Valhalla follows Odyssey as the third period two development games, and the twelfth major Assassin's Creed installment of them all. After two stories that were set in BC times, we're finally traveling forward in time and getting back to a period that isn't far away from the foundation of the historical Ḥashshāshīyīn and the Knight Templar orders.

But first we get into the modern-day story. It's 2020 and Earth seems to see its next catastrophe. Desmonds meddling with the Isu temple to avoid the Earth being destroyed by sun flairs has actually continuously been strengthening the magnetic field of the earth, which has now become so powerful that it negatively affects the planet. Layla therefore travels with Shaun and Rebecca to New England where they find a Viking body of Eivor (who by the way again is canonically female [the surname is 'Varinsdottir' = daughter of Varin - regardless of the gender you pick; male should have been Varinsson] -- once again, shame on you, Ubisoft), and this will lead Layla to 873 AD, to the Viking expansion to Anglo-Saxon England.

Eivors brother Sigurd returns form a long excursion and returns with the foreigners Basim and Hytham, both members of a strange order. During the game, Eivor learns more about this order of the Hidden Ones and their enemies, the Order of the Ancients, even gets to learn some tricks from Hytham, and also learns that a high ranking member of the Ancient Ones is a rivaling clan member and someone Eivor was already looking forward to kill. After this is done, Sigurd and Eivor have to flee their home and join the Invasion of England. However in this process Sigurd gets captured by the Ancient Ones, and now Eivor does not only have to secure their clan and make sure to have alliances with all the other surrounding territories, but also try to find Sigurd and defeat the Ancient Ones who pose a great thread. Hytham is a great help in providing intel, while Basim joins on field missions and teaches Eivor a bit in the ways of the Assassins.

While this game actually ties the series back to the Assassins Creed, Eivor is far from being an Assassin, and as with Kassandra, it not only feels weird to play her stealthy; it also doesn't make much sense, as Eivor is best when she is allowed to wield her two axes or bash in heads with her shield, use her rage and stomp enemies to the ground. The fighting has become much more gruesome and gritty, with the ability to now hack away pieces of the enemies, like their arms, legs and heads. Other than that it does not deviate far enough from Odyssey that I was rather disappointed to have yet another hack and slay Assassin's Creed - as this is not what I initially signed up for and as this is - at least for me - not where the strength and fun of the series lies (there are a lot of better hack and slay type of games - I just now finished Hellblade which was just incredible in its fighting sequences and which Valhalla does not compare to at all, regarding complexity and therefore challenge and fun of the pure fighting scenes). So I was a bit turned down by this. Even more so as in the beginning you aren't able to do much more. You only get the hidden blade later, and all the abilities have to be gained by progressing in the story (and not via skill tree). The fighting is a bit harder though, not as crazy as Odyssey - but in the end game we are rather overpowered once more.

On the plus side, the loot is reduced massively, making the few weapons you own really valuable and upgrading it a necessity - which also doesn't come by easy, so you really tend to think about what weapons you want to play and how you want to upgrade them. New weapons can only be found in special weapon chests, and the same goes for abilities that are now learned via books of knowledge that you need to find in the world - and I really liked this approach. There are still collectible set items so you also pay attention to that, and every gear is aligned to an animal that basically represents one of the three ways of playing (stealth, ranged, or melee). The skill tree uses the same codes, but boy o boy was that "tree" convoluted. In the beginning I read what each option given does, and tried to make sensible choices, but soon I got fed up, because it was so unstructured and large - in the end I just randomly picked according to the code that fitted my gear. This was no fun at all.

The main story was also quite strange. While or main quest should have been to save Sigurd and eradicate that Order of Ancients, we rather build up our town, visit the neighboring kingdoms and try to forge an alliance by helping them out with their problem - all the while Sigurd was getting tortured and brought nearer to death with every passing day. The land itself is vast and for the most parts empty; it's also not as varying as the other two games where; but given its an accurate modeling of England at that time there isn't much you could have done to change that.

There are certain world events though, that where distributed over the map - small funny encounters you'd have with people who sometimes had serious and even heartbreaking problems, other times where outright silly, and sometimes even aggressive outcomes towards you as the player. These where amongst the most fun and memorable encounters in the game, and it was a shame that there weren't more of these. This would have made exploring the world more fun. As it is, it feels really stunning and on the one hand you love to go explore, but on the other hand you know that there is nothing of interest to come. In that regard I would have loved Valhalla to be more like RDR2, where it would have been even fun to see certain buildings or scenes that tell a story by just being there, where you have to guess what might have happened. I felt that there where one or two of those, but for the most time nothing to see, other than emptiness.

