Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

A beautifully rendered and simplistic open-world RPG.

Though it borrows game systems from all across the genre, unfortunately none of them are fully realized. Exploration through the gorgeous landscape is intensely immersive, but the loot you find is not exciting. Scrambling or parkour-jumping through complex environments is very satisfying, but there are no real environmental puzzles. Combat is fluid, comprising ranged weapons, melee, and sneaking, but there's not a lot of tactics involved: mashing buttons randomly is often just as effective as lightning reflexes. There is nice storytelling based on somewhat cliché characters, but it's told primarily through long cutscenes with no player choice. There's a skill tree, but the order makes litte sense and it seems pointless to plan ahead. There's even a pretty little dice-based game-within-a-game (remember Gwent in Witcher 3?), but even that is slow and laborious.

To be clear, none of these sytems are bad, and there's a lot of content to keep you going for many hours. But everywhere you turn in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla you see missed opportunities.

I enjoyed the game, but then I also enjoy beautiful walking simulators, and perhaps that expectation is the best way to approach this game. If you're looking for a serious and deep RPG then you are going to be disappointed.

If you can afford to, I strongly recommend playing this in HDR. This is the best HDR implementation I've seen on any PC game to date. When dawn breaks across the fjords and the first rays of sun glint on the ice and steel of your weapons ... it's breathtaking.

Spent 1.5 hours killing a boss I wasn't supposed to kill yet because he was too powerful. My reward was ... just normal kill XP and no loot.