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Video Game Review – Assassins Creed: Valhalla

Assassin's Creed Valhalla lets you change Eivor's gender whenever you want | PC Gamer — Eivor the main character (Female) of Assassins Creed: Valhalla

To start I want to say i do not support the way Ubisoft treats it’s employees. I follow gaming news closely and I know about all the internal allegations and misconduct. I fully support the better treatment of workers. I choose to support the games and the franchises because I genuinely enjoy the world the developers and people on the ground create. I support the artists, voices, designers, engineers, musicians, testers, software developers etc etc who make these games come to life. It’s sad that such a collaborative art can be held tight in such a strangle hold of capitalist and dude bro toxicity. So I Support the workers who make these games come to life. I enjoy the games and the world they build for me to experience.

I have always found video games to be a release or escape. Like a good book, movie, or TV show, video games have always given me great stories, interesting puzzles, or downright memorable characters. Assassins Creed Games satisfy all the gaming itches that I feel. I completely understand the criticisms of the game for being overly bloated with side content, or being too long, or having convoluted stories and endings. Those reasons are why I LOVE AC games. Especially since AC Origins, when the series dove more into the RPG mechanics. To me that is when the series really started to shine. I’ve been into the AC series since it opened up a bit in part AC3 with Connor.

This game features a main voiced and acted character, Eivor. You can choose whether you want to play as a male or a female gendered character and the game even slyly justifies you being able to change midway through the game. The game implying that the DNA is so old that the Animus system is unable to determine gender (or something to that degree) It’s a non issue, just thought it was clever. I chose to play as a Female character “letting the animus decide”, it didn’t change for the whole game and I never messed with it again. I think if you make certain choices it may change your gender at some point in the story, but as I said the Animus decided I was a female Eivor for the whole game till conclusion. There is very little difference in dialogue options and story other than the voice of the Character.

The controls are a bit looser than the past entries. I don’t know how to explain it. The blocking and parrying is a bit delayed it felt, compared to AC Odyssey. I very quickly got used to it and it was a non issue after the first hour of play. Just something I noticed. It may be tightened up now a year and some months after release. All the other functions worked well. There are a lot of systems in this game. But as in any game that is part of the fun of learning and becomes second nature

AC Valhalla is a tale of brotherhood, and loyalty. A story or triumph and a touch of AC’s famous mystical, metaphysical, sci-fi, computer shit. It follows you leaving your clan to attain your own glory and status in the world. Tired of the old ways Eivor and her brother Sigurd, whose family adopted Eivor, decide to leave their clan in the icy north for the shores of what would be medieval England. From there you establish a settlement village by going on viking style raids up and down rivers and the coasts of the beautifully crafted world map. this all gets more complicated when you meet up with your brother and he is obsessed with these strange visions and beliefs. You slowly conquer your way through the land helping replace thrones and otherwise help people along the way. This game loop was fun for me. The characters are well written and voiced well.

I genuinely liked being a Viking and learning about their culture through the games lore and my own curiosity. Assassins Creed games genuinely interest me because they inspire me to learn more about the time setting and see what may or may not have been actual history and what was completely AC Fiction. Regardless it inspires me to do light research into history to further personify the character I’m spending dozens of hours with.

I liked the raiding aspect and the overall RPG elements felt good. The world they crafted is absolutely beautiful and the Music is solid. The settlement you build feels alive and subtle audio details enrich the visuals, like wind in trees and the sounds of animals and people chatting and singing. The music is enchanting, and I never got tired of stopping at my home settlement just to play some dice, rest, upgrade, or plan my next series of event for the main story. The winter festival was absolutely wonderful and decked out he whole settlement in decorations and let me take part in dorky drinking games and drunken boxing matches. Great little touches like that is why I still admire AC games and the people who make and design them. (NOT shitty CEOs or Shareholders)

The game play loop of conquering areas of the map, raiding monasteries, and upgrading the settlement in pursuit of keeping your brother happy felt mostly balanced to me. I enjoy the combat in these games because I change it up regularly. I don’t repeat the same tactics because then the action would get boring. there are so many ways to take out enemies that the game should only ever really get bored if you let yourself get bored with it. Usually by that time in a game I’m more than powerful enough to just finish the main story at least. There were some good mind****s in proper AC fashion. The ending is bat-shit crazy and begs to be discussed. I implore you, Finish your games.. so we can talk about them. 🙂

Some things that may be seen as negative. Assassins Creed is long. I don’t mind this as much but I also make time to play video games. Someone with less time may not enjoy the sheer amount of playtime it would take to explore and see and keep up with the story. There are tons of side content that distracts you from the main story or conflict. I am used to these games and I have two different play styles. I alternate my time playing side content, collection, and exploration, then the next session I am usually strong enough to power through a larger chunk of the main story or complete a full quest line. instead of constantly distracting myself in-between major story missions. It helps me keep track of where the story is, I’ll get to a good stopping point, and then switch to exploration and side quests.

