I’ve played three hours of Assassin’s
Creed Valhalla and it looks like a great viking
simulator to me.
It lets you do all the classic viking activities:
ride a longboat through dramatic weather,
knock a man’s head off with this spinning
thing, quaff enough mead to anesthetize an
elephant, blow a variety of horns from small…
to big... and frighten some ducks.
But most importantly, it lets you do lots
of murders.
And crucially, it does them better than recent
Assassin’s Creeds.
If, like me, you found melee combat in Assassin’s
Creed Origins and Odyssey like whittling away
at a block of granite with a spoon, you’re
going to enjoy the sledgehammer approach of
Eivor’s viking fury.
This is Matthew from Rock Paper Shotgun and
in this video, I’m going to celebrate nine
things I killed in my Assassin's Creed Valhalla
demo and break down the game as I break down
some bones.
Let’s get pillaging...
Murdering basic meat sacks in Valhalla is
very easy and very pleasurable.
It’s largely about forcing weaklings to
the ground for instant kills.
Y’know: doing your best Mario goomba stomp
impression, or feeding them their own shield
like a really nasty pizza.
Stunning enemies is about whittling down this
defence bar, which can be done with heavy
attacks or just by hitting from behind to
shove them into the mud.
Which is a nice touch.
You can also summon Eivor’s battle raven,
Synin, to stun them with fear.
Which you’ll know is very accurate if a
seagull has ever tried to steal your chips.
This punchy physicality is really felt in
the weapons, too: when you start chopping
someone with an axe it picks up speed like
a woodcutter getting into the groove.
I love how you chop, chop, chop through the
health bar.
Catch someone with the first strike of a flail
and you can trap them in the helicopter blades
of your swings until more blood is outside
their body than in.
There’s a momentum to this, that I never
felt in the flimsy bee stings of Odyssey’s
fleet-footed combat.
That you can mix and match weapons to dual
wield is the blood red icing on the cake:
which weapon is in which hand is important.
Eivor’s right hand can do heavy attacks,
so it’s useful to unlock the skill tree
node to swap hands mid-fight.
Much later in the demo I murdered one of Valhalla’s
legendary animals: Black Shuck.
This phantom dog fiend is a genuine legend
of East Anglia, which is the English region
our demo took place in.
This is how Black Shuck was depicted in the
1850s, so it the game version looks reasonably
legit.
Needless to say, he is a not a good boy, but
he does demonstrate the benefit of carrying
a shield as you need one to parry in Valhalla
- as you did in Assassin's Creed Origins,
which was handled by the same dev team.
Parrying is the best way of eating through
the defence bar of these bigger boss-like
characters, and emptying the bar opens them
up for a proper stun attack.
While the focus on shield blocking does make
this feel more like Origins, there’s plenty
of stuff you’ll recognise from Odyssey,
too.
Late in the demo I unlocked the Brush With
Death power on the skill tree, which triggers
slow-motion with a carefully timed dodge - a
move that came fitted as standard in Odyssey.
Very handy for dodging, er, electric witches,
apparently.
The biggest lift from Odyssey are the eight
abilities you trigger with adrenaline, four
for melee and four for ranged.
Adrenaline is earned by eating certain mushrooms
from the floor or chopping off heads.
I know which I’m more comfortable with - I
f**kin’ hate mushrooms.
There weren’t many powers in this demo,
though this is made up for by the Big Pun
Energy of calling this aerial attack the Dive
of the Valkyries, which I have a lot of time
for.
One power I came to love is the axe throw,
which sees Eivor automatically lob throwing
axes as three nearby enemies - it reminds
me of Sam Fisher popping multiple heads with
Mark and Execute in Splinter Cell Conviction,
only without the marking bit.
Here it’s often enough to stun multiple
guards, setting you up for more of those delightful
stomps and executions.
But the star of the show is this.
It’s called Rush and Bash, which feels like
the viking’s answer to the Spartan Kick
(although that also reappears here).
Catch someone with this charging rush and
you hold on to them for several seconds as
you smash them into their friends or aim for
the nearest building to turn them into human
wallpaper.
I’ll show in a second how brilliantly overpowered
this is, but it feels fantastic - the way
the camera pulls in tight as you make them
one with the stonework feels like something
out of For Honour - which is exactly what
I hoped would happen.
The only downside is when there’s not a
nearby wall, Rush and Bash just becomes a
very long, aggressive hug and awkward for
all involved.
As a quick side note, I also like that these
abilities have to be found in the world, where
you learn them from books of knowledge.
Finding multiple copies unlocks stronger versions
of them.
