Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – comfort food (pic: Ubisoft)

A reader plays the most recent Assassin’s Creed and suggest that its adherence to the Ubisoft template means it barely counts as a game.

I like to think of myself as a pretty cosmopolitan gamer. I have a few types of games I don’t like but I try to give most things a go of I can, especially if they review well. It had been a long time since I played an Assassin’s Creed game all the way through, I gave up halfway through Syndicate, and while I’ve never been a major fan of the series I did quite enjoy them and when I realised I could pick up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla for next to nothing I thought I’d give it a try.

This was the first of the role-playing style Creed games that I’d played, which I’d heard of before and didn’t really like the sound of. Valhalla did seem to be very highly regarded though, so everything lined up to make it seem like it was worth a punt. It wasn’t.

I wouldn’t say I hated Valhalla. In fact, as the hours rolled by, I became increasingly confused about how exactly I felt about it, as everything seemed to be washing over me without ever making a real impression. I was playing the game, but it almost felt like it was playing me. Nothing I was doing required any skill or thought and everything was little parcels of action that was repeated in a slightly different order, or against a slightly different backdrop, again and again.

I began to think of that old Wii era insult, the ‘non-game’ – aimed at things like Brain Training and Wii Fit, that ran on a console but weren’t really a game. Valhalla is nothing like that though, it felt like something different, like a… fake game. Something that seems to have all the attributes of a game but wasn’t really, at least not in terms of anything I deem important.

There’s no originality, there’s no innovation, no real variety, no story or characters that you can even begin to care about, and just the same super simplified stealth and combat again and again. In short, it follows the Ubisoft template ruthlessly well.

The strangest thing, though, is that I still didn’t hate it. There is something strangely soothing and relaxing about playing a game that seems to have no obvious end goal and where your progress is never impeded for more than a few minutes at a time.

You never get stuck in Valhalla and you never run out of things to do, which sounds great until you realise that price for that is that you also never really feel like you’ve done anything. There is nothing to get good at, the next bit of loot doesn’t make any more difference than the one before it, and the story floats along without any obvious reason or purpose.

In gameplay and storytelling terms it is empty calories and I’m almost impressed how it can be that way and do so much while achieving so little. I’m not going to finish it, because I think I’ve had enough of it all now, but it has been a strange and enlightening experience.

Enlightening because I’m pretty sure this is the way the game is supposed to be. I’m not having an adverse reaction to it, this is what it is intended to be: something you can veg out with and know that you can succeed in it and never run out things to do.

It’s like a mindless soap or reality show, something you can switch off and enjoy but, because it’s a video game, still feel like you’ve achieved something. However, it’s so far from cutting edge it’s impossible to imagine anything less ambitious. I can’t imagine what the developers thought while making it, but it doesn’t feel like a creative endeavour, it feels like a product made to fulfil a role. As I said, a fake game.

By reader Bootles

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A reader plays the most recent Assassin’s Creed and suggest that its adherence to the Ubisoft template means it barely counts as a game.