People who get bugged easily by glitches may be annoyed sometimes. It was never game breaking but during the larger sequences, A LOT is going on on the screen at once. Sometimes I would see some pretty funny glitches. Bodies flying and glitching out in silly ways, NPC’s not helping me bash down doors, and other minor sound and visual anomaly. The one that bugged me the most was the audio being absent in dialogue sequences. The subtitles worked so it wasn’t game breaking but would require me to save and restart from the main menu. Again nothing terrible. I bought it on launch day and in my 100+ hours in the game it only ever fully crashed maybe 2 or 3 times playing on old ps4 hardware. i’m sure it’s a much tighter experience by this time a year on.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla Review | Scholarly Gamers

This game was great to me. A wonderful way to spend the coldest parts of the year. A good story where your choices have some impact on the final scenes. Some of the music still rings in my head from time to time. Eivor was a solid character and some of the philosophies they spoke were relatable and thought provoking. I try to go into every game pretending like it’s a new experience. I know games can be cheesy and ultimately fall flat for some people. That’s completely OK. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a long story in a beautifully crafted world. As a player it felt up to me whether I was playing the story or whether I was engaged in side content and collection.
who would enjoy this game.

All in all I highly recommend this game. It’s a long, epic game, but should be experienced by anyone who loves rich colorful worlds, walks through historical settings, or fairly consistent action or exploration. RPG lovers may take to the modern formula of Assassins Creed games as well. This series may have gotten stale for some, but the games have gotten better since Black Flag in my opinion. I finished this game around February of 2021, so it’s been a minute. Just catching up. Thanks for reading, hope this review was helpful or informative.

Pax

Video Game Review – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I played the Witcher 3 several years ago on my Xbox One. I never finished the main story but I absolutely fell in love with the story and lore of the game itself. Without a doubt one of the best modern RPGs I’ve ever played. I found the Witcher after I played through several hundred hours of Skyrim. I was craving more of that open world, exploration, discovery, and lore. I quickly realized that the Witcher is much more traditional role playing game in the sense that the main character has history and lore. It wasn’t till later on, that I discovered that “The Witcher” is a series of books that began back in the 1980’s by Andrzej Sapkowski. Obviously there were other games if this was The Witcher 3, but I had never even heard of them.

I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes high fantasy or Gothic / medieval fantasy lore. Geralt is a gruff and stoic character but definitely has a charm about him. Coming off of Skyrim it took me a fat minute to begin to appreciate the raw role-playing element that this game offers. You are Geralt of Rivia. People know who he is and he has a storied past. Much of which you can uncover and learn tid bits of throughout your journey.

This is a massive game. The first time I played I petered out around the 70 to 80 hour mark when I realized there was an entire different continent to explore and do missions in. This time I easily spend over 100 hours. I took my time and played lots of side missions except for the gwent card game side quests. I found the mini game to be incredibly random and kinda unfair. Either that or I just suck at the game and never put enough time into it to learn the intricacies. The Gwent card game was so popular that it spawned it’s own spin off card game.

Completing the game felt great. The ending was one of the better build ups and subsequent climaxes of any video game I have ever played. The game is 5 years old mind you and the amount of dialogue and original non repeated speech is worthy of accolades. It’s like playing through a movie in it’s writing, voicing, and depth of choice during interactions.

Admittedly the game can become a bit of a slog, during the middle part of the game when you are on the main quest line. Simply, this world is sooooo big and there are sooooo many locations to seek and side missions to do, it is very easy to get distracted. You could probably mash through most of the story in about 40- 60 hours. If you take your time and explore and do a bunch of the side missions and extra contracts you will easily tack on another 20-40 hours. Which was not a bad thing at all. I just had two distinct play modes when I turned on the game I would either be aiming to explore and do side quests, or I would just play story missions which were generally more involved and took a bit longer to complete. Using this method I was able to complete the game in bite sized chunks, while keeping up with the sprawling story.

