Post Platinum review:
The game sucked through and through. Mechanically, technologically, it was a complete slap in the face to every fan of the franchise from the Ezio trilogy, or even the previous two RPG titles. What an insane mess of a game, from the mastery points and challenges thereof to the actual core gameplay, the running, the parkour, the exploration. All of it was a complete grinding halt to my entire mentality. I hated playing through this game. It was genuinely sunken cost fallacy that got me through the rest of the story and concurrent DLCs. I didn't want to poorly review this game until I knew EXACTLY why.
Eivor is too slow. They are too slow to do almost anything compared to Alexios/Kassandra and Bayek, yet lacking the powerful capabilities BOTH of these characters ended up displaying at the middle or end of the game. With the abysmal amount of points one can ascertain through exploration alone, I am vehemently disgusted that ubisoft did not implement "increase movement speed +.05%" as an additional end-of-game perk.
Speaking of, if a tutorial card in the loading screen says directly to the player (it's like hint 14 or 15 out of 30) "don't get overwhelmed by the amount of stupid stuff we have in our game," then it may be time to dial back the amount of stupid stuff you have in your game.
It is micro-frustrations exactly like this which are rampant enough throughout the game to distract you from the beautiful world I'm sure the developers spent a lot of money on to go use these places as nice vacation spots and take photos "for reference."
Mechanically speaking, you are still getting the same, clunky and withered Anvil engine that was used to make 2002's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. You can really tell when you're trying to climb at a spot with a fixed camera position. It is a cow in which ubisoft refuses to let its milk spoil. However, the chunks are found within almost any parkour setting, specifically finding the magic papers (atune to AC3 and AC4). Imagine my frustration when i found out almost 100 hours in that you can freeze time. Thus furthering my point on the broken mechanics behind their tutorials they have also dwindled.
It used to be that Ezio/Desmond/Conner/ WHOEVER would first go into an animus training session. I suppose that money went to developers going on Eurotrip history tours?
Funny, too, how the closer they try to mimic historic accuracy, the further they stray from it. Eivor is meeting with people who didn't exist until 1100, seeing sights that would have been desecrated to rubble hundreds of years ago. But I suppose in this world we can assume the plate tectonics have also smushed the british isles into mountainous monstrosities? Where are the flatlands? The highlands?? Where on EARTH is scotland? Don't give me some genuine horse about the Isle of Skye, that's a copout at best.
Every time a developer makes a historical piece setting like this they either have to decide on whether it's going to be an amusement park ride or a genuine recreation of the land as it was to the people who were there. Ubisoft made sure to miss both marks by expanding the map to 'only bloated enough to fit everything in.' They might as well have made a Big Ben be the new White-Gold Tower of Cyrodiil for the entire map and add in a medieval version of the eye.
The biggest problem I have with all of this is with the old anvil engine, it's exactly like bethesda with Creation2.0 or whatever. A revision is not a new engine, ask any mechanic. if anything, revised means cheaper parts and methodology to get there, so it's really only beneficial for the top brass (investors, marketing, executives, etc.) while the players, modders, and more so the game itself suffers. There is no 'fluidity' to these motions that are based solely on camera direction instead of player movement, the platforming levels you do have to face are almost never implemented with the idea of getting through one quickly, but the way "THEY" want you to do it. It's been like this since the original titles with '50%' synchronization on certain levels, while conveniently not telling you about what parameters you failed until the tail end. It's always been under the guise of "well, that's not how your character would have done that!"
The miss here with Valhalla is that Ubisoft was just blatantly trying to prove to its investors that you can indeed lead a horse to tainted water, and they will still drink it. However, this horse drank the poison, spat it back out, and is now drinking a new, better poison; AC Shadows, and let me tell you I only hate that game HALF as much.
