‘Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’ tells a Viking epic with surprising new brilliance

With each new addition to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the balancing act between delivering what players expect from the series and innovating enough to create a memorable experience becomes increasingly difficult. 

Some elements of Assassin’s Creed have been around since the first game and will likely never change: historical settings, a hidden blade, and leaps of faith from global landmarks. Other elements, such as naval combat, grappling hooks, crowd blending, and crafting have appeared and disappeared through the series’ lifetime as Ubisoft retooled their franchise through the years.

The push and pull between old standards and shiny new things is a good place to start when discussing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Valhalla takes place in 9th century England, a fractured series of Saxon and Briton kingdoms built on top of the ruins of the island’s former Roman civilization. The old is everywhere in Valhalla, complete with tombs to explore, ancient temples hiding treasure, and crumbling castles to invade. The 9th century new is there as well, in the form of fresh-looking cathedrals and trading towns built from wood and stone, siege engines, and familiar political drama. The people of Valhalla’s England kept what was good about their country’s history and moved forward to create a foundation for their future.

Valhalla is by far the best Assassin’s Creed title of this era.

So too does Valhalla itself, which delves back into the Assassin’s Creed playbook to bring back some of the series’ classic and lost elements to marry them with the victorious strides in combat, exploration, and storytelling seen in recent titles like Origins and Odyssey. Though the game takes a few hours of play to hit its stride, Valhalla is by far the best Assassin’s Creed title of this era. It brings back real Assassins, complete with their eponymous creed, mysterious hoods, and emphasis on stealth. It learns from the overstuffed quest logs and question mark–filled maps of Origins and Odyssey to streamline its exploration into more manageable, but still epic, episodes that tell a cohesive saga. 

That winning combination of old favorites and exciting new toys is what makes Valhalla a great game, one that earns a descriptor rarely used for the twelfth game in any series: genuinely surprising. 

You Are Awaited 

Assassin’s Creed almost always delivers likable protagonists and Valhalla’s star Eivor is no exception. As the second in command of the Raven Clan, a group of Norse immigrants who dream of carving out a new home for their people in merry old England, Eivor is a fierce warrior with a sense of humor and a knack for forging lasting alliances. Since Valhalla continues in Odyssey’s RPG footsteps, player choice determines whether Eivor is a reaving warlord who charges axe-first into anything remotely problem-shaped or a silver-tongued tactician who charms their way to power. 

Some of the choices Eivor makes change the fate of the game, while others are simply a way to craft the character the player wants to see — one of the funnier dialogue choices encountered in a major questline offers the options of beating a bully to a pulp, buying them a drink, or selecting the “Don’t Fuck With Me” text (yes, a direct quote). Other choices require more thought as Eivor solves mysteries, unveils traitors, and chooses whom to trust. These have right or wrong answers and rely on the player’s logic and perception to avoid making deadly mistakes.

For the first time in the series, Eivor’s gender is variable for the entire duration of the game. 

One player selection, however, is not so much a choice as it is an overdue addition to Assassin’s Creed. For the first time in the series, Eivor’s gender is variable for the entire duration of the game. Unlike in Syndicate, where the dual protagonists Jacob and Evie Frye were separate characters with individual missions and Odyssey, where playing as Alexios or Kassandra was a one-time choice at the beginning of the game, Valhalla lets the player change Eivor from a man to a woman or vice versa around literally whenever through an aesthetic option in the inventory menu. 

Both Eivors are fully voiced and his or her gender does not impact the story at all. It’s a small but appreciated step for a company that famously eschewed putting women in playable roles while including “hire sex workers to distract enemies with their boobs” as a game mechanic for eight straight titles. 

Ship It

However he or she is played, Eivor takes part in a grand saga that sends them traversing a huge map populated with memorable characters both historical and fictional. The hills and dales of England are sometimes beautiful and green, other times grey with smoke and covered in bodies, but the simple joy of sailing off to a new segment of the map does not wear off at all.  Eivor’s longship is key to that traversal as a vehicle of movement and a weapon of war. The longship doesn’t invite naval combat exactly, but it does ferry Eivor and the warriors of the Raven Clan along England’s many rivers as they travel to meet their allies…or find helpless shoreline towns to raid and plunder. 

