Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Let me axe you a question

Despite being built on the same bones as Origins and Odyssey, this 872AD-set open-world adventure is surprisingly different from both. Primarily set in England during the Viking invasions, the longboat exemplifies this. There are no ship battles, instead it’s your primary mode of transport as you weave through England’s rivers.

Many enemy camps are dotted along rivers too, meaning you can either deploy your raiding crew from your boat from the get-go, or call on them should a stealthy approach go wrong. When it does, the meaty stun-and-finisher-focussed combat is some of the most satisfying in the series.

While there are plenty of camps to plunder, they don’t litter your map – this isn’t checklist central. On default exploration difficulties, vague dots mark points of interest (wealth, artefacts, or mysteries), but you only find out what they are when you get close enough. Your bird’s-eye view (a raven this time) is mostly just that too, not an unstoppable enemy marker.

Many ‘mysteries’ are short but sweet sidequests that feel like dynamic incidents you happen to stumble across. They’re often silly: one sees you meeting a band named The Prodigy who sing “smack my bishop” as you wallop a meddling man of the cloth. Others are collectibles that require interaction, from balancing cairn stones to circling henges as you try to line up mysterious markings, or undergoing platforming trials to obtain England’s relics. Valhalla is grounded, but still steeped in the mythological, and the spectral presence of Odin lends some legendary mystery. England doesn’t have Ancient Greece’s vibrancy, but the lighting and fog of its rolling hills is breathtaking and beautiful in its own way.