I don’t have many games I hate. If I don’t like a game, well, maybe it wasn’t for me, maybe it didn’t do anything for me, or maybe it just was a bad game. There’s only one I really hate.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
It’s a running joke among my friends and I now. It gets mentioned, it’s like my eye twitches just from hearing its name. I’ve never disliked a game so strongly, and I hate that it’s from a franchise I love so much. I’ve been an Assassin’s Creed fan since the day the first game came out. I played the entirety of the Ezio Trilogy, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Black Flag. Unity is where I sort of dropped off. I got it at release and ended up getting incredibly frustrated with it because of the state it released in, so much so I returned my copy. I didn’t play Syndicate but I do own it and plan to, one day. Out of the recent open world games, I played the entirety of Origins, including the DLCs and LOVED it, I tried to play Odyssey but couldn’t get into it (probably because I tried to play it after Origins), and then we circle back to my beloved Valhalla.
As you can see, I’m not hating the game because it’s part of the newer style of AC games. I don’t necessarily enjoy how much the “assassin” part has been lost in them, but I still enjoyed Origins nonetheless.
I can’t say the same for Valhalla.
I could technically just drop SkillUp’s review of the game and be like “watch this, everything he said I agree with” but that loses the whole purpose of me explaining why I hate this game. It’s been a while since I’ve played it—it was one of the first games I bought when I got my PS5. Still, I hope to be able to explain exactly why I hate AC: Valhalla so damn much.
There will be spoilers in this so before I proceed, just giving the head’s up now.
Just to give a brief overview of the game: AC: Valhalla starts off in Norway in 873 CE, but quickly moves to Anglo-Saxon England. You play as Eivor (male or female, your choice) who sets out with their adopted brother, Sigurd, and a whole slew of your Viking clan to settle on the lands there. You create settlement there that you can upgrade and improve called Ravensthorpe. You’ll come back to this place a lot after main story missions to give updates on your progress of pacifying England. A map there will show your progress on your pacification (I will be mentioning this map again…probably more than once). You meet quite the cast of characters, from the different people who live in your settlement, your brother’s wife (who you can romance…whoops), the Seer (who has some of the best questlines for you), Basim, a Hidden One assassin, and even the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. There are also a few different storylines happening at once: you have Eivor’s storyline in Anglo-Saxon England, you have Layla’s story (story is a bit generous, to be honest) in the present, and then we circle back to Eivor again, but in the realm of the Isu.
Outside of main missions, while boating to the various areas in England, you can raid various small settlements with your crew for supplies. You can manage your crew back in Ravensthorpe, but I admittedly didn’t play around with this too much. There are a variety of other things to do as well such as play Orlog, a dice mini-game, go up against NPC in a drinking game (which I was not very good at), and even do some flyting, which is essentially a rap battle. Romancing characters is also a thing in Valhalla.
The game has a few different endings: there’s the ending to the Seer’s questline (which takes place in two different Isu realms, Asgard and Jötunheimr), the main quest storyline (which triggers once you have 90% of England pacified), and the conclusion to the England storyline (which only triggers when the entire map has been completed). Two of these endings are okay, the last one, I will be talking about later.
THE GOOD
Before I go into why I hate Valhalla it would be incorrect for me to say I’ve always hated this game. I did enjoy it at the start. I have screenshots of me telling my friends on Discord I was enjoying it—and I was! The beginning, when you are in Norway, I thought Norway looked so beautiful. Norway didn’t feel so bloated, but to be fair, you’re not in Norway very long (you can travel back once you’re in England and my feelings on Norway changed). The cutscene on the journey to England was so well done. And I truly felt more like an assassin in Valhalla than I did in Origins. I also really enjoyed the Seer’s quest line. Asgard looks stunning and the lore there was well done, tying major characters in the game (Eivor was Odin, Basim was Loki, Sigurd was Tyr) to Norse gods, although in game they are known as the Isu. You learn, after the Great Catastrophe, 8 of the Isu drank an elixir that allowed them to reincarnate, which is why many of the characters in Valhalla look like their Isu counterparts.
Most importantly: you can pet the dog and cat in this game! You can pick up the cats to pet them. This was a redeeming feature for me, probably my only one.
