Assassin's Creed Valhalla Amazon Limited Edition (Xbox One/Series X) (Exclusive to Amazon.co.uk)

Black Flag was a great game, Syndicate was good but Unity Origin and Odessey were poor for me, i even lost interest in the series. With Valhalla being about England i hoped to get back into the series... From the start, graphically it is good, no slowdown on the Xbox One X. But whereas earlier games had good combat and story tracking which was simple to follow, the game has now become much more complex. It is no longer as simple as putting a marker on the map. Since Origins, they have included mythical combat like fire and while that works well in some games... it is just NOT Asssasins Creed. Whereas before you could hide in the bushes and take them out by stealth this is a hack and slash with an axe. It is however a good effort, an improvement over Odessey and if they kept it simple instead of trying to be OTT at times it would have been so much better. The combat control feels awkward, isn’t it natural to want to use A,B, X, Y? Here it is RB/RT. After an hour of gameplay I became bored of the game, not stuck just not interested in the characters or story. Markers on the screen show quests, but when you get there they disappear! Graphically one of the best Assassins Creed games, gameplay... one of the worst.

Having enjoyed Origins and Odyssey I am not as happy with this game. I find the healing system frustrating at times when I run out of health during a big fight and cannot find any food nearby to restore it, and so have to leave the fight. Also the fact that my bird cannot now mark the position of items of interest and enemies makes it more difficult to find things.On a separate subject, I was informed that I would receive an email to unlock The Way of the Berserker Mission at release, but I till have not had it, two weeks later!UPDATE I never got the email. Having played for over 75 hours I am finding it rather boring. There is a lot of looking for chests in hard to find places which contain nothing much of interest, the characters are not very interesting and there is no overriding story as there was in the previous games. If Assassins Creed is going this way I will have to look for something else to do.

The game itself is really enjoyable, with great stories and well thought out interactions. Less of the Animus nonsense from the older games and more focus on being a Viking, raiding and building your settlement/character.But, the huge and fairly common glitches in this game get to be a pain in the ***. Needing to restart the game sometimes, or the game restarts without warning while mid-mission (and no, I don’t have an old and tired Xbox One, I have a Series X, so it’s definitely the game).There are always some glitches in big open world games, but these are too common in this game.The additional downloadable content (The Way of The Beserker) I got as a pre-order bonus was also sent via a link. When I followed this link it took me to Ubisoft, however everything is in French. I replied asking for the correct link to, as unfortunately I don’t speak fluent French, but have received no reply. So the content is not available to me.With a few major updates to reduce glitches, and the additional content being received as promised; this game would easily score a 5! But as-is the problems have knocked it down to a 2.Here’s hoping for some updates.

Let me start by saying that this is definitely not next-gen if you buy the Series X edition. Graphics are not much better than Odyssey, and the facial animations are utter garbage. The game itself is immersive to say the least, the map is huge, maybe I'd go as far to say it's too big as I'm 60 hours in and probably at about 50% completion, it's getting a little tedious now and there's still some bugs that aren't allowing me to progress the side quests. Talking of side quests, some of them are just tedious like the offering alters and the animus glitch, they take you out of the immersion and slap up that modern day story arc that no one actually cares about. Its jarring, and breaks immersion imo. Time to just forget about the modern day animus rubbish I think. All in all a great game, but marred by sloppy graphics and annoying bugs.