Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

First released in 2020, I did actually begin playing the newest instalment straight away but this pesky thing called a child got in the way. I found it didn’t grab me in the same way that Odyssey did – you begin in Norway and it is a miserable landscape to explore. I racked up maybe 25 hours but then moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and promptly forgot all about it.

There’s two things wrong really:

1. It’s just too damn big. I’m all for massive RPGs and collectables and random world events, I really am, but there’s simply no need to have so much other stuff to complete. Most of which has no bearing on the story at all.
2. Vikings and assassins. One is sneaky, subtle, agile. The other is a fucking Viking.

There are some really good things about AC:Valhalla – I mean, I’m clocking in at nearly 150 hours now so something is keeping me hooked. There’s enough interesting stuff if you manage to power through all the gumpf. The river raids are very enjoyable, but not in any way related to the traditional Assassin Creed mechanic.

Ivaar the Boneless is by far the best character in the whole thing, and while you might despise him, his character arc is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately the rest of it pales into mediocrity in comparison, Ivaar being so erratic (and quite funny if you like his sense of humour) means that all the other supporting characters are poorly fleshed out.

The main problem is how repetitive it is. There are 16 areas in total to ‘pledge’ and the storylines don’t vary significantly enough to be all that engaging. Valhalla is set primarily in England in 872 AD, so while it can be quite picturesque at times it really doesn’t lend itself to the free-running mechanic that has made Assassin Creed games so popular. The sprawling cities of Odyssey were perfect for exploring, and differed enough to remain interesting, whereas Valhalla reuses the same (quite flat) landscapes a lot.

There’s also the various ‘mysteries’ you encounter. Similar to Odyssey you meet various inhabitants of England who ask you to help solve their weird and wonderful problems. An argument between two brothers, a woman accused of being a witch, a couple suffering infertility looking for a miracle, the list goes on. While some of these can be quite amusing, your decisions have no impact on the story whatsoever and don’t particularly give out exciting loot. You get to a point where you’ve completed over 100 mysteries and realise that is less than 50% of the total and wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life.

And finally on to the worst aspect of Valhalla: the skills menu. I am not one of those people who pours over every skill tree, plans their strategy from the beginning of whether to tank or bow. I pretty much wing it and hope for the best. However, even for the most lax of players, the skills ‘map’ is nigh on unusable. A star constellation is a nice idea, but it’s so sprawling and difficult to navigate that having any kind of plan is impossible. Not helped by the fact that not all the ‘stars’ are revealed at the beginning. You can reset, which is something, but it makes building your character specs unenjoyable.

The actual storyline at the heart of Valhalla is pretty weak. There’s Odin and a load of lore/fate stuff, but it’s not particularly interesting or engaging. I find this is true with a lot of Assassin Creed games, Odyssey aside.

So… if you can pick it up cheap (which you definitely can), it may be worth playing. But I wouldn’t dedicate the 100+ hours that I did – there are better games out there.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

The sixth installment in the Assassin’s Creed world, Assassin’s Creed IV:Black Flag was heralded as something new and completely different. And boy, they weren’t wrong.

I have a love/hate relationship with Assassin’s Creed. On the one hand, they’re amazing, imaginative, fun and brutal. On the other I don’t think I’ve actually completed any aside from Brotherhood (and now IV). They are a rabbit hole of quests, missions, chests, fragments and usually they become slightly repetitive, which invariably leads me to putting down the controller.

Black Flag is different though. They’ve fined-tuned the controls so that the free running is nigh on perfect. True, you will occasionally get stuck on a tuft of grass or repeatedly run into a wall instead of up it, but the improvement is significant and the snags small enough to not be a bother.

Set in the early 18th century in the Caribbean, you are thrown into a world where pirates rule the high seas, while the Spanish and British wage wars to gain control. You play Edward Kenway (voiced fantastically by Matt Ryan who plays Constantine in recently cancelled TV show Constantine) who is a pirate trying to make his way in the world. He accidentally stumbles across the Assassin/Templar feud and his story slowly intertwines with theirs. I won’t go into detail, as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, it’s a well thought out and cleverly executed storyline.

Who’s the fat guy? Seriously, they’re all quite main characters and then there’s baldy at the end…

The characters you meet and the dialogue you hear are both exquisite, entertaining and in places heart wrenching, all of the voice actors really matched their characters well. (On a side note, was I the only one sat screaming “it’s a girl” at the TV?)

The newly introduced mechanic of sailing a ship (the Jackdaw) and plundering enemy ships is fun, interesting and pretty flawless. You can choose stealth or just go for brute force, pick off the weaker ships or go all out and challenge the Legendary Ships that reside at the four corners of the map. There are also underwater shipwrecks to explore, smugglers caves to ransack, unsuspecting sea creatures to harpoon, and your very own pirate bay to upgrade. They’ve really gone all out with this game, it is true open world and has so much to do that it is easy to become lost. And that may be its downfall.

The only reason it doesn’t fall into the same trap as the previous games is probably due to the sailing – it’s not quite monotonous enough to make me stop playing. The sheer amount of chests and animus fragments, quite a few of which are scattered on spits of land out in the middle of nowhere, means that collecting them all is a right ball ache and the rewards hardly seem worth it. I wish they had included one or two more bigger cities that I could explore. I enjoy unlocking parts of an area, but with Black Flag there were only three major cities and the map felt quite sparse because of it. In terms of the single player however, don’t let this put you off. It is truly a great game, especially if you’re not bothered about 100% completion.

Also they have, thank god, cut down the amount of time you spend outside of the Animus to an absolute minimum. There’s no pointless standing in rooms or watching conversations, you’re either doing something or you’re back in the machine. Good stuff.

The ending was also exceptionally good. Touching, a little sad, with beautiful music overlaying it all. There have been some really good game endings of late (Red Dead, I’m looking at you).

That’s the single player. Don’t get me started on the multiplayer.

We were so excited! They’re giving us multiplayer – maybe we’ll be able to join forces and wreak havoc on the high seas, or perhaps we’ll get able to do assassin missions together, sneaking around killing guards while closing in on our targets. The multiplayer is actuality is nothing like this whatsoever. You sort of play assassin missions, but you don’t appear to be assassin’s, you don’t move in the same way and the settings and characters you come across aren’t quite right. They’re also small exchanges rather than actual stories, meaning they’re boring and repetitive. The disappointment I feel when I think of the multiplayer is almost enough to make me hate the game as a whole, so I prefer to think of them as two separate games – one awesome and one plain awful.

So…. play it. It was on Games for Gold last month, but if you missed that I’m sure you can get a copy for cheap. If you do get, ignore the multiplayer at all costs because it is truly truly dire.