There is however a thing that bothered me even more - and it is a continuation of the problem I already encountered with Odyssey and that I coined the "alignment issue". To progress in the story, we need to make alliances with neighboring kingdoms. We do so by visiting them, doing tasks for them, and finally gaining their trust; however we also need to proceed by gaining materials which we can only do by brutally raiding monasteries. So we do a main quest and ensure the loyalty of a region, which is christian, by actually working with the priest there - and then we raid his monastery? There where even quite enjoyable side quest where you helped a priest, where you had philosophical discussions and actually had a bonding moment - only to then having to raid his monastery. This felt so wrong and so out of line. Raiding monasteries was also on of the dullest and most repetitive tasks in the game - but you had to, to progress in the main story. I really didn't enjoy this at all. It also felt quite stupid, as there was only one way to do it: With your raiding party. So no sneaking around and eliminating the enemies. It had to be done in a large scale fight - and the reason behind this: You needed another person to open the chests - it was impossible to do on your own. Now your raiding party weren't the best fighters and sometimes also not the most helpful. I had situations where I waited for minutes at a chest until finally someone of my crew came along to help me. This further reduced my fun in doing this.

Then there where these request by your towns people. E.g. the shop asked you to bring rather stupid items and carry them over half the map to the person asking for them. Or the Fisherman asking for a multitude of different fish that not only where hard to find and catch - but also came in three different sizes. I spent a lot of time trying to get together all the fish to reach the 100%, only to later find out that due to bugs some fish didn't even exist -.- Wow. Even after multiple upgrades and introducing all the different patches and DLCs did they neither add the fish to make this possible, nor did they just remove those requests. Bummer.

Another type of challenges, the mastery challengers where also partly unbeatable - I did one of them a multitude of times - there where just to few enemies, or my Eivor already too strong. The internet suggested cheating by setting the difficulty to lowest or highest settings for certain of these challenges, but even with those there was one challenge I wasn't able to master, because with the given number of enemies it was impossible to kill the required number by fire and the additional required number by falling - there just weren't enough enemies. This led to added frustrations - and after already spending so much time in the game, I just wanted to get over with it already. First Assassins Creed where I didn't even try to attempt the 100% anymore. But well - as there isn't any account to 100% anyways and the game says you managed 100% by simply finishing the main game.... guess they know themselves that this game got so vast that it would be impossible to ask this from the players. To gain some legendary weapons, there where also River-Raids - these where a different kind of monastery raids, only that this time you'd raid an entire river, so monasteries, villages, military buildings, etc. These rivers where located in England, Ireland, Dublin and even Germany and France; and they where a bit more fun, as you'd have a little bit more tactics to consider; however they soon also became quite monotone - and unfortunately to get all the gear and abilities hidden in those rivers you'd had to do a couple of them multiple times; this was the most grindiest and most unfun part; but actually manageable. Unfortunately they spoiled some events that where only released later in the DLCs, which was another weird aspect of these.

I did most of the other tasks, however, and have to say, the rewards weren't as satisfying as they used to be - a lot of things (like finishing all hunting requests, upgrading all gear, etc.) wouldn't even make you gain a an achievement.

So in the end, the world was great and the overall story decent - but I never felt totally emerged into the world, and this was partly due to its vast emptiness, partly due to frustrations, but also because it missed the vibrant live you experienced in the other games. I feel like I didn't even experience much of what it means to have been a viking - other than the things I already knew. There was one mission up in the north that finally gave me a little bit of that feeling, but other than that? Was it really all just raiding and partying? Or was there more to viking life, to their culture, their economy, how they build stuff, etc.?

So the most fun I actually had was playing in Eivors drug induced visions, where Eivor takes on the role of Odin and we get to experience an interpretation of the Viking believes and mythology, as we play the events that lead to Ragnarök. This was in parts more fun than the main game, and yet it felt weird as these visions where not all possible to do at once, but also so long that it fragmented the stories so much that I wasn't sure what I was doing last in either worlds.

I also had problems following the Isu story. Now they are apparently all Viking Gods? And the catastrophe that wiped out the Isu now was used as an opportunity to mix their DNA with humans, so that they could resurface as anyone of us in any time and just to keep up their personal fights in now human form? And somehow the Order of Ancients knows of this and tries to bring it out from humans that have the right DNA? I feel like my head is starting to hurt regarding the strange turn this all took.

