Heather Stalter

Played the game through. While initial release was buggy per usual for Ubisoft, and clearly not beta tested enough, I thoroughly LOVED the game. I will state, I hate that most of the game art used for promotion was for the "male" version of Eivor, which isn't exactly "cannon", and you definitely miss a lot of the story undertones if you manually chose to play male, however, I love that its a step in the right direction. Eivor is headstrong, brutal, rational and charismatic. Havi is a joy to play as well. The player mechanics feel a bit more clumsy, like you're playind Ezio and Desmond. UI is good. My only other real beef with the game is Ivarr the Boneless. Ubisoft did him dirty- the "real" dude had a substantial disability that they completely wrote out, and that really detracted from how terrifying a fighter he was IRL. Wish they would have included that. Origins and Odyssey make a lot more sense with this game in the franchise as well, it continues the second storyline really well. Beautiful game, entertaining, and very playable. Good job Ubisoft. Side note back to the gender thing- It's been nice to play as several female characters, and the team did such a good job fleshing out each woman's personality. Many games fall into the trap of "strong woman = sexy strong or butch strong" and that's it. The female characters are well rounded and given just as much attention as the males, so from a female perspective, thank you Ubisoft.