It’s a collectible that actually makes a
difference the moment you find it, and much
more fun than just unlocking ability points.
But as mentioned, this violent hug is quite
overpowered, as I discovered fighting Thor
the Fishmonger.
He’s a fallen drengr - the most respected
of viking warriors, now left to scoop up clams
in East Anglia.
No wonder he’s looking for a noble death
at the hand of a fellow drengr.
“But now I must show my son the way of the
drengr.
How to die with honour.”
To begin with, I thought he was hard as nails
- in the immortal words of the Vengaboys,
‘The drengr bus is coming, and Eivor gets
a thumping’.
But as soon as I snagged him with Rush and
Bash and ran him up this convenient ramp he
was losing huge chunks of health and was staggered
enough to get trapped in Spinning Death.
That isn't me being descriptive, by the way - that’s the flail’s actual name.
Two doses of this and I gave him his desired
death, much to the amazement of the chap running
our demo session.
I think I then lost all goodwill by tossing
my noble enemy’s corpse into the clam pond.
While I love a good virtual cheese, I hope
his fellow drengr are a bit tougher.
Not all murders are done with noisy hugs.
Despite much of my three hours focusing on
chaotic raiding parties, a tiny sliver of
Assassin’s Creed’s stealth DNA remains,
as you come across small camps you’ll be
very familiar with if you’ve played Odyssey
or Origins.
Interestingly, Eivor has regained traditional
eagle vision.
Here it’s called Odin’s Sight, but it
feels like the older games as it pings nearby
enemies.
Very happy to have it back as I find the process
of marking enemies as a bird incredibly tedious
- although you can still do that here, too.
Sneaking is pretty standard as you take out
guards by slashing their achilles tendons
and spilling Ribena everywhere, and that age
old Creed trick of sitting behind cover and
whistling for attention.
The one major tweak to all this is how you
assassinate stronger enemies - if a guard
has a higher power level than Eivor, they
have this little diamond marker and you’ll
need to unlock the Advanced Assassination
skill to take them down in one move.
This involves a little timing game where you
stab just as the marker hits the sweet spot,
think of it as what if Guitar Hero was about
stabbing.
Okay, this next one’s a bit cheeky.
I killed time in the demo with some side activities.
Don’t worry, there’ll be more actual murders
in a moment.
East Anglia is home to many entertainments,
sadly Great Yarmouth, which would be here,
was yet to be invented at viking o’ clock,
so you don’t get to visit the notoriously
s**t waxworks museum which is home to… er,
Sean Connery?
I think?
What you can do instead is visit a stone circle,
which I’m guessing was created by the ancestors
of Batman’s Riddler, as it’s one of those
perspective puzzles.
You can also build a cairn - er, if you cairn
that is.
This is like Jenga with rocks and will soon
educate you why Jenga doesn’t normally use
rocks.
It’s a huge pain in the arse.
The one everyone’s excited about is flyting,
which is likened to viking rap battles and
play out like Monkey Island’s insult sword
fighting: you have to find an answer that
rhymes and makes sense.
“They say you’re a coward, who runs from
a fight.
And they’re sorely mistaken, I’m known
for my might.”
This tutorial battle is a pushover but I’m
told that in the full game you will have to
investigate your rivals before throwing down,
to learn what will humiliate them the most,
which sounds cool.
I’m working on my lines already:
“Your beard is disgusting, it belongs in
a bin
Here let me shave it, with an axe through
your chin”
Generally, exploration feels a bit less guided
than in Odyssey.
Instead of hundreds of bespoke icons, most
activities are represented on the map as blue
or gold dots - gold signify something you
can collect, be it knowledge books or a rare
upgrade material, while blue dots are side
missions - the game calls them mysteries - like
the Drengr fight, or world events which are
micro side missions, not unlike the random
events in GTA or Red Dead - in one an angry
lady told me off for looting an artefact and
then asked to buy it off me, in another I
had to use witcher vision, sorry, odin’s
sight, to track some thieves.
Nothing radical, but it feels less like a
tick list.
Okay, this next one also isn’t a traditional
murder, but I definitely killed some braincells
at my mate’s wedding: not only did I get
to show off some drunk archery - please don’t
do this at your wedding - but I got to enjoy
a mead quoffing contest.
This is a pretty daft minigame where you gulp
in time with the crowd’s shouts - SKOL SKOL!
- and try to balance as the alcohol kicks
in halfway through the second drinking horn.
I mainly included this clip because of the
terrifying dead eyed stare on Eivor’s face.
Mate, if you’re not enjoying it, don’t
do it - please quaff responsibly.
