I’ve got a bit of time for Assassin’s Creed games – especially those that touch upon historical periods. While they’re not particularly historically accurate, in terms of events or people or even the kinds of things that were present at that time, I do think they are interesting in terms of the historical atmosphere they develop and bring to life. I think that’s because of the open world nature of the games – where you can wander through, in this case, the English countryside and watch people go about their daily lives. Sure, it’s limited, but on the surface it’s quite satisfying and convincing enough. The other thing that helps with that is the scale of game – AC Valhalla is BIG. Early in the game, you move from Scandinavia to England and establish your own settlement there. From that point on, it’s a matter of building alliances in lots of different regions, each coming with their own main quest, lots of side quests, challenges, animals to hunt, fish to catch, people to romance, cairns to build and so on. Anyone region is more than enough to engage your attention for 5-10 hours. The whole game – well over 100 hours for me, and I didn’t even come close to competing it.
The other thing that I noticed is that it’s considerably more hack and slash than other AC games. This kind of makes sense – and lends itself to the fun, too – after all, who wants to be a viking if you can’t charge in and split heads with an axe – and so the story goes through some serious convolutions in order to justify why that’s the case. On that matter, the whole AC uber-story is perhaps the worst part of the whole game. I’ve long since lost track of what’s going on there – and I don’t really care. Instead, it just proved to be a distraction from hunting bears or storming castles.