Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, review: A mountainous epic with a few holes to patch

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla arrives at the beginning of a new console generation, announcing the occasion like a bottle smashed against the bow of a ship. Published by Ubisoft, the gaming company that has this year faced a wave of internal sexual harassment and assault allegations, Valhalla was nevertheless positioned as the showy inaugural epic for the Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles (while also being less showily released on PS4 and Xbox One). To this end, it fits the bill perfectly, bringing England’s Dark Ages to life with both great scope and fine detail.

In Vahalla, you inhabit Eivor, a pugnacious Viking raider with a tragic backstory and a hero’s steely resolve. Players are given the choice whether to control either a female Eivor or a male version – or you can play as both sexes in alternation, according to the whims of the Animus, the time-bending machine at the heart of Assassin’s Creed’s tortuous lore. It’s a welcome progression from a series which has featured almost exclusively male protagonists, though the difference between the two leads feels largely academic. It’s easy to imagine a game in which this sex-switching feeds into some sort of meaningful exploration of gender fluidity, but Valhalla isn’t it.  

After a substantial prologue section set in Norway, Eivor travels to England to re-establish her clan on our greener pastures. There are political manoeuvrings, as you strike bargains and truces with the various cultures that make up the eighth-century English milieu, all the while unravelling a densely arcane conspiracy surrounding the franchise’s long-running feud between the Brotherhood of Assassins and the Templar Order. The plot constitutes a somewhat uneasy marriage between the classic Assassin’s Creed story elements and the impulse to indulge a structured, standalone story arc.  

Perhaps the defining quality of Valhalla is its size – even while whistling through water on a Viking sailboat, or galloping across land on horseback, it takes a while to get around the map’s multitude of regions and shires. The environment is huge, the story long. Valhalla takes a while to get going, and the combat for the first several hours feels pretty repetitive, offering you a greater wealth of attack options and chillingly violent executions as the game goes on – the game is at its best when it entertains Eivor’s lust for carnage and mayhem.

As was the case with the release of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs: Legion last month, Valhalla has suffered from a few technical hiccups around its launch – or maybe a spluttering fit, if reports are to be believed – but barring a few aesthetic glitches, my own playthrough of the game has been smooth enough. As open-worlds go, it’s not quite as enlivening as that of, say, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the battle mechanics feel nowhere near as slick as this year’s worthy Assassin’s Creed imitator, Ghost of Tsushima. But it’s an exceptional adventure nonetheless.