Assassin's Creed Valhalla

I'll be honest: I walked into Valhalla expecting Odyssey with axes and left genuinely surprised by how much of it works. The Bear, Raven, and Wolf skill paths give you three meaningfully different builds across a constellation grid with over 400 nodes, and the decision to lock abilities behind exploration rather than a leveling menu is one of the better design calls Ubisoft Montreal has made in years. Want to charge a Saxon soldier into a stone wall? There is an ability for that. Want to play dead mid-combat and then knife someone in the throat? There is an ability for that too. Gear follows the same logic: no random loot piñatas, just specific, upgradeable pieces scattered across ninth-century England, each one worth keeping. The combat sits somewhere between satisfying and repetitive depending on the hour. A stamina bar punishes button-mashing, parrying actually matters, and the Stun Attack finishers carry enough visual weight to feel like a reward. The problem is that fights happen constantly. Outposts flood the screen with ten or more enemies, larger monastery raids push that number well past twenty, and after hour thirty the loop can feel like work dressed up as warfare. Stealth is better than it was in Odyssey, with one-hit assassinations back regardless of enemy scale, but guards have a frustrating tendency to spot Eivor across entire courtyards, which turns careful infiltration attempts into open brawls anyway. The hidden blade is back in spirit; the AI to complement it is not always there. Where the game genuinely earns its runtime is in its regional structure. Arriving at a new English kingdom, untangling its political mess, and leaving your mark on it before sailing the longship to the next one has a rhythm that holds up across dozens of hours. Eivor as a protagonist has real personality, and the relationship with Sigurd is where the best writing lives, threading actual choices that affect how that arc resolves. The settlement at Ravensthorpe grows alongside your progress, unlocking feast buffs, a dedicated assassination mission board, and a surprisingly charming cast of residents you grow genuinely fond of. On PC at high settings, the Anglo-Saxon countryside and Norwegian snowfields are among the most striking open-world visuals in the franchise, with HDR support making the most of the color contrast between environments. The caveats are real, though. Bugs have been a recurring companion since launch, from minor glitches to the occasional save-system scare. The microtransaction store attracted justified criticism for selling cosmetic armor sets at a pace that outpaced the base-game offerings. And the regional quest formula does repeat its beats: arrive, investigate local power struggle, storm a fortress. By the fifth kingdom it starts to blur. Completionists face a game that has been described, accurately, as too big for its own good. If you approach it as a long-haul Viking saga and give yourself permission to skip the icon-clearing, there is a genuinely compelling RPG inside. If you need every narrative beat to feel distinct and every quest to justify its existence, Valhalla will test your patience well before the credits roll.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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