Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Headlines April’s Humble Choice

Overview

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the twelfth major entry in Ubisoft’s long-running historical action-adventure franchise, and it represents both the peak and the ceiling of the “RPG-lite” era that began with Origins in 2017. You play as Eivor, a Viking raider who hauls their clan from Norway to 9th-century England, building a settlement and carving a bloody path through Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It’s a gorgeous, exhausting, occasionally brilliant, frequently bloated experience — and for the price of a Humble Choice sub, it’s one of the best deals in gaming right now.

We’re reviewing the Complete Edition experience here, which includes the base game and its major story expansions. If you’re jumping in fresh through Humble Choice, here’s everything you need to know before you raid your first monastery.

Gameplay

Valhalla’s combat is the best the modern AC era has produced — at least until Mirage stripped things back down, and now Shadows has tried to split the difference. Here, it’s heavy, deliberate, and satisfying in ways that Origins and Odyssey weren’t quite. Dual-wielding axes, throwing shields, and executing brutal finishing moves on downed enemies never really gets old. There’s a real sense of weight to every swing that fits the Viking aesthetic perfectly.

The skill tree is massive — genuinely overwhelming at first — but it doesn’t demand optimization. You can build Eivor however you want and still clear content. Stealth remains an option and is significantly more rewarding here than it was in Odyssey, thanks to improved enemy detection and one-hit assassination opportunities with proper gear. That said, Valhalla never truly commits to being a stealth game, and if you came for the classic AC fantasy of being an invisible predator, you’ll find the game gently steering you toward open combat at every turn.

The settlement system at Ravensthorpe is one of Valhalla’s best ideas. Building up your longhouse, adding shops, a barracks, and a hidden bureau gives you real stakes in your home base. Raids on monasteries and villages fund those upgrades, and the loop of “raid, return, build, raid again” is genuinely compelling for the first 30 to 40 hours. It’s when the game starts stacking region after region — each with its own storyline and alliance arc — that fatigue sets in hard.

The Open World Problem

Valhalla has a world-content problem that Ubisoft has never fully acknowledged. England is enormous. It is also densely stuffed with collectibles, mysteries, artifacts, and wealth caches that blur together after a while. The “Mysteries” — small self-contained vignettes and puzzles scattered across the map — are genuinely some of the best content in the game. The hundredth feather or the thirty-second chest, less so. Completionists will clock 150+ hours. Normal players who follow the main story and some side content will land around 60 to 80 hours, which is still a massive game.

The Orlog dice game is also legitimately fun. We said what we said.

Graphics & Performance

On modern PC hardware and current-gen consoles, Valhalla looks excellent. England’s countryside — rolling green hills, fog-drenched marshes, stone churches, and Nordic longships cutting through grey rivers — is genuinely beautiful. Ubisoft’s environment artists are among the best in the business, and Valhalla is one of their finest works. Eivor’s character model is detailed and expressive, and the game’s cutscenes hold up remarkably well five years out.

Performance-wise, the PC version runs well on mid-range hardware in 2026. At 1080p on a machine with a mid-tier GPU, you’re looking at consistent 60fps on High settings without much fuss. The game has had years of patches and driver optimizations behind it, which helps. On PC specifically, loading times are near-instant on any modern SSD. The game no longer has the stuttering and texture-pop issues that plagued launch — Ubisoft did put in the work post-release, credit where it’s due.

One caveat: if you’re playing through Humble Choice and running an older system, bump the settings down without guilt. The game still looks great at Medium, and frame consistency matters more than maxed shadows in a 60-hour RPG.

Story & Content

Valhalla’s story is where opinions diverge most sharply, and we’re not going to sugarcoat it: the main narrative is uneven. Eivor as a protagonist is genuinely great — charismatic, complex, and one of Ubisoft’s best leads regardless of which gender option you choose. The voice performances for both the male and female versions are excellent, though the female Eivor performance has widely been considered the stronger of the two. The relationships Eivor builds with companions like Randvi, Sigurd, and Dag carry real emotional weight.

The problem is the alliance system. You will spend dozens of hours completing story arcs in regions like East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria — many of which are genuinely good on their own — but the connective tissue between them is thin. You’re always doing “the thing” to unlock the next alliance, and after the fifth or sixth region, the structure becomes transparent and exhausting. The game needed a tighter second act badly.

The Isu mythology thread — the series’ ongoing sci-fi subplot — is handled better here than it was in Odyssey, but it’s still the weakest element. If you’ve never cared about the modern-day AC storyline, Valhalla will not convert you.

The Expansions

Wrath of the Druids (Ireland) and The Siege of Paris are both solid, focused DLCs that arguably tell tighter stories than chunks of the base game. Dawn of Ragnarök is the standout — a mythological deep-dive into Norse cosmology that gives Eivor supernatural powers and feels like a genuinely different game for its 15-hour runtime. If you’re getting Valhalla through Humble Choice and enjoy the base game, Dawn of Ragnarök is worth the separate purchase.

Pros & Cons

Final Verdict