The music of Valhalla is also very good. Assassin’s Creed never really disappoints in this area. Jesper Kyd, the composer for the Ezio trilogy, returns and does not disappoint.
I thought it was important to go over a bit about the game and the fact that I did enjoy it at one point before going into why I hate it. There’s a chance if you haven’t played it yet, you may enjoy it too. The problem is though, the bad and the ugly outweighs the good.
THE BAD
I’ll admit, it feels a little silly to be talking about the bugs and glitches I experienced for a 3-year-old game. Valhalla did receive updates and DLCs so it’s likely some of these things (hopefully) were fixed. Nevertheless, they weren’t at the time and while not all of them attributed to why I hate this game, some of them did. I had a few that caused the game to crash at some pivotal moments—I forget the exact details of when this was in the game (I know it was later) but it was during a fight. I had finished the fight and a cutscene played out to end it off. The game froze during the cutscene, crashed and when I reloaded, I had to re-do not only the fight, but a bit leading up to the fight. I remember this really pissing me off because the fight itself was giving me a challenging time. Another time, I had gotten to the end of a quest and should have seen a cool cutscene, but the camera glitched out and I instead stared at a tower for the entire time. And don’t even get me started on the lip-sync glitch and screen tearing, which drove me nuts.
Not all of them were bad though. I had one where I was in some outpost and a low poly village character, who wasn’t even supposed to be there because this was an enemy outpost, was on top of a tower, walking in a spot.
I had another where arrows would stick to my hand/body. I was able to cheese a fight because the arrows I had stuck to me at the time were on fire and every shot I fired with my bow was also on fire because of that. These stuck arrows would also appear in cutscenes, which while wasn’t too bad and ended up looking funny, but it did take me out of some serious scenes.
One of the cool glitches I experienced was during the “The First Night of Samhain” quest. You’re dressed up as Mari Lywd, as seen below. Once this quest is done, this costume is supposed to comes off. It did not for me. It stayed on. I managed to make it go away eventually, but I at least enjoyed it while I had it. I got some cool shots with my skeletal horse.
You’re probably wondering when I’m going to get to why I hate this game. You’re in luck, that’s what’s coming up next. And spoilers, I won’t hold back.
THE UGLY
Valhalla suffers from a few problems: firstly, its length and its open world. I put these two together because I think they do go hand in hand. Before Valhalla released, Ubisoft announced that Valhalla would be shorter than its previous games. That turned out to be a lie. If we compare between AC: Origins, AC: Odyssey and AC: Valhalla, according to HowLongToBeat.com, Origins is 30 hours for the main story only, Odyssey is 45 and half hours for the main story only, whereas Valhalla is a whopping 61 hours for the main story only. 61 hours! How is that shorter? I ended up lowering the difficulty at some point because the game started feeling way too long for me and I just wanted to be done with it. In preparation for this article, I went back through the Discord server I’m on with my friends (some of the very friends who are also writing on here) and after I beat the game, I wrote a message that said:
There’s not a single game, other than this one, I have said that about ever in my life.
I have other messages I sent to my friends saying that it feels like a chore to play this game—games aren’t supposed to feel that way. I should find enjoyment in them, not feel like it’s a slog.
And the unfortunate thing is, to justify its length, they filled it with so much bloat. I love open world games, they’re one of my favourite types of games. It just seems like Ubisoft doesn’t grasp what makes open world games special. It’s filled with so much of the same stuff, whether it’s quests, side activities, or even just environments. Games like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom give you so much to do in their expansive worlds. Yes sometimes there may be some repeating gameplay as well in those games but the world they create at least feels different (Skyrim has some issues here with this but not as bad as Ubisoft games). A lot of Valhalla’s world has faded into the deep recesses of my mind and doesn’t stick out quite like the four games I mentioned. I still remember the cities and small towns in both Oblivion and Skyrim and it’s been years since I played both. Tears of the Kingdom is fresher in my mind but I still remembered a good chunk of where things were from Breath of the Wild while playing TOTK because the environment stood out. I think the only places in Valhalla that did was when I was in Asgard and Jötunheimr. Outside of that, nothing really stands out.
