Assassin's Creed Valhalla: The best and worst AC game I've played in a while

I have been playing Assassin's Creed since the beginning. With the exception of the most recent game and Rogue, I've played and beaten them all. From the highest highs to the lowest lows. After finishing Odyssey I decided to jump right into Valhalla, which was a mistake as I got a good chunk into it and then stopped playing because I was just tired of open world games, but after a good long wait I finally jumped back in with mixed results.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is a 2020 action roleplaying game developed and published by Ubisoft, known for their open world games. The story follow Evior, a viking who leads their clan from Norway to England to make a new home. At the same time as finding a new home, Evior must deal with the order of ancients and Isu mysteries (the people who came before).

Valhalla somehow gave me some of the best vibes of the series along with some of the most annoying aspects I can ever remember. Story wise, I think this is one of the better entries in the series. I liked Evior's story, I liked the Norse Gods story (even if it gave me flashbacks to the Odyssey DLC), I like Layla's modern day story which is something I wasn't able to say much of the last two games. It sets up the future better than a lot of the previous games. It does make me miss the sequences from the older games as there were moments I'd consider replaying, but as far as I'm aware there is no way to replay missions without replaying the whole game.

The gameplay is what it always has been with some little changes here and there. One of the biggest new additions is the settlement, which can be upgraded for better bonuses and unlocks. The only way to upgrade it is with supplies you get on raids. Raids are fun little assaults on locations where you and your viking allies raid on area. It is a fun little change from the mostly stealth/one on one combat. What isn't as fun is there are only a few of them in the game and the supplies gathered from it don't cover all the upgrades for the settlement, so for completionists like me you need to find smaller chests that are scattered throughout the game to scrounge up the supplies to upgrade the settlement, which was the last thing I ended up doing.

A lot of the side activities in this game are lacking, at least for me. You have your generic animal hunts and collect this item, but they added some new ones. The worst and most annoying is the carin stones, the object of this is to balance rocks up to a certain height. That is it and sounds simple enough till you see the rocks with all their rounded sides and the level of balancing that has to get done. There are dozens of these in the game and like all the side content are used for level ups. Another one that I didn't enjoy was curse symbols, enchanted skulls in different places that slow you down and give off this creepy atmosphere. They don't seem to do damage, but they are just annoying. There are some better additions with Oorlang, a dice game that once you get used to is pretty enjoyable, and drinking games. Besides making money some of them give you clues to different order of the ancients to help you find them. I wish that was implemented better, but it was at least an interesting start.

Overall, I found myself enjoying the story and the characters which isn't something I've dealt with in an Assassin's Creed game in a while. I don't know if I'll jump into any of the DLC (I started the forgotten saga free one but all I got from that was how much roguelikes aren't for me), I will probably take a break but I can see myself coming back for more of Evior's story.