There were also a couple of DLCs - and what was really annoying: While the Open World actually worked quite well as every part is independent and this time there really is no order in which you can do them - there is actually an order in which you should do the DLCs as they'd otherwise spoil the end. BUT they are indistinguishable from the non-DLC content and for these you don't have any order clues - so once more, grep out your phone while playing and surf the net for guides that tell you how to do all of them in the proper order. Oh boy... You didn't had these problems, of course, when you bought and played the game right from the beginning - but to my knowledge you'd then be fighting with much more bugs... so which is the better way to go?

As for the DLCs - Valhalla gives as a lot - and I mean, really a lot! Most they've ever done

- Wrath of the Druids: Eivor is asked by some Viking relative that settled in Ireland to visit Dublin where she gets to meet some Irish druids and one of the most intriguing characters of the entire series: Ciara ingen Medba. There where some new mechanics, and haunting enemies (which where unfortunately spoiled int he River raids already), and a really captivating story, which made this so much fun to play; not the least also because it got an incredible Irish soundtrack with some incredible singing passages, that just made the events in the game so much more epic.

- The Siege of Paris: After returning from Ireland, another related Viking that was raiding France. This one was probably the worst of the new DLCs - it feels like the biggest one-to-one copies form the original game, and the few new mechanics are rather monotonous and feel like chores quite soon (Resistance side missions) or are just plain annoying (plague rats). Most of it is rather grindy; only Charles the Fat and Count Odo as unsympathetic villains stand out. But all in all this is mostly no fun and really forgettable.

- A Fated Encounter: The name already gives it away, and if you look it up, you'll see which two people will meet: Eivor and Kassandra. It's a typical Crossover: two heroes meet, fight it out, then realize that they would be better working together as they both have the same goal and than destroy the evil. It's not much, game play wise, but I thought it was really fun seeing those two meet and especially the scene after they finish their mission is really great and fun to watch - and gives the character of Kassandra so much more weight in understanding what her duty is and what it will cost here to fulfill it. I really hope to see her in other games as well! Its nothing big or noteworthy other than that it is a nice reminiscence to Odyssey.

- Dawn of Ragnarök: This DLC further extends on the Story that started with Eivors Visions. After seeing the imprisonment of Loki's son Fenrir, getting the Mead from Jotunheim that will resurrect the Aesir after Ragnarök, we get to experience the Story of Odin and Friggs son Baldr being kidnapped by Surtr, and how Odin is defeated in an attempt to free Baldr from Surtr, a broken Odin is left in Svartalfheim, where he aids the dwarfs defend themselves against the invasion of the Muspels. Dawn of Ragnarök is basically rather similar to the main game, with the exception of a new power: The Hugr-Rip - an artifact build by the dwarfs that allows you to steal the hugr of certain enemies you defeated, giving you the look and power of said enemy. Want to walk through fire or lava? Use the hugr of a Muspel. Want to freeze your enemies? Use the hugr of a Jotun. Want to teleport? To turn yourself into a raven? To raise the death? Find the enemy that can do it, kill him and rip out his hugr. The bracelet can store two of these hugrs at a time that you can use as long and often as you have power, which is another thing that can be collected by killing enemies or finding other natural power sources. This gives the story a new spin on the game play that is fun enough to keep you engaged with the story; the world however feels a bit too large with two many side quests, things to collect and events. And there is even an Arena that has some pretty hard and challenging fights which you need to win to gain some legendary set items; however this gets a bit repetitive soon, as there are just too many of these round you need to go to get the entire set. It's not a must-play, but can be fun, if you get this included in your edition.

- The Forgotten Saga: I guess this one you'll either love or hate: The story is about Odin trying to reach Hel and demand from here to release Baldr who died in Ragnarök; to reach Hel, he has to go through Niflheim, which consists of Kaldstad, Døkkerland and Nidheim to finally reach Helheim. The clue: Odin can take nothing with him, but when he starts a run, he'll get assigned a random weapon and a random ability. We then fight ourselves thorugh the realms, killing enemies that will allow us to open chests containing either a new ability, a new weapon, health or memories. Should we - on the way die - we get respawned right at the beginning of the first realm. We keep nothing of the items we earned from our run, and start with zero - except for our memories, which we can use to either take one-time charms with us, or level the ability tree. And it is regradless where you die - you'll always start at the beginning. At the end of every part of Niflheim there is a big endboss, that becomes more dangerous - and every region has its own set of rules, enemies and ways to move around - but also people who might help us. The more often we pass through a region the more chances we get to do some side quests that will ease our passing or give us some additional bonuses. And I needed something between 10 and 20 runs and with every restart, there was another animation, other reactions and different dialogues to be had, so this actually really doesn't get boring. And once you reach the end, this is soooo satisfying. I really loved this Groundhog Day approach; for me it was really something. But I guess there will be poeple who do this once or twice and loose interest after that or get so frustrated that they stop playing. It's a different kind of grind.

