Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: The Siege of Paris
The second major expansion may at first look like the last piece in the mosaic of Viking adventure, but its content does not add much credibility to this mask. Rather than the final piece of the puzzle, it is an interlude that will feed you if you don’t have enough of the Assassin’s rampage yet, but you won’t see any big unraveling, fireworks and fanfare in it. Whether it’s Eivor / a or a tangled line from the present. However, Ubisoft has already managed to hurry with the promise of the second year of support, so this rest can still be repaired.
As with the first DLC, Wrath of the Druids, visitors from distant lands await you in Ravensthorpe. After the introductory introductory phrases or throws, Toka and Pierre from the Elgring clan will convince you that their problems with King Karel Tlusty are also your problems, and then they sail to France.
Where Ireland has managed to enchant graphically, the West Frankish Empire can’t do much, and basic England is very similar except for occasional meadows full of poppies. Even the basic storyline doesn’t go too far from the well-established concept of getting involved as a foreigner in things you don’t really care for, but because Karel has settlements burned and villagers executed and Eivor has PTSD from childhood and Randvi winds up the opportunity to form another alliance, it gives about sense?
This time, Eivor is of the opinion that the war does not benefit anyone, and rather than an open clash, it seeks to stealthily destabilize the region through espionage and sabotage, but in terms of playability you have virtually identical content in individual missions as before, only with different names and icons. . You just get more opportunities to deal with them quietly. No siege of castles, no ignition of roofs, minimum of trumpeting. More chests, more keys to chests in wells with snakes, more balancing stones to teach you patience, but in the basic game only taught you to hate the physics of the Anvil engine. All this scattered again on an unnecessarily large map.
A brand new type of mission with rebels is basically just a little more busy type of fetch quests, where you have to bring something to someone and kill someone, only a few dolls assist you during the undercutting. Rewards are calculated in a special currency for which you can buy stronger dolls and cosmetic bonuses for them, as in the case of your raid gang in England, but these are not characters you should care about.
These are already more interesting infiltrations, during which, as in the new works of the Hitman series, for example, you can see the opportunity to reach your goals in a possibly longer, but a little more interesting way. You talk to the innkeeper, you rescue someone’s daughter, you drunk soldiers to reveal a secret password, or you find a disguise and you reach your destination unnoticed.
Sure, you can still sneak up on him very traditionally and just cut his carotid arteries without him and his guards around, but then they’re just the items on the shopping list that we don’t like.
Fortunately, the story is sold here in ten hours, but its conspiracy is again not one you would remember years after it was over. Although Assassin’s Creed tries to move from the box of action adventures to the RPG box, its stories and elections simply do not have it yet.
Another of the borrowed ideas, following the example of popular games, are rats. In Ubisoft, someone must have liked the plague adventure A Plague Tale a lot, because during the conquest of Paris you will come across a lot of bloodthirsty clubs of rodents, which go after everything alive, and if they find you, they slowly sip from your health. You can drive them away by frantically rinsing their weapons, after which they usually return to some sewer from which they climbed before, and you can then cover the relevant channel with a shelf so that they don’t bother you too much.
At the same time, you can unlock a new ability that will turn Eivor into a rat-summoning flock with hundreds of teeth and claws. And of course you can count on enemies. Other new skills are almost cheats, which regenerate health and stamina at an absurdly high speed. Of course, no one forces you to use them, but even without them, fights are no challenge.
The proceeds from the armament are two-handed scythes that allow you to mow enemy groups. Quite soon, however, we returned to the proven combination of two one-handed, maximally improved axes, because their rhythm simply suited us better.
Compared to the British, the French enemies use the ride much more, which forces you to dodge, and it is the innovative scythes that are completely useless for it, because before you can swing, the riders are two meters behind you. But soldiers on horseback are usually nothing that a few well-aimed fire arrows can’t handle.
Well … And that’s actually all worth writing about in connection with DLC. We are not downright disappointed with The Siege of Paris, but the French addition in any case lacks some inventive mechanism or plot that would make it an indispensable or at least memorable extension. The kind that would have lifted the original Viking saga a bit.
