This is probably the game I feel most conflicted about. In some respects, I really loved it, but I can still feel in some areas where the game is a slog. So, finally after finishing the last dlc I had to do I wanted to put down my thoughts and hopefully figure out how I truly FEEL about Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
To start, I know I have to address the biggest issue this game has, which is the weird pacing of the story with the non-linear approach to it. These arcs are, more or less, fun but the usually the stories aren't connected with the main plot of the game which just makes them feel like filler to pad out the runtime. Don't get me wrong I really enjoyed playing them, but making some arcs optional would've greatly improved the structure of the game. Other than that, the main story of the game is really good, possibly the most like the Ezio games which are my favorite games of all time. Everything about the story from the characters, the theme, the overarching narrative and the way it so beautifully connects to the games before it, is amazing. But there are some areas where the story just falls flat, especially in some filler arcs which the game would be better without. It's not just the Assassin's Creed story of this game which is good, but the Viking lore the game portrays is so interesting and it's what got me so interested in that time period in general. (that later got me to watch The Last Kingdom, which is excellent, and Vikings, which isn't the best)
The world of Valhalla is gorgeous, both graphically and thematically. I spent a lot of time just looking at and exploring England, Vinland, Norway and Francia. The parkour while not as mechanically deep like the first games, is still good and feels like it has more weight as compared to others. The combat is super fun and satisfying and offers a lot of self-expression. With the incredibly long runtime of this game, it was always fun switching weapons and abilities and trying something completely different. The quests in this game can just devolve to going to a place and doing something but I feel the (kind of) episodic structure of this game helps alleviate the feeling of repetition in gameplay with new stories and areas.
The side content for this game is pretty good, at least the stuff that I chose to do, like the animus anomalies and tombs of the fallen, which are the most Assassin's Creed thing ever and they don't get much recognition from people. The DLCs were a mixed bag for me; while I did only get the ultimate edition, which meant I didn't play Dawn of Ragnarök, the content in them felt much like the game itself with little changes. However, I did enjoy playing siege of Paris and the forgotten saga, their stories were interesting enough and I had a ton of fun playing them. The rest of them were just forgettable.
The soundtrack deserves its own paragraph because it is just THAT good. When you get 2 of the best video game composers and a Norwegian musician who truly understand the culture, you get a masterpiece in video game music.
Overall, it's now clear that I really like this game. But it's just these little things which hold the game back from being something truly special.

There's an alright game underneath this but for the love of god the audio is fucking awful. I have NEVER decided to stop playing a game because the audio is fucking trash. I legit thought my headphones were broken but NO thats just the actual fucking game.

There's a good 1 minute long video on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls7W5KGLrIU

People who say they can't hear anything bad, you need to get new headphones or your ears checked because what the fuck. It's even more fucked up because Ubisoft KNOWS it's shit, but have stated "its just kind of how the game is and if we changed it it would fuck the whole game up." Just knowing this is gonna be the standard for all AC games going forward is fucking insane. WTF.

i don't know if it was some misplaced sense of charity or morbid curiosity, but for whatever reason, i felt the need to boot this up again. i’d broadly say that from the 7 or so hours i ended up playing of it- frankly, several hours too many- it was largely what i remembered, expected, and then even worse some. modern ubisoft games continue to exemplify scope creep in aaa games at some of their worst. it’s the inevitable result of designing your game to be popular first and foremost.

some of the consequences are immediate, easy pickings for anyone even the slightest bit critical. open-world activities that amount to little more than a disconnected series of carny games, movement feeling less consistent than older titles despite its simplification, animations that range from being merely badly implemented to just bad in and of themselves, some of the worst audio i’ve ever heard in a game between the compression, mixing, bugged sound effects, and just generally poor choices for said sound effects, dead-eyed character models and flat cutscene direction, but none of that’s particularly interesting to talk about. i found myself more amused by the way it bends over backwards to tell the player that our raids in the name of colonialism are completely justified and badass. assured that the people we’re raiding are totally bad guys, we swear, but there are some good guys amongst them that just so happen to want to be saved by us vikings.

