For one it’s way too big, it overstays its welcome by a large amount.
I despise that someone - an important character - is kidnapped, and then I spend absolutely ages before I can do anything about it. It’s set up like we need to rescue them urgently, but we end up spending half the game before doing it. I can’t remember the name of the woman who kidnapped this person, but it seemed like there’d be a lot of info around her and that she would be interesting, but I don’t remember if there was because there was like thirty hours of gameplay between meetings with her.
Also the whole gods link is just clichéd and boring. Drop it and get back to assassin stuff. As if the games weren’t long enough already.
That’s the biggest issue actually. It’s not that it’s too long, the combat is annoying but it isn’t the worst ever, the barred doors are a scourge designed by a psychopath with no concept of what fun is, but the real issue is that it doesn’t respect your time. It takes as long as it can get away with to do everything, it’s stuffed with superfluous rubbish and some of the shallowest side quests I’ve ever experienced in a game. It forces you to gather outrageous amounts of resources to upgrade equipment and then really expects you to care at all whenever you find a new piece of armour even though it being at all useful to you is on the other end of upgrading for hundreds upon hundreds of resources AGAIN. It relies on cheap drug excuses to get away with giving people magic fucking teleporting powers in the middle of combat for more artificial difficulty instead of designing a satisfying fight.
I completed all the DLCs in Origins and Odyssey, I never finished Valhalla. I did the basim bit towards the end and went “oh for fuck sake, it’s not finished!?” and just uninstalled it.
I could’ve gone on forever about how disappointing this game is back when I’d been playing it more recently, but unfortunately this is all I can remember as the game is pretty forgettable.
I liked Origins a lot and thought Odyssey got much better mechanically even if the story wasn’t quite as good, but Valhalla took a lot of those improvements and ruined them. It felt like Origins/Odyssey had vision behind them whilst Valhalla was just another one that had to be made, full of inconsistency and poorly considered choices.
Valhalla has easily the worst combat of the three full on RPG AC games. Long attack animations every other time you finish an enemy off whilst all the others stand there patiently, for example.
Then there’s the unbelievably terrible barred doors that are absolutely everywhere (they are in mirage as well) which is the shittest, lowest effort puzzle they could have ever thought of and they repeated it every fifteen feet. Good luck maintaining stealth whilst you have to go back outside and circle the building looking for a hole in the wall to shoot an arrow through in a completely plausible and not at all deliriously stupid way.
Then there’s the offensively shallow side missions, the barely having anything to do with assassins for the vast majority of the shockingly bloated game, the sheer bugginess (tall grass used to disappear when I got close to it, all the way through the game), spending twenty minutes finding a chest that you spotted with your bird only to discover it’s impossible to access until you’re on or have completed a specific story mission. Having to wait for your raiders to open bloody chests, despite them being buggy idiots who will stand around ignoring you for five seconds before moving towards it as slowly as possible - all this, including three horrendous barred doors, in the middle of a Viking raid, because a Viking is incapable of breaking open a door somehow. Awful.
I love assassin’s creed, I’ve played all of them. Valhalla ruined the RPGs.
What was released was a disaster that hadn’t had anywhere near enough thought and consideration put into it. However, frankly if you don’t think a gollum game couldn’t be good I’d have to blame it on a lack of imagination.