I don’t think Valhalla is a bad game; it’s actually pretty good. It’s just that it’s not as good as Odyssey, in most respects. And yes, it promises more than it delivers, though that may well be a result of players understandably thinking each one of these games will add to, not subtract from, what came before.
Certainly the landscapes you traverse, the vistas you see, and the visual atmosphere are excellent, at least in my book. Combat mechanics are also very solid, maybe better than in Odyssey. It’s everything else that brings the game down a notch of two. Ultimately, there is no weight to it. I’m not in general that obsessed with traditional narrative in games; the stories per se are not what brings me in usually. In Valhalla, though, the lack of any real drive or motivation for Eivor really shows. Kassandra has this family thing, set in the context of a literal Greek tragedy, which doesn’t have to beat you over the head with STORY PARTS NOW to get you invested. Eivor, though, is basically second fiddle to Sigurd, a girl or guy Friday sent out to do the dirty work while the boss consorts with destiny.
Subduing regions of Anglo-Saxon England while building granaries and what not back at home is fairly engaging, but only up to a point. Where Kassandra’s Greece felt like a living world, Eivor’s England feels like a museum. Here, you have your Roman exhibits, dusty and arid reminders of a more dynamic past. There, you have a few reminders of pre-Saxon Celtic society, which hint at an exotic and mysterious world but never deliver much of a payoff. You stumble upon the shuttered remains of abandoned Assassins chapters, which should be exciting, but which mostly just serve to underline how boring England is now.
Even the Norse invaders are pedestrian. While a few characters, like Ivar, are superbly done, many are generic, straight out of central casting on a moderately serious historical drama about Vikings. The game can’t decide whether these interlopers (though some have been there for years of course) are vicious reivers or harbingers of civilization. Eivor, despite eviscerating the inhabitants of England in countless numbers, is always so damn noble it hurts–no wonder Sigurd comes to be supremely distrustful.
The world building suffers from the lack of a conceptual or narrative spine. Unlike Greece, where we have a plethora of sources ranging from Homer to Plato to Bulfinch to draw on, Eivor’s England is something of a mystery. While historians no longer use the term “Dark Ages” much, the time period for Valhalla is one where what sources we have are comparatively unfamiliar to most audiences. And as complex as ancient Greece was, we at least have a strong Athenian narrative to work with there; we can trade nuance for clarity. With England in the 9th century, there is no comparable backbone. Thus, we are left with a series of vignettes, sort of historical skits; here are the Saxons! Here are the Danes! Here are the Druids! Here are the…French? Hmm. Well, whatever. The Greece of Odyssey was a theme park as well, but it was a theme park at night. Valhalla is a theme park in the daytime, when you can see all of the nuts and bolts and none of the magic.
In some respects the game continues strong trends at least. Ubisoft does a very good job across the board, in their games at least if not always in their corporate culture, of avoiding monocultural homogenization and in portraying a wide diversity of humans and human society, for which they are to be commended.
At the same time, though, their games often lack a real point of view. One of the most bizarre parts of Valhalla is raiding monasteries. I mean, ok, I’m not a Christian, or even much of a fan of religion in general, but even I find the sacking of churches and the screaming monks a bit unnerving. Which would be fine if that was what they were going for, but there is no meaning behind it. It’s resource gathering, period, and beyond a few throwaway conversations in the boats about the differences between Norse and Christian faiths, there is no contextualization of these raids other than “they are rich and we want their stuff.” You keep looking for some hook here, either a commentary on the struggles between faiths and culture, or a critique of early medieval Christianity, or some insight into the role of these religious communities in the life of England, but no, there’s literally nothing. Instead you are left with vaguely disturbing scenes of helpless, unarmed clerics screaming as their homes and fields burn at the hands of your crew. The fact that you don’t actually kill the monks I think makes it worse in some ways; there isn’t even the closing of the loop around the violence of conquest and cultural clashes that would at least driven home some message.
None of that would matter much if it wasn’t for the fact that these games, since Origin at least, have primed us for some of that commentary and insight. We’ve had glosses on the fall of the Ptolemaic kingdom to Rome, the nature of the conflict between Greece and Persia, even a crash-course in Socratic philosophy. In Valhalla, though, we get…bupkis. Even the peasants, so dynamic and interesting in Egypt and Greece, here become what I call “starecroppers,” as they simply stand there staring out over their fields as you ride by hunting the seemingly endless supply of predators that roam the patches of wheat and barley.
In the end, other than some relatively tawdry love-triangle stuff and mundane sibling rivalry, the player is left with a really good combat game in some really good environments and more mediocre content, stuff to do, than you can shake a bearded axe at. By the time you wade through all of the areas, tone shifts (not even going to get into the Asgard stuff), and deus ex machinas needed to guide you to the non-denouement that the game provides, its exhaustion not satisfaction that is the dominant emotion. I kind of love the game, having put a lot of hours in to it, many hundreds really, but I also kind of hate it.
I just don’t love it or hate it enough.
