#Valhalla hills acg series#

On lesser difficulties this is not so much a problem, but when you're one-shotted because you hit the attack button one single time too many it can be enraging. You'll often find yourself getting struck simply because you hit the button one-too-many times. Combat stamina has been introduced to remove the button-mashing of Odyssey, but the combat controls themselves are pretty clunky and lack the finesse needed to maintain a nice flow. I must admit that I like the safe and often mindless gameplay loop of the series, and Valhalla offers a beautiful new setting with some fairly engaging story and gory combat. Which, y'know, if you're not tired of the other games, might be appealing. It's one of two dozen other games that all kind of feel the same, and one of three RPG-style games that already feel like they're being spat out of the Ubisoft-open-world-Build-O-Matic 2000 pipeline. Each new release needs to a wild revamp, because there's just not enough 'new' game here for a 90 dollar release.

#Valhalla hills acg series#

So while I was, for once, excited for what I thought might be something honestly different, Valhalla has ultimately been the game to convince me that the series has reached its natural end. But because we're 20-something games deep in the series, whatever minor changes Ubisoft make to their releases hold a far-more-quickly diminishing set of returns for long-time players. This is exactly why Syndicate tanked in sales and forced the company to revamp for Origins. Ubisoft is up to their old tricks, of course, and Valhalla feels like another step slightly too far down the same road. Those feelings are more or less identical here - Valhalla is fun, and it's a tweaked version of its predecessor, but it never, ever diverges enough to feel like much other than the exact same formula, and while I find that formula less worn-out than that of, say, the formula of the later 'old-style' AC games like Syndicate or Unity, it's still worn-out nonetheless. So the understanding that you're not playing a fundamentally different game sets in very quickly, and so does the exhaustion that Odyssey eventually gave way to, despite how fun it was. But it was huge and tiring, there can be no skirting around that fact.

It was the only AC game released in the last decade that didn't eventually bore me. If you carry with you a sense of fatigue at the expansive and often-repetitive nature of Odyssey's content, then you might find yourself starting this game with that fatigue hanging over you as I did.

It feeds from exactly the same trough, in typical Ubisoft fashion, and essentailly makes some small, less significant tweaks to the previous release that change the feeling of the game slightly, but unfortunately not enough to make it feel fresh. In brief: if you liked Odyssey, then you'll likely like the skeleton of this game. Because to a discerning buyer, that seems to be a tick of approval. And given that the reviews labeled 'unhelpful' by corporate shills are uniformly the ones that match my own experience with the game, I've decided to write a substantive review that those treating the game like the second coming of Christ can band together and downvote to their heart's content. And given that the reviews labeled 'unhelpful' by corporate shills are uniformly the ones that match my own experience with the game, I've decided to write a substantive review that those treating the game like the second coming of Christ can It struck me as interesting that 7/10 reviews have dozens of downvotes while a one-line 10/10 review has several dozen upvotes pushing it to the top.

It struck me as interesting that 7/10 reviews have dozens of downvotes while a one-line 10/10 review has several dozen upvotes pushing it to the top.