Assassin's Creed Valhalla - The Way of the Berserker (DLC) (PS4/PS5/XBOX ONE/XBOX SERIES X/PC)

The Way of the Berserker is a paid DLC mission arc for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the open-world action-RPG that casts you as Eivor, a Viking raider building a settlement in Dark Ages England while getting tangled up in Assassin-Templar politics dressed in Norse mythology. The base game is a sprawling, often exhausting thing - hundreds of hours of collectibles, raids, and alliance quests spread across a map that sometimes feels padded to the point of cruelty. This DLC slots into that larger world as a self-contained story focused on Björn, a berserker seeking vengeance, who shows up at Ravensthorpe and pulls Eivor into his hunt. The appeal here is narrowly focused. If you bought into Valhalla for the combat - the visceral axes-and-shields brutality, the adrenaline-fuelled rush of cracking through enemy stamina, the satisfying crunch of dual-wielding heavy weapons - then a mission pack that leans hard into berserker-style gameplay is doing exactly what it says on the label. The encounters push you toward aggressive, high-damage play rather than the stealthy Assassin approach, which is a refreshing gear-shift for players who found the stealth mechanics underwhelming in the base game. The writing, however, is where the cracks show. Björn's revenge arc is functional but thin - it hits the expected beats without much surprise or layering. If you come to RPGs hoping that every questline might fold back on itself in some unexpected way, or that a companion's arc might reframe something you thought you understood, you will not find that here. The character work does not reward re-reads. Björn is a competent narrative vehicle, not a memorable one. For a DLC built around a specific warrior archetype, there was a real opportunity to dig into what berserker culture actually meant - the altered states, the ritual dimension, the cost of living at that psychological edge - and the writing mostly skips past all of it in favour of keeping the pacing brisk. Mechanically, the DLC integrates cleanly with whatever build you have running. It does not introduce new weapons or radically new systems, so if you are in the late game with a well-developed Eivor, encounters will not challenge you much. Conversely, if you are picking this up early in a playthrough, the combat difficulty provides a more interesting test. Build variety matters here the same way it does in the base game - which is to say, moderately. Valhalla's skill tree is wide rather than deep, and the DLC does not change that calculus. The mixed Steam review score (sitting around 70 percent positive across a large sample) reflects what most Valhalla players already know: the game delivers on spectacle and setting, but the sheer volume of content means individual pieces rarely feel essential. This DLC is a solid afternoon of Viking combat with a story that will not linger. Worth your time if you love Valhalla's combat loop and want more of it with a focused framing. Less compelling if you were hoping for something that adds genuine narrative weight to Eivor's saga.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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