Fans should have as much fun with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla as they did with Odyssey for another two years. The game is a big, deep dive into the story and gameplay of the series. This time, it puts fans right in the middle of Viking life. But one thing that stays the same is that the franchise repeatedly makes the same mistakes.
Because of these things, the series hasn’t reached that high level that makes a good game into a great one. Valhalla has kept bringing these things back, even though they should not have been brought back. A few spoilers are coming up, so be careful as you read.
Padding for the environment
The Assassin’s Creed games have never had the best side missions in an open-world game. The main reason is that the environment has been padded, so players must go all over the map to get to one place.
Valhalla does the same thing since the player will spend hours just making their character run across an empty land. Also, because there is a lot of sea travel, padding has moved to this area. The show keeps thinking that a big map is instant fun instead of a tedious task.
Massive Curveball At The Finish
The show has always confused shock value for a good ending to an arc. Because of this, the endings have come out of nowhere. Even though the effect is there, it’s not fair because nothing is leading up to it.
Valhalla went the same way as Assassin’s Creed III and forced the main character out of the story. This game didn’t wrap up the story in a way that left nothing to the imagination. Instead, it copied what other games had done and focused on how shocking Layla’s departure was.
Continued Stories from DLCs
If you wanted to know which games were the best in the series, these would be the ones with the most straightforward plots. Recent games have made the mistake of moving the story forward through DLCs. This leaves people who didn’t buy these DLCs confused when the next game starts somewhere else.
Valhalla depends a lot on the DLC for Odyssey, to the point where you can’t figure out what’s going on with Layla when she first appears in the game. The problem is that it insults fans and makes people read a lot of story-setting information to understand what’s happening.
forcing players to collect health packs
Ubisoft has fixed this problem and then made it worse again. After Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, you should probably play more familiar games since this one brought back health packages, which are always annoying. This is because foes tend to swoop the player, doing damage almost certainly.
Health packs must be upgraded, so the player has to return and get them more than once. There are usually only a couple or a few on hand for most of the game. After a few years, the show seemed to have learned from this mistake, but now it is back on the trend.
Too Long Campaign Mode
The Assassin’s Creed series looks like it will join the game list that takes way too long to finish. Just the story mode takes about 60 hours, which isn’t the best thing. This was a mistake for action-adventure games since they don’t have as many missions as role-playing games.
When it comes to the story, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla ends up being boring because the plot is so big that you might stop caring about it halfway through. It also shows that there are so many characters in the series that it’s hard to track them all.
Not Providing Separate Environments Unique Identities
Even though Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey had some beautiful places to visit, it was mostly the same wherever you went. In the same way, it’s hard to tell where you are in Valhalla because almost every area is the same as the last.
The smaller map size in this game was meant to make each environment feel different. Valhalla made the unfortunate decision to keep the way that places are made up of empty land and few buildings.
Setting Up The Period
Fans often think about what period the next episode will take place. But the characters in the world have become so stereotypical that they are no longer believable. Assassin’s Creed hasn’t solved this problem yet, since each new game adds to the stereotypes.
Valhalla is almost entirely about how rough people think Vikings are and how the Nordic area looks. Even though this is how most mainstream stories are told, the game’s characters are very flat, so it doesn’t take long to see that they will keep acting the same way.
Relying on tried-and-true game elements
If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Origins, there’s nothing about how Valhalla is played that will surprise you. Odyssey made the mistake of thinking that using a tried-and-true formula was an excuse for not being original, and Valhalla kept doing the same thing.
Everything is the same as in the first two games, including the interface, the surroundings, how you fight, and how you use stealth. This entry feels tired, as it feels more like an add-on game than a whole new one.
Making combat very simple
Combat is another part of Assassin’s Creed that has never been its strong suit. The series wrongly thinks that fans want a simple way to fight that makes enemies go down quickly instead of good fighting techniques that make the game fun.
Valhalla might be even more of a brawler since all you have to do is spam the attack button, and you don’t have to worry about defense, creativity, or parkour. This problem could have been ignored in earlier books, but Valhalla is too late in the series for this to happen again.
Character models, not reality, are used to make the graphics
Even though the Assassin’s Creed games are built on a pretty good game engine, they haven’t been able to give a real-world feel. Ubisoft made the mistake of thinking that the amount of detail in a character model was the same as visual mastery.
As a result, some Valhalla characters look awkward at times. The graphics are set, so everyone has the same expression, so conversations never look real. The features look great when the characters are still, but when they start talking, they look completely fake.
