Why Valhalla Isn’t Your Typical Assassin’s Creed Game

I remember looking back to the days when the Xbox 360 ruled the console era, and one of the titles that I didn’t expect to take off at that time was Assassin’s Creed. Though I heard nothing but praise from my peers, I was more interested in multiplayer at the time. I did find myself monitoring the series over the years, noticing some titles did extremely well while others not so much due to a shaky release full of bugs and poor performance. Games were being released every year just like Call of Duty. It was getting to a point where quantity was being favoured over quality, and it started to show when the titles were released.

When this happened, Ubisoft decided to pause and take an extra year, which gave them time to bring a soft reboot. Ready to showcase the next game in the series, the consensus was generally positive with the majority, including myself, being surprised by the path they were taking. This was the first time I was on board to buy an Assassin’s Creed game, fittingly named Origins which focused on the beginning of the Assassins. Though this direction was needed to save a horse that was dying, there were some trade-offs that became more noticeable with time as the series continued.

So, what are these trade-offs? Glad you asked, let’s talk about the latest instalment: Valhalla. This definitely isn’t your typical Assassin’s Creed game, I’m 20 hours in and throughout my playthrough so far, I get the strong feeling that Ubisoft has forgotten what made Assassin’s Creed feel like its original predecessors. Now one could argue that I didn’t play the older games, but I did watch them on YouTube, and when you have friends who have played all of the games noticing what you are too then you know something is going wrong.

The biggest trade-offs I noticed in Valhalla was that I didn’t feel like I was an assassin. The reason I say this is because Valhalla focuses heavily on the theme of Norse mythology and the history of England in the ninth century. At times during my journey, I would totally forget that I was playing Assassin’s Creed because it felt more like a ‘God of War’ spin-off title with Vikings.

Certain segments reminded me that I was an Assassin such as the Animus or when I could sneak up to assassinate an enemy. But when I’d travel with my clan to raid farms and villages, I found myself forgetting most of the time that my Viking is also an Assassin who can parkour his way around if need be, and this is what hurts the game because Vikings were known for raiding and brawling, not for sneaking around like a stealth killer. This could have easily been released as its own entity.

At the heart of the franchise, the spark is in the feeling of being an Assassin, but Valhalla falls short here to deliver this. In reality, what we have here is a game about Vikings set in Norse mythology that attempts to deliver the Assassin’s Creed experience that just doesn’t work. But what does work is Valhalla, a stand-alone game without the Assassin’s Creed name.