikings and charge at the town setting fires to buildings, killing soldiers and pillaging the treasure and riches of the town. interestingly enough, you can call in a raid almost any time you go into a town. What you’ll find is that the NPCs that are assisting you end up taking up a majority of the battle responsibilities leaving you with the task of finding all the loot. Your warriors will even help you out when in the middle of a battle or if you need a hand smashing in a door.

The real exciting battles tend to take place in a castle or an enemy stronghold. Ubisoft really captured the feeling of these moments. The chaos, the yelling and screaming while arrows fly, battering rams smash and people are dismembered is incredible and the music that accompanies these moments is sure to get your blood pumping.

At times the world feels a bit empty but it is the new world after all and there are plenty of landmarks to check out. One place in particular that comes to mind was a quaint little cottage in the countryside. When I approached it I could hear a child yelling out for help asking for help telling me that they were locked away by a witch who means to cook and eat them. I entered the house and found that the boy was locked in a room and I needed to find the key. When I finally found what I was looking for the boy’s mother arrived home and explained that he was mischievous so she only locked him up while she went out.

As you play through and accomplish tasks, you’ll earn skill points to assign in a skill tree. To me, the skill tree felt like a cross between the tree in Skyrim and Final Fantasy X where you unlock skills, apply points to stats like your stealth damage and then open up paths to new skills or buffs. I really liked the way they did this. It could perhaps get a little deeper but all in all, I felt like this was a fantastic addition to the series and encourage them to continue with it into future games. You’ll also find books to unlock new abilities such as a roll to minimize fall damage. These books are scattered throughout the land and often pose a challenge to get to them whether it’s venturing deep into some catacombs or just finding a way into a building.

Fans who complained about the grindy feel of Odyssey may still harbor ill feelings with Valhalla as some regions and story plot points are not recommended if you don’t meet a certain power level and trust me when I say going into one of those towns when you don’t meet the power requirements will leave you bloodied on the ground or running for your life. I, personally, don’t take issue with this sort of mechanic. In fact, I quite like it.

The item system has taken a pretty dramatic shift this time around as well. You never have to buy anything. Literally, I haven’t purchased a thing from the vendors and the reason for that is you can find all the items you would ever need in the world. That includes weapons and armor which you would find in towns. Gone are the days of humming and hawing over what armor or weapons to use. I’m still using the same ones that came with the Ultimate edition of the game. And what’s interesting about that is now you can upgrade your armor with consumables you find – eventually you’ll cap out but then you can take it to a smith, he’ll level it up adding new points to it for upgrades and the addition of runes. Your weapons and armor will also change in appearance over the course of the upgrades and will eventually reach its final appearance level. If you felt that the items management and the sheer number of weapons and armor were too overwhelming in Odyssey, they’ve addressed that with this new system and I fully expect that the changes will be welcome by many and embraced by fans.

One final component that I enjoyed is building up the homestead, Ravensthorpe. When there, you’ll need to collect supplies from raids to be able to build up your town. As you do so, it will gain notoriety and more people will want to join you at your settlement and will then request a building that they’ll use providing necessities to the townsfolk. You can even throw a feast to liven everyone’s spirits and participate in drinking games.

Now with all that out of the way, let’s chat about some of the shortcomings. To start with, the game has had some bugs for me. A few times, the story stopped progressing when it should have been getting to a cutscene and the game just sat there doing nothing with Eivor and another NPC staring at each other awkwardly for 5 minutes before I opted to kill the game and reload back in. Another had me getting off my steed and the moment my feet touched the ground I was launched across the map. Luckily I landed in water but that was most hilarious. The worst bug I encountered was during a boss battle just as I was about to strike the finishing blow, I fell through the level and into the abyss never to be seen from again. It’s going to happen with these sorts of games. I get that and while it hasn’t soured my appreciation of the game it is annoying.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an incredible experience. Like I said above I have over 40hrs into the game and I noticed last night that it looks like I still had about 7 more localized regions to visit and it feels like I’m in around the halfway point. I tried as hard as I could to try and stay focused on the main tasks but sometimes it’s easy to get sidetracked still, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is likely a 100-hour experience for everything. I’m absolutely loving my experience and think that Ubisoft just keeps raising the bar on this series with each new installment. I must now take my leave as the call to battle stirs in me. TO VALHALLA!!!

Pros:
– Graphics are simply stunning
– Story is great and I really like Eivor and would love if we could get a Viking trilogy.
– There’s so much to see and do. You’re easily going to get a solid 80-100 hours of enjoyment out of this title
– Raids are incredible. The music, the sites and sounds all add to the experience
– New skill tree is awesome. Would like to see it get a little deeper.

Cons:
– The game has plenty of little frustrating bugs. It didn’t sour my time with the game but it sure didn’t add to it.
– Would like more context to the cursed objects to make them more interesting