Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
The Assassin's Creed series is a bit of a blind spot for me. It wasn't always that way. I played the first game in the series way back in 2007, and while that game had a lot of flaws, it intrigued me enough to check out the second, which is one of the better games for the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 console generation. Ubisoft, the series' developer, clearly felt the same—or at least read the tides of overwhelmingly positive fan reactions—and followed with two sequels focused on Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the charming Italian Renaissance protagonist. The Ezio Saga is a focused effort that leverages that era of Italian history and, more importantly for a series that engages with every nook and cranny of its open worlds, Italian architecture to deliver a satisfying experience.
Things then started going off the rails for both the series and my relationship with its increasingly convoluted systems and storyline. Assassin's Creed III took the show to the American Revolution, but the new United States did not provide the same thrill as Florence in the 15th century. The dual storyline also begins to get silly here. The player is reliving the memories of various Assassins throughout history in their forever war against the Templars, while also navigating present day techno-babble. To be honest, this split was already the weakest part of even the best game in the series (the second one), and the series only leaned into that more as it kept going from curiosity to world-beater to whatever the hell it is now.
Valhalla is the 12th main game in the series and, as the name suggests, it puts the player in the role of a Viking in the ninth century, traversing both Norway and the British Isles. The modern day storyline is still here, and I don't understand anything going on there.
Valhalla is so completely different from the games I played over a decade ago that it feels like a different series, though I know enough about Assassin's Creed as a series to understand that its focus on role-playing elements and action has been a slow and janky progression through all of the games I missed. Though I understand why this series has continued to have a chokehold on video game discourse and design, the travails of Eivor Varinsdottir are so far removed from where the series started that Valhalla is a jarring return to these games. With that in mind, I tried, after a disorienting few early hours, to discard what I thought I knew Assassin's Creed was in order to evaluate Valhalla on its own merits. How does it do under that approach? Well, it's complicated.
What Is It?
Assassin's Creed Valhalla puts the player in the ninth century, as Eivor, who can be played as a man or a woman. In the game's prologue, Eivor's Viking village is raided by the ominously named Kjotve the Cruel, who kills the protagonist's father. That sets up the first chunk of the game, which contains the best part of the game's increasingly chaotic plot. It's simple enough to set up a revenge narrative, after all, and Eivor does in fact get their revenge by killing Kjotve. Then, the game turns to the British Isles.
This is where the modern day storyline meshes with Eivor's story, as the Assassins-Templars war takes center stage, via the proxy factions of the Hidden Ones (who Eivor aids) and the Order of the Ancients (King Alfred of Wessex turns out to be the leader of that branch ... I think?). While slowly and haphazardly discovering the secrets of this war, the player-as-Eivor kills a whole bunch of people in a combat system that has stealth elements but can't, in good conscience, be called stealth combat.
In between the main storyline missions, the player has a lot that they can do in ninth-century England and Wales, as is tradition in Assassin's Creed games. There are plenty of side quests to undertake for better gear, resources, or bits of story. There is also the world map full of icons to navigate to and towers, so many towers, to climb in order to reveal more parts of the map. The gameplay loop, then, is simple yet full to the brim with busywork: After completing a main mission, it behooves the player to explore the map in order to get stronger for the next mission. I found myself spending more time with the world map than the plot, though at times this felt more like completing a checklist of activities than any meaningful gameplay.
What Went Right?
If a game is going to force a player to engage with its open world, it better be beautiful, and Valhalla mostly nails this. The snow-covered Norway of the game's first part is the highlight here; I might be a sucker for snow in video games in general, but Valhalla truly nails both the never-ending coverage of powder and the dangers that can lurk within this wide-open winter wonderland. The British Isles are rendered with similar faithfulness, but they feel a bit drabber. This is by design, of course, and I can't say that Ubisoft didn't nail a sense of morose Britishness.
That accuracy also extends to the actual setting, beyond any graphical accomplishments. Maybe I've played too much Crusader Kings III and this is my own personal bias talking, but seeing this era of history rendered so viscerally and brutally is a delight. The warring factions on the Isles kept me wanting to explore in order to find out who is battling who and, more relevantly, whose shit I can absolutely rock with my dual-wielded axes. The setting falters a bit when the Assassins-Templars stuff comes into play; for a game that tries to replicate history, adding in the series' meta-narrative is disappointing, and Valhalla isn't particularly clever about the connections to the modern day.
Still, though, there are plenty of things to do in this world that aren't just checking things off the map, and I have to particularly compliment the Assaults and Raids systems, which are larger scale battles in which the player leads a band of Vikings to attack British settlements and fortresses. These are both fun and exciting, and the ability to recruit various NPCs as raiding party members adds in quite a bit of strategy and customization. Similarly, I enjoyed the return of a fleshed-out player settlement, Ravensthorpe; in Assassin's Creed II, I spent more time than I care to admit setting up Ezio's villa to generate massive amounts of money for my mission, and Valhalla ties the aforementioned Raids into growing the settlement, giving Eivor and company a stronger foothold on the British Isles.
What Went Wrong?
Alright, let's talk about the open world now. I have gone on record on this very website about how much I don't like how open world games have evolved through the genre's lifespan, and I have specifically called out Assassin's Creed as one of the worst offenders. The relevant word here is "bloat." The map in Valhalla is just chock full of shit to do, but the value proposition isn't that each activity is fun to do; instead, it is a case of "more is more" philosophy, where just giving players more to do is worth the effort, even if all that more isn't particularly engaging on its own. The Ubisoft Towers trope in game design is well-established, but it is banal enough to point out again: Who really has fun finding a new tower to climb in roughly the same way, just to uncover more crap on the map to go hunt down? I didn't enjoy that in Assassin's Creed II back in the day, and I don't enjoy it in any games that have replicated it since (looking at you, Breath of the Wild).
