Holden Rohloff

I was looking forward the game ever since it was announced, I love vikings and the Assassins Creed games. I appreciate the effort by Ubisoft to incorporate RPG elements as I am a huge RPG fan. Side quests were a bit more polished than in Odyssey which is great. I liked the simplification of the weapon and armor system, that way I'm not constantly worrying about wasting resources on an armor piece or weapon that I'm going to end up swapping out an hour later. The village was a nice touch, I felt like I was contributing to the people I was protecting. However, there were plenty of flaws that drove down my rating. Just like in Odyssey, in Assassins Creed Valhalla, your character doesn't really feel like an assassin, rather another strong armed warrior with little need for stealth or deception. Yes, they added back the hidden blade, but that does not help their score as it should have never been removed in the first place. Parkour is severely lacking, with too few large city centers in which I could free-run. The skill tree was organized into Melee, Ranged, and Stealth, however, Ubisoft definitely went for quantity over quality for skills, with many of the skills being slight improvements to basic passive stats i.e. light damage, heavy damage, crit.-damage, etc. The abilities were okay, but I often found myself using hack and slash attacks and only found abilities necessary when fighting bosses. As far as stories go, it's average writing at best. The story was repetitive with overly predictable quests and "plot twists." I felt that Ubisoft tried to add too many main/named characters in an effort to make the game feel bigger than it was, however, many were forgettable and I found myself caring for very few of them. As for the world itself, no improvements were made in comparison to Odyssey. The world was not as massive as it was in Odyssey, but the cities and towns were even smaller, making the open world seem just as empty as the game's predecessor. There was more stuff put in the open world like small homesteads and military/bandit camps, but they often served little purpose beyond collecting iron and leather, in some case, armor/weapons. In all, the open world was boring and lacked any meaningful content. Although I enjoyed building my village, I found that many of the buildings were not useful enough for me to think of utilizing their services. I normally try to avoid too much criticism of graphics, however, this game's graphics were too problematic for me to ignore. I honestly think this game looks worse than Odyssey. Everything seems blockier, and the world's color, lighting, and texture variety was bland. Like many others who have written reviews before me, I fazed through surfaces and found missing pieces of structures. Yes, the horses looked awful, which seems to be a reoccurring complaint by other critics. Two stars may be too generous, but the game is playable and the story is simple enough to follow. I probably could think of more issues, and to be fair, I'm sure that there are good things about the game that I am overlooking. However, those are the things that come to mind when discussing the latest installment of Assassins Creed. AC Valhalla is an average RPG and a subpar Assassins Creed game that is about 20 to 30 dollars over what it's actually worth. I don't see myself replaying this game in the future.