Bottom line, I spent so much time with these characters that I actually grew to admire them and gave a shit about thier conflict. I wanted to see it to the conclusion that I never got when I had first played through it.

There were plenty of twists and turns in the story mostly basic fare but some pretty unexpected turnouts based on your choices in dialogue and physical actions against other characters. This was one of the things that impressed me most about this game, choices mattered. There were decisions made early on in the game that had an impact on the conclusion and subsequent build up to the ending. I have never played a game that took such care to include the consequences of whatever choices were made. This was special to me and definitely made the game stand out. Even during my second play through I made some different choices during a main mission that lead to a tragically different outcome than my first play though. It just made me feel all the more that my choices actually carried weight in this world and were permanent.

Another interesting thing about this game is that it keeps the character logs in real time. As you complete and finish or fail to finish missions the game updates the character bios which are told through the words of a Bard named Dandelion who is a friend of the main character. The bestiary acts in much the same way updating and adding information about the various enemies as you defeat them and encounter new weaknesses. Little things like this just add to the atmosphere which is the Witcher world.

There honestly wasn’t much I didn’t like about this game. The RPG style of game is my favorite and it’s easy for me to get absorbed by or into a character. The characters were storied and well written. Not many parts felt cheesy beyond what you may expect from a video game. The music was adequate there were some over world themes that were pretty good, not Skyrim good, but good enough that I didn’t get annoyed after playing for over a hundred hours. This is a long game and I am genuinely curious how many people see it to it’s completion. There are parts of the game that drag on a bit and if you aren’t thorough during the main chunk of the game then the ending gets held up by a bunch of missions that tie up all of the loose ends. I didn’t have to deal with much of that and I enjoyed the ending missions without much difficulty having leveled up and acquired good gear. If you like the high fantasy genre this is definitely a great RPG, probably one of the best I have ever played. Top 5 for sure.

What really inspired my 2nd play though was the Netflix show by the same name. I ultimately wanted to read the books before I watched the show but I figured the game would give me a good time in between. I randomly found the first book in hardback at the mall. I picked it up but have yet to read it. I will definitely write a review as soon as I do.

Definitely recommend this game for anyone craving a great immersive RPG experience with great lore and characters.

As always thanks for reading and I hope this was helpful. Feel free to comment. I’ll catch you on the flip sizzle.

Video Game Review – Apex Legends

This is the first Battle Royal mode I have ultimately enjoyed. I played about 20 hours or so in Fortnite and genuinely found that game play is boring and repetitive. I watched a bunch of game play for the Player Unknown’s Battle Ground, and got the same feeling from that game. Just campy and ultimately too little action for me.

Enter Apex Legends. Made by Respawn entertainment, the company behind the Titanfall franchise. Immediately when I tried it I felt somehow familiar. The movement was fluid and the combat is mostly first person view. At first I sucked and admittedly didn’t like the game because of the time it took to see any action. Then I started to play enough to rack up some kills and really dive into the deeper mechanics of the game and the awesome characters with unique abilities.

I quickly found some favorite character abilities that allow me to feel useful without getting too many kills, but this let me learn how to survive well. One aspect I really like about Apex Legends is that it is automatically played in groups of three. This increases the survivability by great lengths. When I, or a teammate, goes down there is a good chance of being healed and brought back into the fight. Even if totally eliminated there is a secondary way to respawn a team mate so overall, right of the bat, I felt that I was getting more play time per match, thus more experience and practice playing the game.

The fact that everyone is placed in a team adds a factor or camaraderie, I want to do better for my team mates so I try to learn how to get better and when to be patient. Generally people are pretty nice and play together well. I have only had a few instances of shitty people but alas that is the internet age.. bound to meet a few here and there online.

The gun play is solid and the weapons behave consistently so you can really learn and get good using certain ones. Learning the different characters and how to use their abilities is also a lot more fun than the stale base characters of any other BR game mode currently out there.

Overall it is a solid game and I can see why it is popular. It is free to download, and you can buy micro transactions to unlock more cosmetic items.

