In Short: Assassin’s Creed’s best story, paired with its best approach to open world storytelling, wrapped in a thick layer of the business model’s most destructive influences.

There’s a rare depth to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in a series full of shallow archetypes and fluffy, fantastical forays into the realm of the mythological. It’s not more accurate than its peers. On the deep end it dives eagerly into Norse lore, on the shallow it conveniently ignores little evidence of practices like tattooing among Viking clans for sake of character customization. Instead, where it shines is in its character, or specifically one of its characters.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt when the male version of Eivor is a cookie cutter nobody ripped straight out of the same premium television viking epics that muted enthusiasm for this release. Swap the lens around for his astoundingly gruff counterpart though, and suddenly, as with Kassandra in Odyssey, life flows through the narrative again. Something different and less predictable, a better delivery of lines with more to ponder - if still unfortunately neutered by the Pilsbury Snowboy’s inherent influence on the writing. An element of the narrative team is clearly dying to write female leads, and while this review isn’t the place to explore that one does wonder if they’ll ever be given their chance without some asshole fucking it up.

The fuzziness of the period’s historical figures does a lot of heavy lifting in Valhalla, allowing the writing team to break out of boxes and do more with their narrative over a broader cast. For past games, set in better documented eras, the writers at Ubisoft were occasionally forced to construct tortured parallel fictions. Massive conspiracies of fictional characters vying for the levers of power despite little interaction with the hands who pulled them in our reality. Here, historical characters like Ubba and Ivarr Ragnarson are free to fill vital, central narrative roles instead; escaping the little boxes that can only rarely be disturbed lest Assassin’s Creed unwrite the same history it relies on.

More importantly, though significant within the game’s mythological framework, Eivor is not the same world altering pivot point in Valhalla that previous characters have had to be. Valhalla’s version of southern Britain churns forwards without, and occasionally in spite of, her. She seems less the driver of action, and more someone drawn to it. A sense helped along by easily the strongest cast of characters the series has constructed since Black Flag’s tales of piracy in the fuzzy history of the Caribbean was similarly allowed off its leash.

The result is a narrative that flows better moment to moment than in the series’ more recent endeavors - even if that flow is slower and more deliberate than past games. Eivor’s relative inexperience as a character presents a more interesting story to explore, with the narrative allowing her to fail in ways the series has been unwilling to in the past. She's not a highly trained Assassin, in fact she cares little about them beyond where their interests naturally intersect hers. She’s also not particularly good at what she does aside from the fighting part. Her allies are not uniformly rallied around her, she doesn’t succeed constantly or deftly outsmart all of her foes, and her prose-like asides disguise an abrasive attitude that often gets her in trouble.

In the process Valhalla’s more grounded narrative weaves together plots into an eerily oppressive story; one that masterfully conveys the weight it places on a young character unwillingly forced into a role of leadership and grappling with its unavoidable realities. More importantly, one that stitches together that narrative into a pattern the series has never managed before. A world where the good versus evil, occasionally disrupted by comic treachery, plot simply does not exist. Valhalla’s conflict is messy and poorly defined in a way that actually revitalizes what had previously grown stale and stuffy.

Beside this are Valhalla’s true game design coup, a dismissal of the standard quest in favor of small, seamless little storytelling events. While large and expansive, Valhalla's rarely ties players down in a side story for much longer than five minutes. These don’t all hit, but for the few tortured tales - like an excruciatingly liberal-brained endeavor of whataboutism involving a greedy merchant exploiting his neighbor - there are many more that shine. In particular, a girl sat waiting for the last leaf to fall from a tree, in hopes it heralds the return of a father who promised he’d be back before said event.

This approach to micro storytelling alleviates much of the sensation of slogging through narrative quagmire the series has suffered from as it’s expanded, while still conveying the same vital bits of world building that make the map feel like more than just a sandbox. They represent a rare case in which someone, somewhere in Ubisoft looked at the rest of one of their games and decided that they didn’t need to shove a bunch of pointless gameplay into the middle of an experience that should expand the player’s understanding of the world.

Overtop of this is a decidedly Assassin’s Creed tinged mythological narrative, drawing heavily on ideas explored in Odyssey and its expansions. The primary thrust of this falters heavily - largely due to the fact that Norse mythology is a near inescapable pop culture touchstone and proximity to a more ambitious take in God of War - but where these elements weave back into that already strong core it produces some of the best writing Assassin’s Creed has ever seen, and likely ever will.

Few games pull off the slow sensation of creeping dread as well as when Eivor and Sigurd “ascend” into Valhalla. Few games confront their core themes as tactilely as Eivor laying down her axe in her escape. Few games so pointedly construct a palpable sense of loss of friendship and of faith, or the intersection of those two, as the Raven clan’s conquest grinding to a halt in Pyrrhic victory while the glory they chased turns to ash on Eivor’s tongue in the game’s brutal final act.

This game should have felt like a culmination of a new approach, a trimming away of the bloat in service of a game that demands attention. Unfortunately, there’s no more grim a tale in all of Valhalla than that of business interests.