i’m not one to go for bat for historical accuracy in the series that turned jack the ripper into the scarecrow, nor will i act like it’s anywhere near the first time this sort of whitewashing has happened in assassin’s creed (or quite a few other ubisoft games for that matter). but it’s a stark difference going from altair’s arc of constant uncertainty and questioning of himself, his order, and perceived enemy to this nonsense. just another consequence of having to design for the widest possible crowd, i suppose: the viking power fantasy must come above all else and not challenge the audience to any significant capacity emotionally or mechanically. but as a final twist of the knife, that power fantasy ends up being scuppered by the games overblown scope serving us half-baked combat amounting to eivor windmilling their arms while the sounds of papier mache play off enemies being hit. really just a game that elicits nothing from me but an eyeroll and sigh of sympathy at the thought of hundreds of skilled and creative people working to make something so clumsy and unimaginative.

This game is bloated.

It can be fun... it is beautiful to look at for sure. But there's just soooo much fluff, so many meaningless activities that drain your overall enjoyment.

It was a bit of a struggle to finish. I had a lot of fun up to the 100h mark... and then it took me another 60 hours... And I skipped the Dawn of Ragnarok DLC because I was just done with it.

The story is also a bit inconsequential at the end. The artifacts are all meaningless.... I must've spent about 10 hours total running after tattoo designs... Yes I feel like a loser because of that.

Me diverti muito jogando AS Valhalla.
No começo me divertia fazendo tudo que tinha pra fazer, a história do Eivor eu estava empolgado para ver e a história no presente parecia interessante. Mas depois de 50 horas de jogo já estava de saco cheio do jogo, com muita coisa repetitiva e a história não parecia ir para frente.
O final da história foi muito interessante e fiquei bem confuso. Deu vontade de ver toda a lore de AS.
Enfim, me diverti, mas depois de muito tempo começou a ficar muito repetitivo e maçante.

Nothing will prepare you for how bloated it is. Nothing. You think you know, but you don't.

It's also laughably ignorant of history, which fine, it's a sci-fi fantasy tale after all, but if you're going to be a franchise that takes great pains to have attention to detail, then you should put in the modicum of effort to represent history somewhat authentically.

Take slaves for example. Anyone ignorant of Vikings playing this game would walk away thinking Vikings hated the idea of slaves. Which is insane.

The whole game is insane really. Why is the protagonist trying to ally the entire fucking British isles? He/She's just a leader of a small village, shouldn't their neighbours be enough? This bone-headed narrative structure leads to why the game is so damn bloated.

Anyway, I'm going to stop before I write a 50,000 word essay on why this game is irritating beyond belief. I ended up with a classic case of sunk cost fallacy as I'd gone too far to give up in my attempt to get the platinum trophy. By the time I finished the game I had an irrational hatred of all video games, and needed a week long detox before I could turn on the console and rediscover my love of the hobby. At least the landscapes looked nice the entire time.

(Review from 2021) A great game with some updates to the formula that are welcomed, particularly the exploration. I think this is the first AC in a while that doesn’t flood the map with icons and encourages naturally finding things. Some lessons learned from BotW I think! The return of social stealth is also nice, I just wish the game as a whole was a bit shorter and that stealth was more thought through again. This game will walk so another can run.

(Addendum) Some things that soured on me from when I originally wrote my review, that I think deserved mention. I feel like I was a little rosy in my original opinions because the exploration was actually good. The Odin bits sucked, I never enjoyed doing them. One of the regions in particular (might have been the Samhain one?) was so tiresome I almost dropped the game. Other regions would have great subplots though, so it was a balance. And this is the first game in the series where I wasn’t motivated to get all the DLC, because there is too much and one of them entirely focuses on the Odin sections, which are not good.