Post Script

How Assassin’s Creed is rediscovering its killer instinct

There’s an episode of Tina Fey’s 30 Rock in which someone invents a gameshow called Gold Case. Contestants must identify a briefcase containing a million dollars in gold. The flaw? The model holding the prize visibly strains under its weight and so case after case is lost at great expense. We mention this not as a direct comparison – although technically much of Valhalla is spent robbing ingots from fools – but because it characterises one of the game’s goofier mishaps.

Early in her tale, Eivor is instructed by the Hidden Ones (a work-in-progress Assassin Brotherhood) to pursue the Order Of The Ancients (Templars-to-be). Picking off weedier acolytes earns clues to unmask deputies, who in turn point to the head honcho. It’s a continuation of Odyssey’s cultist hunt, but for one fatal error: the screen displaying your shrouded targets is simply too well-lit and some can be readily identified. When it falls on you to pluck a rotten apple from York’s town council, you opt for the obnoxious tunic you spotted in the shadows. And he would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for that meddling brightness slider.

Too bumbling to annoy, it is indicative of unfulfilled potential in Valhalla’s shadier side. What a hook: a country-wide conspiracy lurking on the fringes of the main campaign. And you, the inquisitor sniffing out intel by duffing up roaming zealots (grim mini-boss figures) or finding gossipy scraps in enemy camps. Just as your sleuthing hits its stride, however, you encounter schemers who’re protected by an as-yet-unknown role in the story. Doesn’t the Brotherhood believe ‘everything is permitted’? Not if it steps on the toes of a third-act plot twist, apparently. We long for the unpredictable: the systemic hierarchy of Shadow Of Mordor’s orc legions, or the NPCs suddenly shuffled into speaking parts in Watch Dogs: Legion. A spark of life, if only for you to snuff it out.

If it will take a bolder direction to deliver a completely satisfying web of intrigue, at least Valhalla gives us a hero better suited to tackle such a thing. The right upgrades remove the messy business of ‘assassin damage’ introduced in Creed’s RPG reboot; the resulting binary kills better suit our precision tool. You can even switch on one-hit stabs, though it comes unrecommended by both Ubisoft and us should you want to experience the drama of hitting timed cues to silence elite guards. That the option is there feels like a tacit agreement that a hidden blade that only assassinates 98% of an enemy’s life makes no sense.

Arguably, the shift merely returns Valhalla to where the series was five years ago, itself an imperfect stealth vehicle. Earlier games wrestled between athletic flexibility and choreographed theatrics, those achingly cool E3 trailers mimicked in mission designs that prescribed paths to jugulars and punished deviation with desynchronisation. The trend reached its natural conclusion with Syndicate’s ‘unique kills’, where key villains were slain in contrived cutscenes lifted direct from Agent 47’s playbook.

Eivor parkours over the debate as she tackles more sandbox-y design. Sniping out door locks through window cracks and swiping keys to inner sanctums encourage route-finding that’s less rigid than any Hitman game by dint of your ability to scramble up anywhere. It gives your bird companion a juicier role, too. What once doubled as a squawking drone, marking enemies below (you now ping foes with Odin Sight, much like the older Eagle Vision), is put to more enticing use scouting spires and battlements for points of entry. As you clamber up Canterbury Cathedral, punching in stained glass to access the rafters above a target’s head, there’s a weirdly unearned nostalgia: this is the vision of Assassin’s Creed we were initially sold; only now is it being delivered.

Still, much of this stealthcraft is self-imposed. After all, if you do alert the guards you have a combat-ready Viking to hand. This isn’t a petition for instant-fail stealth, however. That’s an unsatisfying answer the series has landed on many times before. But it is hard to shake the mental safety net. Odyssey’s now-abandoned bounty system points to one solution, punishing sloppiness by putting super-soldiers on your tail. The distinction Valhalla makes between dangerous and distrusting spaces – a cloak grants some freedom in the latter – could certainly be exploited to escalate a nervous town into something more hostile. As it is, there’s no more tangible a reward for a hushed shanking than smug satisfaction.

Weirdly, the game does address some of this in one standout episode. Your rampage through the ranks of the Ancients at one point leads you to a self-contained region. For reasons never quite explained, Eivor has to leave her equipment back in England, arriving with just the hidden blade. What follows is the entire Valhalla power curve in a microcosm as you attempt to find a loot foothold with only the local flora to shield you. It feels like the kind of ‘what if’ twist that might normally be explored in DLC, a brief interlude that has no impact on the wider campaign. But as a showcase for her assassin’s nous, it’s a rare and welcome moment where those skills become a matter of life and death. It’ll take more than a half-naked squat in the bushes for Assassin’s Creed to trouble the stealth game classics, but it’s reassuring to see Ubisoft pondering such things. For this particular series, there’s gold in them sneaking hills. Now to bundle it into a briefcase for easy delivery.

What a hook: a country-wide conspiracy lurking on the fringes of the main campaign