Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (PlayStation 5, 2020)

It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. Each Assassin’s Creed title has gradually grown in size, though it wasn’t until the massively open-world Origins and Odyssey that things really got out of hand.

Everything I’d read about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla indicated this was a step beyond even the previous two games, delivering a ridiculously long saga of the Viking conquest of England. But hey, I like Vikings, I like British history, and I (more or less) still like Assassin’s Creed.

My plan was to inch through the game and take a break the moment I got bored. Helping things is that Valhalla is an episodic narrative and each English county you conquer is a 3-5 hour long story. Grind out one of those each weekend and bing bam boom I’ll be done in a couple of months right?

It ended up taking me seven months to finish Valhalla and I didn’t get much out of it. Theoretically, the episodic storytelling should tesselate well with Ubisoft’s geographically decentralised development style, allowing the head developers to assign these mini-campaigns to individual design teams and letting them do their thing.

The reality is a series of poorly told stories in which player character Eivor solves the political problems of a procession of unhappy bearded men. To be fair, there probably were a lot of unhappy bearded men in Viking England, but they instantly blur together and after finishing there aren’t many that stand out.

The closest Valhalla gets to a successful character is the amusingly psychotic Ivarr the Boneless, though he takes his bow about 20 hours into the 80-hour story and no other character comes close to filling his shoes.

The rest of the cast is essentially interchangeable, which sadly includes your Viking best bud Sigurd. He’s at the core of the central narrative, though any emotional involvement is diluted by spreading a handful of hours of story over 80 hours (and Sigurd disappears completely for large swathes of that).

And then there’s the environment design. England isn’t known for its varied biomes, so most counties end up being some combination of rock-walled farmland and procedurally generated forests, studded with towns assembled from a handful of identical buildings.

One of the my favorite things about Assassin’s Creed used to be that someone on the team clearly cared about historic accuracy, with Syndicate perhaps a high point in its intricate recreation of Victorian London. But Valhalla‘s England may as well be Hyrule for all its similarity to what we know about this time period.

For one thing the game stuffs every conceivable corner of the map with Roman ruins. The plus side is that these give you something taller than a hut to climb on, though they’re also a flagrantly obvious cost-cutting way to reuse assets from Origins and Odyssey. You can stick a few vines on it guys, but we recognise those corinthian columns…

Also, in a properly nerdy nitpick, Valhalla‘s London has a giant aqueduct looming over it. Why does a city that’s famous for being literally on a river need a multi-story aqueduct that doesn’t even connect to the river?! C’mon!

I was glad to finally see the end of the game, though I still have Wrath of the Druids, The Siege of Paris, and Dawn of Ragnarök to burn through first. Once those are out of the way I’m done with Assassin’s Creed for the foreseeable future. I just can’t take another 80-hour trek through dullsville, no matter how interesting the historic period is.

As the hamster-wheel design ground me down I couldn’t help but remember one famous line from Fellowship of the Ring: ““I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Valhalla is basically a spoonful of butter spread over a tennis court-sized slice of bread.

Can Assassin’s Creed pull it back with the episodic Infinity project? If they’re actually bite-sized chunks of game I’ll consider it, but frankly, I’m burnt out on this shit.