Valhalla is a Viking game after all, and unprovoked violence and robbery was kind of their shtick. Most video games are murder simulators when you get down to brass tacks, but there is something a little disturbing about an Assassin’s Creed game that encourages the player to sail up to a peaceful riverside town and burn down everyone’s house for a few barrels of supplies. Is raiding villages necessary? In the game, yes. There’s no way to build up the Raven Clan’s settlement without homicidally repossessing other people’s stuff. Is it fun? Also yes, because combat in this game is dope and so is breaking into buildings. 

Even dozens of hours into the game, it feels bad breaking down a door to see a passel of terrified villagers begging for their lives.

Does it feel right? Not really. Even dozens of hours into the game, it feels bad breaking down a door to see a passel of terrified villagers begging for their lives while Eivor steals enough loot to build a chicken farm back home. Nothing is true and everything is permitted, but those people have families, Eivor. 

Moral quandaries aside, the longship has some improvements for navigation as well. One press of a button can set the ship on course to follow the river towards Eivor’s objective without steering, which allows the player to enjoy panoramic views of the white cliffs of Dover while one of the clan members sings a Viking song or tells a story. Valhalla’s map is very big, so these respites are a welcome way to let mechanics do some heavy lifting. 

Maaaaaaaaaps

Image: ubisoft

The hard work of building a settlement for the Raven Clan and forging alliances with nearby rulers falls largely on Eivor’s shoulders, and the story of their successes and failures is the story of Valhalla. The game gets around its potentially overwhelming map by chunking each potential alliance into a separate quest line that is only viewable when that region is selected as Eivor’s currently pledged region, a fantastic choice that keeps the quest log neat and encourages the player to play each storyline through as a single chapter in Eivor’s memories. 

The pledge quests are the backbone of Valhalla’s storytelling and are unanimously good, especially when characters from a previous pledge show up to aid (or hinder) Eivor as the Raven Clan’s legend grows. Eivor can crown or dethrone kings, kill or spare usurpers, and make friends or earn the enmity of powerful figures through the player’s choices. These stories build up Valhalla’s supporting cast as one of the strongest in recent franchise memory, which makes each quest’s finale and impact on the story all the more immersive. 

Seriously, there’s some bonkers stuff in this game. 

Valhalla also trims down the number of side quests by spreading out the experience of small-scale questing over different activities. World Events are similar to standard side quests but do not appear in the quest log, as they’re meant to be encountered organically while traveling. These range from silly things, like adopting a cat and accidentally participating in a Saxon couple’s really weird knight-and-maiden sex roleplay thing, to more serious events that permanently increase Eivor’s combat abilities. Stumbling across a World Event is one of the many bizarre joys of Valhalla, and they play a small part in keeping the play experience interesting.

In addition to World Events, Valhalla’s map is packed with standing stones, drinking contests, hidden treasure hoards, Animus anomalies, rap battles, and hundreds of other secrets that appear with astounding frequency. It’s impossible to get a handle on everything Valhalla has to offer even after hours of play, and every single moment of exploration brings the possibility of seeing something that’s not only new to the player, but new to the Assassin’s Creed series entirely. Seriously, there’s some bonkers stuff in this game and the only way to find it is to keep Eivor’s eyes open (and to take a butt-ton of drugs, which Eivor also does). 

Have Fun Storming The Castle 

One of the more interesting ways Assassin’s Creed Valhalla keeps the player on their toes is by totally changing the way combat, skills, and abilities work. The basics of combat are similar enough to Origins and Odyssey, with light and heavy attacks mapped to the right trigger buttons, but Eivor’s true Viking badassery takes a lot more than that to unlock. 

Skills are one way Eivor grows, with two skill points gained each time he or she meets an experience requirement. The skill tree is more of a skill constellation (hello, Skyrim) that chains together small boosts in damage, resistance, and gear specialization with eventual endpoints in cool passive skills like double assassination or extra adrenaline bars. There are also abilities, which are earned in a few different ways through the game. 

Some abilities, like poison and fire attacks, come through working with the Assassins to eliminate Order of Ancients targets. Others Eivor can find by reading Books of Knowledge hidden around the world. Some great ones, including one where Eivor gets a summonable wolf pet named Chewy (you can name the wolf, but the best name is Chewy), come from completing world events. Giving Eivor multiple paths to power is one of Valhalla’s best choices, as it encourages the player to poke around more just to see what happens. 