- The Last Chapter: This felt more like a cut sequence then a game; we finally get to know why Eivors body is not burried somehere in England but actually in New England in the US. And then we get a link to the present day -- and finally this story is brought to an end.


In some ways Valhalla is really great, and me being a great fan of vikings (I even got back into Magic the Gathering after 20 year, just because of their viking-inspired Kaldheim set) I really wanted to like this game. And there are fantastic aspects of it. But on a gameplaying level there where too many things that bothered me; I think its best described as quantity over quality. And this had me from having fun and being excited about this game to finally just wanting to be done with it, and even stop caring about the 100% completion rate. That's why I cannot give it more than 3/5.

This is the game that made me stop buying Ubisoft games. the game is designed to force microtransactions and time savers down your throat with its bloated and nonsensical story.

The game opens in Norway, which is in my opinion is Ubisoft's best looking world space since AC origins. Unfortunately, this is promptly ruined by Ubisoft's typically shit facial designs and animations, with every character looking identical as those who share their gender. How am i supposed to feel sad for eivor losing their parents when her dad looks exactly like the blacksmith and they reuse eivors male VA for eivors Dad. Like bro your dad is literally everywhere OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES!!!!!!!!

Throughout the games marketing campaign they teased the return of the assassins brotherhood or 'hidden ones' for the nonces among us. Eivor is given a hidden blade which they use on the top side of their forearm because quirky and glorious Viking moment. Eivor is taught social stealth by basim and how to dish out various assassination techniques. However, after using these mechanics for the entire game and favouring a stealth approach, when eivor is presented with the opportunity to join the hidden ones, the game strips the option to make the choice yourself and she down right refuses because she thinks cowards work in the dark and that killing should be done with glory and honour in the open.

Dark age England is possibly the most boring setting Ubisoft's ever produced and the random events were a lazy answer to odysseys side quest problem.

the combat is messy, doesn't flow well and feels like sliding a bit of cardboard down your urethra.

on top of all of this subpar shite, the game forces you to do every arc in England before you can finish the game, this means that the game is bloated by about 70 hours when in reality the main story is comprised of like 5-6 of those arcs. my total playtimes added up to 150 hours just to finish the main story.

dont even get me started on the mythical arcs or the dlc

shit game
worst ac

HUGE amount of content for the money and as long as you know going into it that you are in it for the long haul and treat it as such, I think it's very enjoyable, definitely a game to be played in small bursts over a long period rather than trying to grind it out in a few weeks.

I loved all the little nods to Norse and English folklore and popular culture in the side quests, the detail and historical references of all the locations were fascinating and the sheer scale of the open world was something to behold!

That said, having played other Assassin's Creed games, it's definitely very light on the traditional AC gameplay and whilst I enjoyed playing as Eivor, I found the conclusion of the story very disappointing and was expecting more of a send off for a character that I'd spent so many hours with, even the additional tacked on content released later didn't do Eivor justice.

As an English person with Viking heritage and a massive history nerd, I may be biased but I really had a good time with this game and most of the additional content. The Forgotten Saga DLC sucked though, not a fan of rogue-lites or the continuation of the Eivor/Odin weirdness which I was not a fan of in the main story either.

valhalla pecou por muitas coisas, mas a principal, sua duração.

só o conteúdo base garante pelo menos 100 horas de história, fazendo o básico do básico, precisa de muita paciência e tempo livre pra fazer o 100% de TUDO. isso seria ok, se o conteúdo não fosse tão cansativo.

além disso, o parkour e a necessidade de completar todos os arcos da inglaterra pra ver o final do jogo quebram totalmente a imersão, já que o arco principal e a história de sigurd é digna de um game of thrones!!.... que vc tem que ficar 40 horas sem ver pq vc é obrigado a terminar um monte de conteúdo filler....

mas enfim, tirando esses fatos, valhalla é o melhor AC de "RPG" da trilogia, melhorou em TODOS os aspectos e trouxe uma história sensacional pra franquia.

seu único pecado é não ter conseguido superar o charme da kassandra. eivor eu te amo, mas... faltou carisma e a sensação de liberdade do odyssey.

