In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Eivor reps the Raven Clan while storming 9th-century England the only way a Viking knows how: By swinging axes, making pals, and drinking mead.
Credit:
Ubisoft
In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Eivor reps the Raven Clan while storming 9th-century England the only way a Viking knows how: By swinging axes, making pals, and drinking mead.
Credit:
Ubisoft
Before I go into everything about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla—the writing, the action, the open-world jank—I want to offer an unusual preface. Basically: Gosh, I like this game.
It’s a rare earnest turn for me, especially when I’m talking about open-world Ubisoft games. I try to find a fair-and-balanced way to talk about their hours of gameplay, and I respect the heck out of how their multi-studio teams slam together so many moving parts into a giant, playable romp. But personally, I can get bored with them—same fetch quests, same ho-hum mechanics and checklists, year after year. After playing only a few hours of these games, I feel less like an adventurer and more like an errand boy or girl. None of their high-end rendering or historical references can change that feeling.
Yet the Assassin’s Creed series has been evolving into AC Valhalla‘s shape for some time, which we last saw from the character-driven surprise of 2018’s AC Odyssey. This year’s model is undeniably messy and imperfect, and it doesn’t surpass Ghost of Tsushima as my favorite open-world romp so far this year. But it earns my recommendation for getting enough things right—and doing so with more nuance than a phrase like “a more RPG-like Assassin’s Creed” implies.
Equal parts diplomacy and pillaging
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla stars Eivor, a Viking in the Early Middle Ages. Note: all images in this article were captured directly from live demo gameplay, not altered or sweetened by the publisher.
Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla stars Eivor, a Viking in the Early Middle Ages. Note: all images in this article were captured directly from live demo gameplay, not altered or sweetened by the publisher.
Ubisoft
Your other option for how Eivor can look in the game; both variants can be further customized with hairstyles and facial tattoos (which you can either find as collectibles on your quest or, ugh, buy via microtransactions).
Your other option for how Eivor can look in the game; both variants can be further customized with hairstyles and facial tattoos (which you can either find as collectibles on your quest or, ugh, buy via microtransactions).
Volumetric clouds, gorgeous lighting effects, and ample view distances are just some of the many things AC Valhalla gets right visually.
Volumetric clouds, gorgeous lighting effects, and ample view distances are just some of the many things AC Valhalla gets right visually.
Your other option for how Eivor can look in the game; both variants can be further customized with hairstyles and facial tattoos (which you can either find as collectibles on your quest or, ugh, buy via microtransactions).
Volumetric clouds, gorgeous lighting effects, and ample view distances are just some of the many things AC Valhalla gets right visually.
It’s also nice to whip through the game’s lush forests on a horse.
The longboat sequences aren’t as nimble, but they show off the visual engine pretty well thanks to a “cinematic” camera toggle.
One boating sequence has you steer into a raid. The lighting and water-wave effects are top-notch.
Another ride through pastures.
A boss encounter. This battle is blurry as captured in still images, thanks to electric attack effects that fill the battle zone.
Equipping new weapons like a flail results in momentum-filled swings. They take longer to wind up (though not as long as something like an average Dark Souls blade), but they can also whack multiple people at once.
The average frenzy in a “raid” sequence. That’s a lot of allies and foes in the same crowd.
This is how combat typically looks, with your foes (in red armor) smushing against your allies (in blue armor, but often stained in thick coats of red blood).
Here, I’m asked to trigger a special attack on one foe, all while another foe is rearing an attack on me. AC Valhalla struggles with letting you nimbly aim at multiple nearby targets, instead relying on a lock-on system, and it’s quite inelegant in action.
We’re now roughly 7,000 games into the series, so if you don’t know the basic drill, check any of our older AC reviews. In short: once again, you control a “chosen one” warrior in a real-world historical era, as dramatized for the sake of a video game. You’re occasionally interrupted by a modern-day plot about researchers who dive into ancient warriors’ DNA to wage war against a global, generations-deep conspiracy theory. This offers enough wacky plot hooks for anyone invested in the series. But mostly, you’re back in time juggling a mix of open-world traversal, stealthy Spider-man crawls around massive historical sites, and all kinds of murder.