There isn’t much I don’t like about the game for what it is. Therein lies the fault. I will not go as far as to say it is a full game. It feels like a game mode, forever more. The matches are too short and there is not enough depth to keep me playing for more than a handful of matches. Playing with friends and chatting makes it more fun for a bit longer but in the end it is a game mode and not a full game.

There is only one map. The maps in these BR modes are large and separated into different biomes or areas that contain different set pieces, architecture, and geography. They are basically a bunch of mini arenas within a large map. This gets boring after a while just like any single map, once you have seen all the locations and fought in different areas they all start to look the same in this game. There isn’t much variety in the map department. This is standard in most BR modes.

Now that this game is nearing several months old, the entry level skill gap is pretty high at this point. I often get melted by more experienced players right off the bat just because I am not fast enough or don’t know what to pick up first. The game is pretty unrelenting to newcomers. The game is entirely PVP there is no “single player” experience or story. So after a couple rounds and eventual wins … that’s pretty much all there is too it. Nothing grand happens when you win, you don’t get any wicked bonuses or anything… you just play another match.

So far critics have said that the skins and cosmetic items are underwhelming but i don’t really notice or care for cosmetic items. I will say that the season pass that they charged 10 bucks for is ultimately not worth it. The pass nets you a few cool skins and cosmetics but only after a grueling grind through 100 levels of crap rewards. I doubt I will be able to get anywhere near the end considering the levels for the season pass take more Exp than normal game levels. haha.. but hey you can purchase any levels you miss if you really want the rewards.

Overall a great Battle Royal mode. Nothing more, nothing less. I am sad that such a fad of a game mode has made it to become a major fixture of modern gaming. Just feels cheap. I like the bigger game modes and larger teams! Battle Royal game mode has infected some of the best shooter franchises, turning them into husks of their former selves,

In the end it is free, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes intense player vs. player action, or anyone who enjoys BR modes in general.

Video Game review – Metal Gear Survive

**May contain spoilers** I try not too but it’s hard writing a review without spoiling some things, read at your discretion. Feel free to ask questions or comment if you have something to add.

Over all I give Metal Gear Survive a 4 of 5 stars. *NOTE* I have not beaten the game yet. I will update this review if it needs it upon completion. I feel I have played enough hours to write a good review for someone who is curious about picking up the game.

Let me first say, I am a huge fan of Hideo Kojima and his Metal Gear Solid video game franchise. I appreciate how the tight mechanics, mature military sci-fi story, superb graphics, and excellent voice acting come together to create thought provoking video games with great content. I was a little skeptical after Hideo Kojima, the main producer of the series, left the game studio Konami. I have read a lot about what caused the split but that is another article entirely. I simply want to give an honest review of Konami’s Metal Gear spin off, without devolving into the Kojima/ Konami fanboy critique.

First and foremost i have read several reviews for the new game and most of them do not say if it is a good game or not. Most reviews I have read simply devolve into how it is NOT Metal Gear.. I got fed up with reading about what people think of the series or the Kojima/Konami situation. I don’t think a single reviewer, actually reviewed the game. It was more about what they didn’t like about it or the story or characters. Still most reviewers put way too much emphasis on the game not being Kojimas Franchise and a cheap cash out by Konami. Most reviews online will tell you all about this. I want to actually discuss the game and why I more or less enjoy it.

It is not a direct prequel or sequel. Metal Gear Survive is an off shoot that happens sometime between the end of Peace Walker and the start of The Phantom Pain in the main story chronology. It is a military story in proper Metal Gear fashion that involves wormholes and other dimensions, combined with infected, zombie like creatures, in a mysterious survival setting. Your character is a silent cuztomizable soldier. You do not directly play as Snake or any of the main characters that you may know. Survive is an entire side story consisting of entirely new characters and some new and old ideas.

That being said, I enjoy this game because of the many formulas at play. Metal Gear Survive is more or less a base building sim that plays a lot like Tom Clancy’s: The Division. It is a well crafted loot-shooter, that combines all of the better mechanics of Metal Gear series, with the looty goodness of The Division, and with a sprinkle of your favorite zombie games peppered in. You have certain amounts of time you can stay out in the environment and you collect materials, food, water, blueprints, and other stuff that you have to take back to a base to count as acquired. You can extend your exploration by preparing yourself with more survival gear, weapons, ammo, food, and water. This allows you to stay out in the harsh environment much longer than if you venture in unprepared. The entire game plays like one huge subsistence mission, where you are entirely un-equipped at the beginning and every single item you use is procured from the environment.

