Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Wrath Of The Druids
Dying on the hill of Tara
After Viking-ing across England to build alliances, Eivor has earned a break. That means travelling to Ireland to help your cousin Bárid, the King Of Dublin, forge a new alliance (by forging more alliances for Ireland’s newly appointed High King). It’s more, but doesn’t touch Valhalla’s best moments.
Served with a new map, you can venture across the mostly green (sometimes boggy) vistas of Dublin, Ulster, Meath, and Connacht. Functionally, they all act as one narrative region. You can choose when to jump in from the main game, but this is aimed at higher-level players, especially when it comes to new side-content battles. Fortunately, gear can be carried back and forth across the Irish Sea.
If you’ve come expecting an adventure that delves into arcane rituals you’ll be disappointed. The titular wrath is pretty indirect in the main storyline, and everything you do to help out these kings is weirdly above board. Valhalla was over-concerned with the problems of those who rule as it was. Here, Eivor protects kings at coronations, has to find a “king pass” to be granted audience, and scrambles around for deeds to trading posts. Truly, paperwork is an assassin’s greatest adversary.
A few interesting characters, such as poet Ciara and merchant Azar, offer glimmers of interest before being mostly sidelined. You never really have time to explore what’s going on with them beyond the odd brief mission – and that’s when the narrative isn’t grinding to a halt to thrust you into its new boring messenger pigeon contracts tasking you with killing some generic enemy or stealing something, or asking you to assassinate a member of the new Order equivalent The Children Of Danu, or getting you to secure a trading post.
TINY CAUSEWAY
Malaise bleeds through into side-content. Each region has its share of Wealth, Artefacts, and Mysteries to stumble upon, but all the Mysteries are iterations on previously existing challenges like combat arenas or cairn stacking, with no bespoke events (such as collecting viper eggs for that farting lady in the main game). Don’t expect much tongue-in-cheek humour.
When things do kick off, it’s almost always in open combat. There’s little stealthing to do. Valhalla’s crunchy combat remains, but late-game boredom sets in as you can easily dispatch most enemies.
Considering Valhalla is already a massive game, full of missions and quests that most players will never complete, the only people who’ll bother with this are those who simply want more. But what’s disappointing is it’s not more of what you loved, it’s just more of Valhalla’s most mediocre material.