In AC Valhalla, this formula lands in 9th-century England, where you’re cast as Eivor, a high-ranking warrior in a band of Norse Vikings. This historical angle obviously means more beards, axes, and mentions of Odin than in any AC game before, which I can get down with, but the plot also hinges on the real-life immigration of Viking bands to begin new lives in other nations. This does something new for the AC series: it creates a home base. Eivor and her brother Sigurd have their hearts set on winning over England’s “unpacified” kingdoms with equal parts diplomacy and pillaging, and both angles are helped by a central base for recruiting, resting, and gathering strength.
Sure, growing your home settlement (named Ravensthorpe, after your clan’s affinity for ravens) amounts to a glorified menu system. Gather enough in-game resources to build a fishery, for instance, and you get access to the game’s fishing mini-game. Other buildings do everything from adding cosmetic options to unlocking quest lines. But unlike the home bases found in older entries like Assassin’s Creed II, this one has much more personality and unlocks brand-new gameplay features—and makes me wish we didn’t have to wait so long for Ubisoft to toy with the concept again. It’s nice to have a hub that always welcomes your hero with open arms, full of town-specific NPCs and past adventuring companions alike, and it fits into the game’s expanded emphasis on narrative.
Trash talk: Two thumbs up
Speaking of: if you were to think of AC Valhalla as a cable TV series’ single, lengthy season, you’d land somewhere between SyFy and AMC, and closer to the latter. Its reams of dialog and cast of voice actors deliver about as well as you might expect from over 30 hours of primary and secondary quests. It’s perhaps easiest to compliment the game’s narrative by way of elimination: one character, who appears in modern-day flash-forward sequences, is a travesty in terms of voice acting and dialog. I point that out because her misstep is the only glaring example I can think of in a cast of hundreds. Everyone else receives ample breathing room to establish traits, quirks, and motives, often broken out in mid-mission dialog passages or optional Q&A moments, and I appreciated how each in-game “chapter” of quests (usually two to three hours of adventuring) introduces and establishes at least one interesting character, if not a few.
Ivarr (left) is annoying Eivor (right) once again.
Ivarr (left) is annoying Eivor (right) once again.
Ivarr threads a good needle in terms of being entertainingly scummy (which Ubisoft admittedly fails to get right in some of its narrative-heavy games).
Ivarr threads a good needle in terms of being entertainingly scummy (which Ubisoft admittedly fails to get right in some of its narrative-heavy games).
A puppet king considers his fate.
A puppet king considers his fate.
Ivarr threads a good needle in terms of being entertainingly scummy (which Ubisoft admittedly fails to get right in some of its narrative-heavy games).
A puppet king considers his fate.
Ivarr’s brother Ubba looks up at a potential foe.
Then Ivarr taunts said foe.
I am also compelled to praise the game’s Viking-proud propensity for vulgar and sexual banter. Ubisoft’s narrative team was given full rein to let men and women alike revel in the brutal realities of battling as a Viking and celebrating with booze, dance, and outright sexual thirst as appropriate (though always with words, not with awkward polygonal sex). AC Valhalla is a rousing success in terms of going rated-hard-R with its dialog without coming off as sophomoric or leaning on punching-down humor.
Plus, roughly every hour in this game, you’ll be treated to a shouting match between two very angry people—sometimes two blood-stained warriors, but more satisfyingly between a fighter and an impish noble—that calls for a battle to the death. The trash talk that plays out in these encounters is somehow always brutal, vulgar, and darkly hilarious. That this quality doesn’t waver by the game’s end is a testament to Ubisoft’s Viking interpretation of “yo momma” fights. After seeing reports about Ubisoft woes in terms of management and HR, I have to wonder if lower-rung Ubisoft developers used this game’s pre-battle face-offs as a way to subtweet at their bosses. If so, I hope it felt as good for the devs to record these lines of dialog as it was for me to listen to them.
A refreshing perspective on side quests
That dialog is meaningless without an enjoyable game attached, and AC Valhalla gets just enough right to keep you mashing away at a controller for dozens of hours. Much of that boils down to the usual AC open-world formula of quests, combat, puzzles, and mysteries, which Ubisoft has honed to a mostly steady sheen. But I was surprised by the way one major tweak to the games played out: emergent missions.
