Review: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

For better or worse, I have never experienced a game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. As a huge fan of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and its protagonist Kassandra, my hype for this game was real. As a historian, Assassin’s Creed is a series near and dear to my heart. I love the way Ubisoft rebuilds historical sites, cultures, and environments and I often find myself lost in them for hours on end. With Valhalla being set in the heart of ninth century Viking culture, I could not wait to throw myself into the game and its story. This is where the problems started.

I booted up the game on my PlayStation 5 and quickly dove into the prologue. Upon gaining access to the first part of the open world environment I immediately set out to complete and explore as much as the game as possible before continuing the next main quest line. This turned out to be a terrible mistake. For those who played the game close to launch, the words “Seer’s Solace” may fill you with complete and utter dread.

Serving as the second main quest of the game, this quest was glitched due to Ubisoft mistakenly locking it with their day one patch of the game. The marker for the quest would not show up and as a result, players could not progress past this point. This glitch was discovered before launch by media with early access review codes and Ubisoft was slow to acknowledge it. Their advice to players was to delete the game and reinstall it on your console while in offline mode in order to prevent the day one patch from downloading. As a result, players needed to delete their save files. For someone like me, who had put twelve hours into fully completing the first area of the game, I found this solution to be unacceptable.

Image: Ubisoft via Eurogamer.net

So, I became trapped in limbo. I could not play my new $60 video game for an entire week. It took until November 19th, 2020 for Ubisoft to quietly fix the problem they had created. This entire situation had soured the game for me, but I attempted to remain positive and optimistically dove back into it.

For longtime fans of the series and newcomers alike, I do believe this game will be enjoyable. The environments of northern Europe are gorgeous and the cultures feel alive and welcoming. Eivor, the main protagonist of the game, is a welcome addition to the series. You have the ability to choose the gender of this character, though it appears that female Eivor is the canonical version of the character. While not drastically changed from the previous release, the combat flows well and filling up your skill tree is surprisingly addicting.

If you like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Viking culture, you’ll find things to love about the game. For longtime fans, the later aspects of the story answer several questions we’ve been dying to have revealed. Not a perfect game by any means, with the most recent patches and fixes, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla serves as a solid adventure game with several non-game-breaking bugs.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla                                                                  Rating: 7/10