Giving Eivor multiple paths to power is one of Valhalla’s best choices. 

Once Eivor has a decent selection of beefed-up stats, passive skills, and acquired abilities, big story events like storming castles become incredibly fun. Odyssey had those straightforward regional battles, but Valhalla’s siege set-pieces are three-act combat skill checks that give Eivor way more to do than hunt down a special bad guy. Eivor can power a battering ram, sneak up the walls to disable the enemies’ cauldrons of boiling oil, chuck explosives at palisades to gain ground for his allies, and shoot chains to lower drawbridges while the chaos of battle roars around them — and that’s if he or she isn’t too caught up chopping down foot soldiers in standard battle combat.

Those foot soldiers, by the way, are more interesting and varied in Valhalla. Far from being a faceless sea, there are different kinds of attackers who all require different strategies to fight one-on-one. Kinsmen attack in pairs, Skirmishers dodge most of Eivor’s attacks and have teeny awful little knives, and there are some dudes who just show up with big-ass hammers because hey, ow. There are dozens of enemy types that require constant vigilance.

Assassin’s Creed combat has never been this intricate or this rewarding.

And My Axe

Inventory management as an involuntary mini game is a terrible trend in gaming and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla totally avoids it. The days of mindlessly holding a button to break down useless gear and weapons to gain three chunks of iron and a log of wood, all the while praying you don’t zone out and accidentally scrap the cool bow you spent an hour looking for are over. Praise Odin! 

The trade-off to all of the weapons and gear being permanent and non-scrappable in Valhalla is that both of those important elements of Eivor’s loadout are much harder to come by than they were in recent games. Armor is only acquired by finding rare pieces hidden away in various parts of the map and weapons are primarily gained as quest rewards. The trade-off to that trade-off is that finding a new toy is more of an event now than it was in Origins and Odyssey. Sneaking into a monastery to infiltrate their crypt and solve a puzzle to earn a cool new cloak is so much better than comparing eight versions of the same boots looted off a random solder who still somehow has boots on after you loot the poor bastard’s body. 

One great weapon combo that is easily achievable in the early game is dual wielding an axe and a horribly dangerous spiked flail, because why not and hell yeah. 

The weapon selection is also limited but highly enjoyable in Valhalla. In addition to having no canonical gender and being optionally pansexual, Eivor is also ambidextrous and can dual wield weapons with ease. If you want to charge into battle with two hands full of axe, you can live that dream. If a sword and shield is more your style, hack away. One great weapon combo that is easily achievable in the early game is dual wielding an axe and a horribly dangerous spiked flail, because why not and hell yeah. 

There is one more tiny trade-off (to the trade-off, to the trade-off) when it comes to weapon and armor scarcity. All of the armor pieces come in sets that give bonuses if you have all five pieces, which are very difficult to complete considering you don’t know which armor piece you’re looting once you track one down. This might discourage players from mixing and matching their armor, or even putting resources towards upgrading newly found armor until much later in the game. If you’re not a stickler for set bonuses, you’ll be fine. 

If you are though….armor hunt as early and with as much focus as possible early on. 

Skal! 

When I first started playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I did not predict that I would lavish this much praise on the game. Its prologue quest is hopelessly boring compared to other Assassin’s Creed games, it’s loading times on the PlayStation 4 are interminable, and I spent my first few hours worrying that Ubisoft was cashing in on their newer, RPG-oriented AC games’ successes without innovating further. 

Then, I stormed my first castle. Eivor’s stealth actions destroyed the enemy’s defenses and turned the tide of battle. When the smoke cleared, I spent half an hour solving environmental puzzles to find the castle’s hidden stores of silver. Then I stumbled on a world event where a militant nudist instructed Eivor to steal someone’s clothing and cackled when they realized they got pranked. Eivor heard the voices of the Isu, threw a rager, did shrooms, talked to an elk (on shrooms), and did the old school Assassins’ Creed thing where you hide in a bunch of monks and eventually assassinate someone from inside a haystack.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is an unexpected triumph that looks back at the stealth genre standards it helped create and moves forward to expand that experience with an overflowing goody bag of new tricks. It stands as proof that this series is not treading water — it is sailing, like Eivor, towards exciting new horizons. Skal to that.