Your average on-foot march, horse ride, or longship charge through the Dark Ages will include some form of organic interruption. Ubisoft knows where you’re likely to go in terms of valleys between massive mountains or direct paths between primary mission objectives, and it uses obvious visual and audio clues to nudge you toward passers-by in need of help. That’s not anything new in this genre, but oftentimes, such an interruption dumps a new “quest” and list of objectives into your pause menu. Like, “I’m on my way to install a puppet king, and you need me to go to which five chapels to interrupt impure marriages, m’lord?!”
AC Valhalla is careful not to interrupt your noble journey in such a manner. Instead, the people you meet along your path offer one-and-done requests, which you complete in the vicinity you find them in. As an example, if you run past a crowd of children while holding two axes and looking determined, those children will lose their minds—you’re the closest thing to Lebron these kids are going to see on an average, disease-filled day—and ask to play with you. Sometimes, this will turn into a makeshift game of hide-and-seek, which makes you flex your arsenal of sneaking moves. Other times, they’ll want to pantomime war games, so you’ll “fight” wooden dolls staged nearby.
“Nearby” is an operative word: side-quest objectives, with very few exceptions, do not derail your primary progress or make you fast-travel to another part of the map. But Ubisoft is also mighty clever about what these tasks entail. With less distance to travel, the side-quest tasks you’re given do not light up as icons on your map or appear as vague clues in a text sidebar. Instead, you’ll get a spoken prompt from the questgiver, then look around their vicinity to find and resolve the objective. Here’s one of my favorite examples: early on, a young man says he seeks to engage in an honorable battle; your hero suggests that the man fight a woodland creature as a baby step into such battle-hardened glory, and he agrees. At this moment, you hear some wolves in the distance, and if you run to them, they make chase. The idea: lead the wolves to the man so he can battle them. (This is… not exactly how the quest plays out, but I’ll leave its resolution unspoiled.)
With these side quests, Ubisoft’s quest developers break the mold of the average open-world quest—and seem to openly have fun doing so. Primary objectives, after all, still require romping through massive cities, epic battles, and “defeat three warlords before you continue” kinds of sprawl and movement. You’ll still check your map for icons and guidance to accomplish those, but since side quests are designed that much differently in AC Valhalla, they can be much quirkier by default—and in ways that don’t turn out annoying or tedious. Like the time I had to carry a guy’s barrel of apples down a half-mile stretch of road and… nothing else happened. On one hand, this quest toyed with my expectation that carrying apples would devolve into, say, a fight against a bear (which it didn’t). On the other, the narrative team took advantage of my rapt attention to host an odd conversation, beginning with a man’s love for apple orchards and ending with a sweet conversation about differing religious beliefs. How about dem apples?
Raids: Kill Saxons dead
With every new AC game, the hero’s movement suite has shifted more and more to hand-to-hand combat in large crowds, as opposed to the older games’ insistence that combat happen quietly or in the shadows. AC Valhalla continues this streak with the “raid” mechanic, which asks you to lead fellow Vikings into towns, castles, and fortresses and engage in what amounts to eight-on-eight face-offs. This isn’t the game’s best part.
The game’s RPG-like nature lies primarily in this power-up interface, which grants equipment bonuses based on which branching path you upgrade the most.
The game’s RPG-like nature lies primarily in this power-up interface, which grants equipment bonuses based on which branching path you upgrade the most.
As you unlock more options in a particular chain…
As you unlock more options in a particular chain…
…you unlock apparent animal representatives, as seen in the background.
…you unlock apparent animal representatives, as seen in the background.
As you unlock more options in a particular chain…
…you unlock apparent animal representatives, as seen in the background.
You can equip up to eight special abilities at a time, which can only be triggered when their meter recharges.
This rushing attack seems cool as described, but in my gameplay, it was frequently buggy in execution.
Want to wield two single-hand weapons? Go ahead.
This two-handed spear includes built-in blocking and parrying abilities, so you don’t have to feel defenseless without a shield.
Eivor gets an RPG-inspired upgrade tree, but its available unlocks are hidden beneath a “fog of war” until you spend points in one of three directions (which have the same color coding as your weapons and armor, and you’ll get more bonuses if your equipment matches your upgrades’ colors). Most of these unlocks are mathematical bonuses to attacks, defenses, and so on. Some are special combat abilities, like an attack bonus for tapping a button at the right time while swinging a weapon, or a damage bonus applied to successful parries. On top of these are special attacks that must be learned from scrolls hidden around the game’s open world, like “throw three axes at the nearest enemies” or “shoot a poison-tipped arrow that puts your target to sleep temporarily.”