The beginning of this game is not easy. It is a survival type game where the first enemy you encounter is the environment and elements themselves. You have to struggle to find water and keep hydrated as well as cook food. I have read other reviews that described how much of a difficult slog the beginning of the game is and I can definitely agree. I died a lot in the beginning because I was constantly starving to death, either for lack of water or food. Keep at it though because it is deeply satisfying when you start to learn how to keep yourself healthy, well fed, and watered. I was not looking for a game to hold my hand so I enjoyed this steep learning curve. However, people who don’t like slower paced action and stories in general will most likely be put off by the pace of the beginning of the game. This game rewards persistence, and learning from your mistakes.

The action plays well, definitely at a slower pace, compared to the traditional Metal Gear games. I have experienced and played with styles combining run and gun tactics, (once I finally found the blueprints to build a gun) to the quiet and stealthy strategy of the core games. Both work well and the game does a good job balancing and dealing with tension.. A great sense of panic and urgency builds as the zombie like creatures become alert and scream, thus alerting all of the enemies around you. I could feel my excitement rise when I realize a whole hill of those things turns to me and starts running toward me in a large mob. In this game you get to decide whether to take the fight or flight approach, both of which are warranted at different times, a decision which becomes crucial to survival during some parts.

I really enjoy the “Dust” aspect of the game. All around the main base is an ominous cloud called “the dust” . Most of the adventuring is done by gearing up at base and then venturing out into the dust to find, survivors, gear, new materials, or blueprints to craft new things. This brings to mind the Dark Zone of The Division. This area sets up a need to prepare and form a strategy before just casually trekking to that wormhole irregularity. The game does a great job of making the dust disorienting with only small visual clues to help you find your way around. You literally have to make note of direction and recognizable landmarks in order to keep your bearings. This gets more difficult when enemies require you to fight or take alternate routs to avoid being spotted. The lack of direction combined with the fact that you are on an oxygen timer creates quite a tense “oh shit I have to get home” feeling. I think they did this wonderfully it is a great aspect to the game in my opinion.

There is an extensive tutorial menu so every mechanic of the game can be re read to better understand or if you missed some information. I also particularly enjoy that it gives you the option of recovering lost items when you die. You can choose to start right before that last mission started before you left the base, or you can start from base and go try to recover the box full of your items that you lost when you perished. This choice greatly relieves the sense of loss when a game over inevitably happens. I don’t like games that try to waste your time, while in the game.. (that is why I play video games for entertainment). Losing everything for not preparing yourself or making a mistake kinda bugs me but this game gives you an option at least. This is not an easy game so expect to die a lot, especially in the first segment of the game, it is pretty normal, and you aren’t doing anything wrong.

I do have some complaints about the game but none of them are cause enough to make it a bad experience, just something to be desired.

I had hoped the Co-op play would have been in the main quest part of the game. So I could team up with friends to secure the base and loot for materials. For now I believe there are only select staged areas that players can take on cooperatively. I haven’t played too much in Co-op so I will probly update this section a bit when I finish the game.

The characters are decent but not as instantly lovable as the main protagonists of the Core games. Many people will be put off right from the start because you don’t play as snake or one of his colleagues. For the first several hours I found it hard to take the characters seriously, However, after I played for a while I actually kinda started to care whether this group of random characters will ever get home. Also the main conflict, why the characters are stuck in this world, is fairly thought provoking and I want to know who is behind everything and why/how the characters are being manipulated. All of these things, coupled with the inclusion of aspects from the Core metal gear series, make for a pretty compelling survival game with the soul of it’s name sake.

The Metal Gear series is known for it’s tight gameplay, chiseled graphics, and mature (sometimes ludicrous) sci-fi / military stories. Metal Gear Survive definitely embraces these qualities while giving something a bit different. Overall not perfect but pretty good in my opinion. Definitely worth a play through if you like good looking, tight playing, survival games. I highly recommend this if you desired more from The Division. This game feels a lot like that. If you are looking for another Metal Gear Solid game, don’t bother. It is a different experience overall and uses a bunch of new mechanics and other story drivers that may not satiate the common Metal Gear fanboy.

Well I hope this was informative. Please comment or share if you fancy. Much love and Happy Gaming!