'Valhalla' Is Assassin's Creed At Its Most Bloated

"I played the first game in the series way back in 2007, and while that game had a lot of flaws, it intrigued me enough to check out the second, which is one of the better games for the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 console generation. Ubisoft, the series' developer, clearly felt the same-or at least read the tides of overwhelmingly positive fan reactions-and followed with two sequels focused on Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the charming Italian Renaissance protagonist."

"The Ezio Saga is a focused effort that leverages that era of Italian history and, more importantly for a series that engages with every nook and cranny of its open worlds, Italian architecture to deliver a satisfying experience. Things then started going off the rails for both the series and my relationship with its increasingly convoluted systems and storyline. Assassin's Creed III took the show to the American Revolution,"

"The dual storyline also begins to get silly here. The player is reliving the memories of various Assassins throughout history in their forever war against the Templars, while also navigating present day techno-babble. To be honest, this split was already the weakest part of even the best game in the series (the second one), and the series only leaned into that more as it kept going from curiosity to world-beater to whatever the hell it is now."

A player who began with the first Assassin's Creed in 2007 found the second entry and its Ezio-focused sequels compelling due to setting and architecture. The Ezio Saga leverages the Italian Renaissance and Italian architecture to create satisfying open-world experiences. The series shifted to the American Revolution in Assassin's Creed III, which reduced historical thrill and introduced a dual storyline of reliving Assassin memories alongside a confusing modern-day techno-narrative. That dual structure weakened the series over subsequent entries. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the twelfth main game, moves the series to ninth-century Vikings across Norway and the British Isles and retains an opaque modern-day storyline.

Read at Defector