Rack up enough experience points, and you get a good number of abilities to juggle—plus, the ones you learn from scrolls have to fit into eight equippable slots, so you’ll have to pick your favorites. Ubisoft has delivered a tantalizing variety of special attacks, and many of them include brutal, “whoa did you see that?!” attack impact animations. All of this is aided by a jump in weapon types, including polearms and flails, that change combat animation possibilities in really intriguing ways. But these scroll-based powers hinge on an “adrenaline” meter to access, which takes way too long to refill in the game’s early goings, so your first 15 hours of combat do a bad jobmo letting you experiment and learn how to fit these powers into combat. And if you’re playing on default difficulty, you’ll find that they’re not really needed to survive—nor is Eivor’s weapon variety.
Eivor benefits from a ridiculous number of healing items, easily dodge-able enemies, and painfully stupid AI—on both sides of the battle, mind you. During countless battles, waged with over a dozen people from both sides on-screen at once, I’d see wacky scenarios play out, like warriors from opposing sides crawling up side by side to the same rooftop in order to fight up there, or soldiers jumping into a giant wheelbarrow and just standing in there. Beyond those unsurprising glitches, I just saw enemies fail to coordinate in any meaningful way while battling side by side, making it easy for me to mash buttons, then run away and watch them forget I exist while they contended with my dumber AI comrades.
Comparatively, the game’s boss battles pit you one on one against supercharged villains, which are an utter delight (and a great opportunity to use and manage your scroll-based attacks and specialized weapons). But even then, Eivor’s move-set revolves less around Souls-like one-on-one combat (which these boss battles clearly evoke) and more around plowing through waves of stupid enemies. I can’t help but feel like combat had to split the difference between these extremes, while also supporting the series’ usual climb-and-sneak stealth options, and thus left every potential fan with something to shrug their shoulders at.
Had the game launched exclusively on next-gen consoles, and thus mandated army sizes in the dozens or even hundreds, I would be more lenient in this department. I suspect that Ubisoft has this idea in mind for a future AC sequel, and I look forward to seeing the lessons taken from AC Valhalla as applied to something that looks much more epic. AC Valhalla‘s biggest battles, in the meantime, don’t resemble anything as epic as Lord of the Rings. They’re more like Monday Night Football.
Gorgeous visuals—should your hardware keep up
Despite those janky crowd-combat descriptions, AC Valhalla is generally a stunning game to look at. Expect massive fields of detailed foliage, towering ancient buildings covered in fine textures, and Viking warriors with incredibly detailed facial animations (even outside of cut scenes, when those kinds of details are typically pared back). All of these are bathed in a jaw-dropping lighting engine that manages high-res shadows over massive expanses and gorgeous crepuscular ray effects as light cuts through trees, branches, and leaves. That’s not even getting into the gorgeous journeys you’ll take on a longboat over England’s network of rivers—which give players a nice reason to put down the controller for an automatic 60-second row from place to place and tap the longboat’s “cinematic” camera.
I got to play AC Valhalla on Xbox Series X ahead of its launch and was shocked to find it was my preferred way to play—over my high-end PC, even. Fluid 60fps gameplay at near-4K resolution and “very high” visual settings (as compared to the PC build) is good enough, but Series X also includes a number of loading-time boosts that a computer with an NVMe SSD, rated at PCI 3.0 speeds, can’t compete with. If you want your new next-gen console purchase to sing this month, AC Valhalla should be near the top of your third-party game list (unless, of course, either console winds up having freakish bugs and crashes in AC Valhalla, which is always a possibility in the open-world genre on brand-new hardware).
Since the game doesn’t lean on ray-tracing technologies, it’s a matter of pure rasterization to get the game up to performative levels on PC, and at launch, it still needs some optimizations on the CPU side; while my tests showed the overall CPU stress count maxing at around 40 percent, I ran into some pretty constant framerate stutters there, and that was with an i7-8700K (overclocked to 4.7GHz) and an RTX 3080.