The other major problem with Valhalla is that, when not running around grabbing chests or unlocking new locations, the moment-to-moment combat isn't all that fun. I am by no means a stealth gamer, and in fact hate mandatory stealth sequences in games (looking at you again, Breath of the Wild), but stealth was the whole point of Assassin's Creed when I last played the series. Valhalla still has stealth, of course; Ubisoft would have a riot on its hands if it ever truly abandoned it. But the way the game's many zones and missions are designed, stealth is never the one true way to progress. Embracing the Viking theme, Valhalla instead put a lot of emphasis on making the combat worthy of an action RPG, and while some of the tweaks to its formula work out (I love dual-wielding axes, great call there, Ubisoft), the actual fighting is a janky mess. Elden Ring, this is not.
I get what Ubisoft was trying to do in making the combat feel more grounded and weighty, but in practice, moving Eivor around a battlefield feels clunky. The combos are all window dressing, and I found the best way to win fights was to just dodge a lot, throw in a timely parry here and there to stun enemies, then chip away at their health. In a way, the focus on action combat made me appreciate the stealth aspect, when it was available and not clumsy to work around, because assassinating an enemy in one hit meant that there was one fewer enemy for me to deal with in face-to-face combat. This comparison has to be made, but if I want a Nordic-style action combat game, I'm going to play God of War (the 2018 version) over Valhalla.
Finally, the plot of Valhalla is a damn mess, and not just because of the modern-day aspect that I bemoaned above. Even taking that part of the storyline away, the pacing in Valhalla is inconsistent, with plot threads disappearing for hours on end and Norse mythology getting tossed in willy-nilly. (Somehow, an assassin from ninth-century Baghdad shows up as a reincarnation of Loki. Sure, why not.) Thanks to the open world aspect that can soak up endless hours of game time, I'd lose track of what was actually happening in the story before the next mission dropped more plot on my head. By the end of the game, I just wanted to finish it to say I did, because I didn't really feel any sort of resolution from a story that had long before stopped making narrative sense.
Were People Normal About This Game?
Somehow, I made it to this section of this article without mentioning microtransactions, but let's get to that. Ubisoft has been a leading culprit in the monitezation of modern video games, starting arguably with Assassin's Creed Origins in 2017, but Valhalla might be the worst offender, and people were mad about it. A Reddit post from February 2021 serves as a damning time capsule to the game's release: "There are now 9 armor sets in the microtransaction store - just as many as in the entire base game. Are we just gonna let this slide?" The answer to that question is "yeah, probably," given how well the next two games in the series sold, but the comments paint a frustrated picture of what fans of the series have had to put up with, peaking with Valhalla.
Elsewhere, the reaction was similar to what I would expect from such a long-running and stagnant series: Yeah, Valhalla has issues and flaws, but it's more Assassin's Creed, and the people who are fans of the series will continue to play these games. You can argue whether that's normal or not, but given the reaction to the most recent game in the series, I'd say Valhalla gets off scot-free here.
What's Happened Since?
Valhalla is anomalous for the Assassin's Creed series, in that it received content support for more than a year after release. Through its season pass—I could write a whole other blog about season passes and how, more often than not, they are a scam, but I'll just say here that Valhalla at least tried to put out enough content to validate buying one—the game has seen three expansions: Wrath of the Druids, The Siege of Paris, and Dawn of Ragnarok.
After years of releases either every year or every other year, Ubisoft let Valhalla breathe a bit longer, partly due to the restrictions of the COVID-era of game development, and partly because the next game in the series, Mirage, was a bit of a return to the series' roots. Following Basim Ibn Ishaq, the aforementioned assassin-and-also-Loki-reincarnation, Mirage strips down a lot of the bloat in Valhalla to focus on what made the series unique in its earlier installments. Parkour (parkour!), stealth, assassinations, a smaller map ... all of these things are present in Mirage in a way they hadn't been since the late 2000s. The story is still a tangled mess, but from a gameplay standpoint, Mirage sheds away a lot of what made Valhalla such a frustrating experience.
Back on its normal cadence after Mirage, Ubisoft then released Shadows in 2025. Because everything is culture war now, that game's launch was a breeding ground for racism, as one of the game's protagonists, Yasuke, was black, and a certain type of gamer could not wrap their heads around a black samurai. (Never mind that this Yasuke is based off a real samurai of African descent, also named Yasuke.) Shadows still sold incredibly well, and it was well-received in more normal sectors of the gaming world. Shadows isn't as bloated as Valhalla, but it's not quite as streamlined as Mirage either.
Is It Worth Playing In 2025?
If I haven't made it clear yet, let me be very direct: I do not like what Assassin's Creed became by the time Valhalla released. Gaming is a deeply personal hobby most of the time, and everyone can formulate their own opinions, but you're reading my retrospective on a game that mashes together everything I don't like about AAA open-world games into one. Valhalla isn't without merit; its a great 30-hour experience ballooned into 60 hours, but with a laser focus and some willpower to not clear the map, players who are interested in this era of history will find it rewarding.
I firmly believe, however, that you should not have to fight game design in order to get a good experience from said game, and Valhalla makes it near impossible to have that focused experience. That's not what I want from Assassin's Creed, and there are games in that genre that I've enjoyed more both before and after Valhalla. For that reason, Assassin's Creed Valhalla earns an 4.7 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale.