The amount of characters as well was a bit much and there was just no depth with them. I’ve seen many of the names before from taking history classes and watching Vikings so I know who these people were but Valhalla didn’t give me a good enough reason to give a shit about them. They tried, they really did including some cutscene to pull at your heartstrings when you’d do their respective missions, but I just didn’t in the end. I didn’t even cry when some of them died in the final mission (and I cry to a lot of things).
I also do want to go more in depth about Valhalla’s gameplay as I think it’s important to understand that at first before I can talk about my least favourite ending. The gameplay loops is the following: you’re at Ravensthorpe, you go to the war room, you get your mission, you go to the place on the map, do mission at said place, come back to Ravensthorpe and report on your mission, marking off the section as pacified. Rinse and repeat. You can do side quests and side activities but I never felt like they added anything. The raids you did got you supplies and I did a lot of them at the beginning of the game, but as I progressed through the story, I stopped doing them as much because it was the same thing over and over again—never any variety.
I also never completed the entire “kill the Order of the Ancients” map. This was optional at least, and I’m glad it was, because I refused to touch it the longer I played.
I already mentioned how to trigger the main story ending, which at least is somewhat satisfactory because of the conclusion. I cannot say the same for the England storyline. To get the ending to the England storyline, you have to 100% the map. And, again, to do that you have to keep repeating these same missions. Your reward for completing the map is a battle with the allies you’ve made joining you. You all fight, some allies die, you win the battle, you talk/have a funeral for the fallen…and that’s it. That’s all. I went and cleared that whole map for that. It ended up making me so mad, I remember saying “that’s it??”. I absolutely regret playing it. I don’t think it would have been so bad if there had been a variety of main missions or even if I didn’t have to 100% the map. Personally, I think ending the game on this ending further diminished any enjoyment I still had remaining for this game (which wasn’t much). I’m not even sure what power level I was at by the time I did this – I know it definitely wasn’t the 340 that was recommended—I was not grinding in this game. I had enough of this goddamn game by this point.
There’s no easier way of saying it: this game is boring. It’s a drag to play and it literally drags on forever. It’s also unfortunate because I know they added more to the story with the DLCs, but you couldn’t pay me to play them. I couldn’t subject myself to anymore of this game. It already took so much of my time already. This is a frustrating thing for me too because I legitimately love long games. I’m a massive RPG fan and those games can be incredibly long, but I’ve never felt this way about any of them. And what’s worse, I feel this way about a franchise I actually like. I haven’t purchased the most recent Assassin’s Creed: Mirage as I’m waiting for it to drop in price. It sounds like it’s far more up my alley, going back to the assassin roots, but it still is lacking in story and making you giving a shit about the endless characters they introduce. I’m not getting burned twice.
Final Thoughts
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is one of the worst games I’ve ever played in my life. It’s dull, monotonous and feels like a chore to play. That image from the start of this article where I wrote boob in the snow? Yeah I did that because I was so bored with this game. There was no payoff for me and I regret playing it to this day. If you’re going to play this game, I personally recommend you don’t. I cannot recommend this game—even if it’s been 3 years later. I will not recommend it. I know there are people who did like it so maybe there’s a chance you will, and hell, even I did at one point. But once you start getting further into the game, don’t be surprised if you start hating it too.
If I have not convinced you, I highly recommend checking out SkillUp’s review “I’m angry I wasted so much time on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Review)” because he was equally as angry after playing this game. I’m sure if I had written this review after I finished playing it, there would be far more vitriol in this that has gotten dulled by time. You can hear the frustration and just down right annoyance in his voice as he goes over his issues with the game. I didn’t even touch on like how the combat feels, the skill tree, and the lack of character development, but he does (I’ll be honest, like with other aspects of Valhalla, these things too have faded into the recesses of my mind because I just don’t care anymore about this game).
I really hope Ubisoft takes what people have said post-Valhalla into consideration when making their next Assassin’s Creed games, because I do want to enjoy these games. Unfortunately, because of Valhalla, I will forever be cautious about buying another one of their games until they’re reviewed. I will not get burned again.