Another vital part of the viking experience
is pillaging, which you can do in river raids.
Raids basically begin the Great British tradition
of packing your family in the car, driving
to a rural spot and wrecking it with your
noisy kids.
Admittedly here you’re using a longboat
instead of a Renault Grand Scenic, and instead
of leaving crisp packets, you’re littering
it with bodies, but the principle’s the
same.
It’s a pretty basic ‘kill everyone in
sight’ mission, but they’re livened up
by the presence of your viking pals - teaming
up to barge down doors or heave open massive
treasure chests makes you feel like part of
a bigger gang, rather than the lone wolf mercenary
of Odyssey.
I’m curious if these raids can be done more
stealthily as much of what I did in my Valhalla
demo favours the loud and crunchy approach.
Also while I was reading this village I killed
a chicken who was then avenged by his raging
brother.
Valhalla is basically Zelda with beards.
Yes, you can quote that on the box.
The next natural step after killing a chicken
is to killing an entire English castle.
As a English Castle myself I found this quite
disturbing, so please make me feel better
by liking this video.
This is the big story mission in my demo,
an attack on Burgh Castle - which was slightly
more impressive then than it is now.
It’s very much a case of ‘you vs the castle
the she told you not worry about’.
Also, Burgh Castle is located just outside
of Great Yarmouth, which as we all know is
home to the terrible waxwork Elvis Presley.
It begins with a sea approach, riding a floating
bomb to nuke a hole in the side.
Thankfully, once you’re in it becomes a
bit more involved: the aim is to barge through
gates with a battering ram, killing off enough
swordsmen and archers to open a window of
opportunity to seize the siege weapon and
get to the next area.
It’s the kind of all-out action set piece
the series hasn’t really attempted before
- I know Odyssey had conquest battles, but
that was just a barney in a field.
This is proper stuff: sniping bags of rocks
onto archers heads, igniting oil to set archers
on fire, dropping heavy logs on archers…
I’m beginning to think that archer is unwise
career choice.
This attack is a good showcase of that sense
of combat momentum I mentioned at the beginning
of the video.
This longer fight also puts the new health
system to the test - Eivor has to eat food
from the battlefield to regain health, food
which is stored as rations if you grab it
with a full health bar.
It adds slightly more pressure to proceedings
than a simple regenerating health bar, and
it also means the level designers have to
fill this big scary castle with raspberry
bushes, which feels more animal crossing than
burly viking sim.
It all ends with a boss fight against the
villainous Rued, though again, the old Rush
and Bash proved too powerful, turning what
should have been a big dramatic clash into
a rather silly fight against his wolf sidekick.
Still, always fun to wrestle with a big dog.
“Breathe deeply!
Watch as I become smoke… and listen as I
break your bones.”
Performing powerslams on a wolf wasn’t the
oddest part of Valhalla.
No, that would be the two witches I fought.
Going into the demo I was curious to see how
the game would or wouldn’t embrace the mythological
aspect of Norse culture, given that Odyssey
went pretty big of Medusas and the like.
These two optional side bosses appear almost
as hallucinations after Eivor huffs in some
corpse gas.
“Are you here for blood?
Like all of those wretched others?”
They’re very familiar if you’ve played
the more high level content in Odyssey: lots
of unblockable attacks and big area of effect
elemental moves to deal with.
Regan is the fiery one, while Cordelia is
more about giant pools of electricity and
lightning strikes that give our burly pal
a proper workout.
Annoyingly, they teleport around and fight
in big empty arenas, so I struggled to get
my Bash and Rush tricks to work for me.
Had to do it the old fashioned way instead:
eg, with my very last fraction of health and
no rations to save me…
And there ends my tour of murders of Assassin’s
Creed Valhalla.
I hope you enjoyed watching people get axed
in the face as much as I enjoyed axing them
in the face.
As you can probably tell, I had a really good
time with this demo and went in with quite
low expectations - I found Odyssey quite bloated
and never clicked with the combat, but I’m
already digging this a lot more.
It’s stripped out a lot of the RPG busywork,
too - you’re not constantly collecting loot,
adjusting loadouts, and engraving kneepads
to get a 1% poison damage boost - there’s
a huge skill tree with lots of incremental
boosts, yeah, but they feel hidden and simplified,
in the same way the map boils your progress
down to wealth and mysteries - which are the
only two things that truly matter in life,
right?
I’ll likely be back with more Valhalla later
in the week so please do subscribe if you
enjoyed this video, and why not watch Colm’s
brand new Watch Dogs Legion breakdown?
I hope you enjoyed this video and hope to
see you around here soon.
Bye for now.