As of press time, the new $299 Xbox Series S console does not offer performance parity compared to its $499 sibling. You’ll get resolutions close to 1200p at a locked 30fps on that system. Ars Technica was not provided PS5 code for the game ahead of launch, but I expect that version to run similarly to Xbox Series X (though perhaps with mild differences like loading times and rendering resolutions).
On older consoles, meanwhile, beware: Xbox One X struggles to lock to 30fps at roughly 1080p resolution, with no options to select lower resolution or higher frame rate. I didn’t test on other older consoles, but if the last generation’s most powerful box is struggling, that’s probably not a good sign for the others.
Diversions, assassinations, and verdict
I’ve kept this spoiler-free for the most part, but I will suggest that Eivor is an interesting “blank slate” character for such an open-world adventure. Your hero generally errs on the side of generic snark and bravado while engaging with a cast of questgivers, allies, and villains, and they pop in comparison. Eventually, you’ll be forced to grapple with conflicting forces in ways that I appreciated—even in spite of the series’ usual conspiracy theory jibberish in the mix.
Side activities include a drinking game that requires balancing button-tapping rhythm with joystick waggles for balance.
Side activities include a drinking game that requires balancing button-tapping rhythm with joystick waggles for balance.
Build a cairn by balancing stones carefully atop each other.
Build a cairn by balancing stones carefully atop each other.
Side activities include a drinking game that requires balancing button-tapping rhythm with joystick waggles for balance.
Build a cairn by balancing stones carefully atop each other.
Visual perspective puzzles ask you to line up an image spread across multiple rocks.
Visual perspective puzzles ask you to line up an image spread across multiple rocks.
In this rhyming challenge, you must listen to your rival’s verse, then respond with both rhyme and meter in consideration.
In this rhyming challenge, you must listen to your rival’s verse, then respond with both rhyme and meter in consideration.
Visual perspective puzzles ask you to line up an image spread across multiple rocks.
In this rhyming challenge, you must listen to your rival’s verse, then respond with both rhyme and meter in consideration.
As I talked about in hands-on previews earlier this year, the game also includes a variety of quaint puzzles and mysteries. Sometimes, you have to stand in the right place and make a logo’s markings line up perfectly on nearby rocks or tree limbs. Or you’ll have to stack cairn stones as a physics puzzle, or get into a rhyming-and-meter battle with a poet, or play a button-tapping drinking game, or play a dice game that feels like Viking Yahtzee. These bits of side content work for being equal parts cute and disposable. I appreciate when AC games include non-combat diversions as good (and, in a pinch, skippable) as these, though I wish the dice game wasn’t almost entirely a matter of chance.
This isn’t going into other series of quests that you can take on, including a chain of assassinations spread across England’s biggest metropolises—and while those are more “been there, done that” in AC series terms, I mean, it’s Assassin’s Creed. You’re an assassin. Assassinate some fools while you’re traveling through time, right?
All of this is to say, AC Valhalla gets just enough stuff right in its RPG-ized transition without blatantly copying fare like Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher III, or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Ubisoft’s latest history-trotting murder-for-honor journey strikes a proper balance between “familiar sequel,” “RPG homage,” and “just fresh enough,” while still being quite fun to play. In some respects, particularly its handling of side quests, it’s actually better than Ghost of Tsushima, a similar 2020 game that I otherwise prefer. If you’ve got the time (quite a bit of time, in this game’s 30+ hour case) to invest in the bloody, honor-bound journey of some cool Vikings, and the proper hardware for it, don’t miss what AC Valhalla has to offer.
The good:
Dark Ages-era England looks incredible throughout your virtual Viking journey
Progression system is anchored by charming “settlement” concept, range of impressive superpowers
Side quests buck Ubisoft’s worst errand-running instincts in favor of organic, whimsical diversions
Your hero is (mostly) a blank slate but is redeemed by a huge supporting cast of interesting, darkly funny characters
The bad:
Crowded “raid” battles suffer thanks to 3D engine jank, stupid AI on both sides
The ugly:
If you haven’t made a “next-gen” jump, prepare for uneven frame rates on consoles as recent as Xbox One X
Verdict: A great choice for next-gen consoles or high-end PCs, should you have the bandwidth for dozens of hours of Viking adventure.
This article has been updated to correct an error about “settlements” in prior Assassin’s Creed games.
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