The latest installment in the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise is next on my top 10 games of 2020!
My criteria for my top 10 games of 2020 is below.
In order for a game to make my top 10 games of 2020, it has to be released in 2020 and not a remaster. Remakes count because they’re rebuilt from the ground up and are basically a whole new game. I must have completed the game or sunk an incredible amount of time into them. Early access games do not count and will not make my top 10 games list no matter how much I like them. When they release they’ll count towards my top 10 list of that year.
I love the new direction that Ubisoft has taken Assassin’s Creed in. This is another example of a lose/lose situation though. I called the Indiana Jones situation a lose/lose for Microsoft yesterday because of the perception that the game media and Playstation gamers have created for the Xbox platform.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is in a similar situation. For many years everyone was begging Ubisoft to do something different with Assassins’ Creed after the failure of Unity. And when they did do something different with Origins (the best game in the series) people complained that it was too different and it wasn’t what they wanted.
Valhalla is a great game that actually tells a really good story too. Ubisoft mixed old Assassin’s Creed with the new in Valhalla. It’s as close as you’ll get to one of the older Assassin’s Creed games today and it honestly worked really well. I do miss all of the RPG mechanics from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but I don’t miss how long Odyssey is. Odyssey is probably the biggest game I’ve ever played and I’ve played just about every open-world game that’s released in the last 5 years.
Valhalla never felt too long and even though I missed the RPG mechanics of Odyssey it wasn’t a deal-breaker that they were missing. Eivor (male) is a much better protagonist than both Alexios and Kassandra and I prefer playing as a battle-hardened Viking over a Spartan mercenary. Not everything is all rainbows and butterflies with Valhalla.
After a while, I stopped raiding villages completely because there was little to no point in doing so once I upgraded my village and found the loot I wanted to find. There’s also a real lack of interesting armor sets in the game. Most of the really cool ones are locked behind a paywall and that’s not cool. I feel like Ubisoft is continuously pushing how far they can take microtransactions in their single-player games to see where the line is.
What’s there is great, but I wish I could’ve had more variety. Having a lot of loot in an open-world game is a must for me and in Valhalla, it’s just… okay. That’s probably my biggest negative though. I LOVE this game. The gameplay is a lot slower than Odyssey (thank the video game gods for that) and meatier too. The execution animations are fantastic and the world is jaw-droppingly beautiful and this game has no ray tracing whatsoever. Ubisoft made this game look this good without the need for ray tracing and I applaud them for that.
I can’t put into words how much I enjoyed exploring the world that Ubisoft built here. I was always going off in a random direction and finding interesting things to do. If I’m not solving a side quest that popped up out of nowhere I’m solving an interesting puzzle, or just sneaking around in the shadows murdering every guard in town while looting everything that’s not nailed to the ground.
I really enjoyed the minigames too. Drinking, flyting, etc. They’re all fun and gave me some good laughs outside of the combat. I thought Magnus Bruun Nielson did a fantastic job and was the best character in the game. His voice felt natural while female Eivor (Cecil Stenspil) overacted and fucked up too many of her lines for me to find any enjoyment in her performance.
I could make the argument that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the best game in the series. That’s how much I enjoyed it. This game is absolutely worth buying and it easily earned the number 4 spot on my list.
Want to catch up with the rest of the list? Then click on the links below!
Hi,
I’m Omar. I’m the founder of drakulus.com and the new founder of Petescorner.net. I cover every type of game genre there is and I’m using all of the skills I learned over the last 7 years working on Drakulus to make Pete’s Corner the best it can be. My favorite types of games are strategy, RPGs, and Shooters. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other types of genres. Those are just my top 3. You can expect my brutally honest opinion on what I think of games in long reviews, editorial pieces, and game news coverage.
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