Alright. I'm finished with Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
I'm torn.
On the one hand, it's an excellent viking simulator. Not exactly realistic, but hey. On the other hand, it's supposed to be an Assassin's Creed game.
I like the setting. 9th century England and Norway is great. I like the environment, the general tone of it, the setting as a whole is quite a spectacle to behold.
However, Assassin's creed games used to be set in a single city(or a few), which worked so much better. Having to ride across the English countryside to get to another "city", which honestly passes more as a settlement than anything else, feels like a chore. It used to be "get to that district", and now it's "get to that county", and when the games compress entire countries into a 8km by 6km piece of land, it feels too tiny. Days may pass, story-wise, between towns, but it took a few minutes to ride there, which in game-time, translates to a few hours, judging by the day/night cycle.
The games used to be about parkouring your way through city scapes, and assassinating targets. Now it's a ridiculously large open world, and Dark Souls. Because the combat isn't what it used to be, and while it's good they changed it up, why does every goddamn game have to be dark souls now?
Even assassinations now, are based on dmg+crit chance. If I managed to sneak past an entire army, to perfectly stealth kill my target, I expect to be able to do just that, instead of a hidden blade penetrating the jugular be just a flesh wound, and now the entire fucking village is on to me. Not to mention the combat system is so much based on perfect parries and dodges, lest your stamina runs out.
On the story;
It's a fairly straight forward one. Go to England, seize the entire country. There are of course intrigues, drama and humor in there, but nothing I didn't really see coming.
As for the modern day setting, they actually did bring some interesting stuff to the table, only to cut it short way too early, leaving me wanting more. Classic, sure, but when theres a 2 year wait for the next game(I assume), and they have like 30 minutes or so of modern day stuff, they could've made it more compelling, if not complete.
This is the third game in the new style of games, and I still play them, but I did just download the Ezio Trilogy to play those again. Hopefully they're as good as I remember them to be, but it's been 10 years.