Ironically enough, it’s the game’s namesake that represented the canary in the coal mine for Valhalla’s over-stuffing. Odyssey’s DLC leaned on its Greek mythological overtones and expanded them by throwing Kassandra head first into that era’s most important settings. Most importantly, as with Origin before it, Odyssey confined this to DLC. Valhalla does not, putting it front and center as optional side content that, in addition to pointlessly padding playtime with the game’s most grating, and mechanically worthless gameplay, sets up the mythological overtones of the main story.

The biggest problem with Valhalla’s dropping of Eivor into the metaphorical boots of Odin isn’t that the gameplay presents players with a mostly worthless series of annoying environmental puzzles and vapid collecting, but that it plays as straight as an arrow with the story. There is almost nothing in the side content that breaks from convention in any way. Those with even a passing familiarity with the source material, which again seems likely considering Norse lore’s prevalence in contemporary pop culture, will find almost nothing they haven't been thoroughly assaulted with before.

More galling is the deployment of these same elements later via DLC, almost all of which is purely a waste of time. From combat trials that demand the player trudge through encounters in recycled areas with tedious limits tacked on, to the game’s largest expansion - a bland, massive, nearly story free return to the already boring realm of the gods with a roguelike progression mechanic slapped over top. It’s hard not to see where the storytelling utility of Valhalla’s Valhalla ends, and the monetary utility of a second setting begins.

The free-to-play feeling of previous games’ loot and progression has, thankfully, been heavily toned back for Valhalla, with the player never really hitting a wall and a set pool of upgradeable weapons and armor replacing the ARPG style drops of Origin and Odyssey. That said, this system is still a victim of needless padding. None of it feels perfunctory in the moment, but it’s easy to see how someone might look at a map full of upgrade materials and items to collect and feel overwhelmed by it all. It's hard to argue all of these are necessary in an already massive game.

Perhaps this wouldn’t feel as staggering if it wasn’t paired with the game’s bevy of side content that actually does tie the player down. The series’ inane floating parchment chase nonsense is somehow back here, offering the player tattoo patterns in a pointless resurrection of the series’ most profoundly awful recurring mechanic. Mini-bosses also litter the map, offering little of value aside from a bland power level check. An annoying man in Ravensthorpe demands you collect silly Roman mask artifacts for him. Circles of mushrooms throw Eivor into a handful of boring puzzles and challenges, none of which is the least bit fulfilling.

The prevailing question here is why? To what end? Who fucking cares? I want to kick the shitty fake Roman dickhead out of Ravensthorpe the second I see him, so why doesn't Eivor?

Cairns represent the most tedious of side content, although I’m willing to be less harsh on them as they exist primarily as a storytelling vehicle. The same can’t be said for the game’s take on the classic Brotherhood era rifts, mind-rendingly boring platforming puzzles that serve as an obfuscation of vital narrative information. As someone irrationally attracted to Assassin’s Creed as a guilty pleasure series, few things it has done have managed to crawl under my skin and cause the same excruciating pain. I’d rather replay all of the series’ worst low points in their entirety before doing any of these ever again.

With a wealth of actual storytelling in the world, and a critical path that would take even the most focused player sixty hours to roll credits on, it’s hard to see where any of this cruft has value beyond keeping people hooked in and potentially buying cosmetics. And that's with a half dozen other pointless distractions left out of the discussion in this review.

The wheels of the business model must keep turning, however. While it’s sad that this nonsense turned a bunch of people off a genuinely well written game, no part of the broader Valhalla experience was harmed more by the business model than its two story focused DLC.

Wrath of the Druids and Siege of Paris are full of good ideas, but short on execution. It would be easy to sit back and point at the time these two small expansions were developed and write off their troubles as the fault of COVID. And while it definitely did play a role here, such as moments where voice actors couldn't be brought back, it’s Ubisoft’s business model that put them up against the wall to begin with.

The cessation of the yearly full Assassins’ Creed release was only a fractional lifting of Ubsioft’s collective foot from the series’ metaphorical gas pedal. The plan was clearly to replace that with a drip feed of content support for Valhalla, and that content must flow. Paired with the pandemic, the result is a pair of DLC rife with assets that needed second passes, narrative that needed tweaking, and takes that needed retaking.

Even without that, however, it would be hard to see where either of these two expansions would fit in a story so tonally focused and consistent in its pursuit of building its growing sense of unease over an already long runtime. The narrative is lesser for their inclusion, unless the player ignores them until a point at which their content is rendered trivial, as these detached blobs of distraction inject themselves at key turning points and shred them in the process.

The growing sense that something is wrong remains intact even with them there, but its focal point shifts from the inner machinations of the Raven clan to Ubisoft itself.

Something is wrong here, that Ubisoft would be so willing to bury its creatives’ best work under a mountain of bullshit. Unfortunately, like its Hollywood peers, Ubisoft seems unwilling to prioritize quality over quantity. The business model reigns supreme, even if that means cutting its own legs out from beneath it.