A fun but repetitive and super dragged out game.
The story starts out nicely but then it quickly becomes an uninteresting and too long mess. There's like 14 or 15 alliances you gotta do and when something happens to a character you just don't really care because you didn't spend that much time with them, so some important story beats felt very weak imo, specially the ending.
The gameplay, although similar to Origins and Odyssey, feels a bit better, mainly during combat which is always pretty fun to the point where stealth isn't that interesting or enticing to do. There's some very cool finishers that are always fun to see after you kill a strong enemy. There isn't lots of enemy variety unfortunately so after a couple hours you'll have pretty much faced every type of enemy. The raids are always fun too although they also get repetitive after a while.
The map is pretty big but it's mostly uninteresting and I never felt interested in seeing what it had to offer. I did a few side quests, they were okay. The dice mini game is cool and you can spend some time with it!
My biggest problems with this game are the progression system and how the story is told. You will get to a point where you either grind and do tons of side activities to increase your power level or go the options and increase the damage you deal and reduce the damage you receive, I did that and thank god!! I thought the game's story was already dragging and if I didn't use those options I'd have doubled my playtime and gotten even more tired of it. The skill tree in this game is also atrocious. The actual good upgrades are locked behind "+5.2 melee damage" type of upgrades and it's super tiring after a while because there are tons of upgrades to do. I get this is to increase the overall playtime but it's terrible imo. I'd rather have a smaller skill tree that was more enticing to do. This boring progression system gets even worse since the main story is related to your power level. Wanna do the next alliance? The suggested power level is 50 lvls away from yours! You can try doing it anyway but it will be hard since enemies will be very tanky. It just made me lose even more interest in the story. I hope AC Red adresses this! Because if the story here didn't have the power level requirements it would've been better. I get they don't want you unlocking the whole map at once but it could be done in another way. For example, that area could be in siege and would unlock after some alliances or just say the Animus is corrupted or something lol.
Visually, the game mostly looks quite nice! There are some npc's that don't look too good and some facial animations are ehh. But it's also just style and not a lot of substance. It looks good but it's not interesting to travel through the map, it's very bland. If the story was interesting and most of the characters were too I probably would've explored more even if it's not too interesting, I'd wanna spend more time in that world, to see everything it had to offer, which was what I did with Odyssey.
Overall, like I said in the beggining, it's a fun but too stretched out game with a meh story and characters.

Bom jogo, com boa história, infelizmente teve o azar de ser produzido pela Ubisoft, o jogo te prende no inicio mas do meio para frente fica muito repetitivo com milhares de itens para pegar no mapa poluindo a sua tela. Mais para o fim do game fica incrivelmente mais repetitivo do que já era no inicio fazendo assim com que chegue um momento que você se sinta obrigado a continuar só para terminar o jogo e não ser apenas mais 1 que você deixa de lado na biblioteca antes de finalizar.

Como disse, um ótimo jogo, com boas histórias e fidelidade aos acontecimentos da vida real, porém, feita pela produtora errada.

Ok, well, the drive AC Valhalla was installed on died and I Can Not be bothered to re-download 150 gigs for this fuckin' game so I guess it's time to try and sum up my thoughts on this one, huh. Spoiler alert: I think it's bad!

I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!

This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.

Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!

And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.

(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)

The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!

And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!

(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!

But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.

The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!

And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.

I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!

I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!

TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!

¿Qué es lo que hace diferente a este AC sobre los demás? Por una parte es el escenario y la cultura de los vikingos es muy interesante, aunque ya a este punto ya muy explotada en los videojuegos.

Pero, lo que rescato más de este juego es el combate. Se vuelve muy dinámico y fluido que puedas cambiar las opciones de armas: 2 hachas, espada y escudo, 2 escudos, espada y haca... y así las combinaciones que quieras.

La actuación y personalidad de Eivor (versión femenina) es súper fuerte y carismática. Pero, no al punto de Cassandra en AC: Odyssey.

Sin embargo, ya con este AC empecé a sentir cansado la formula repetida de Ubisoft. El mundo es demasiado grande y muy vacío en comparación de las cosas que puedes hacer. Y la historia se extiende innecesariamente, pero al final de todo es un juego muy divertido.