Assassin’s Creed Valhalla It is The last game that needed any extra content now, but this week I got some anyway, and as I’m still fresh in the game, I thought about going back in and check it out.
These things arrived in the form of “River Raids”, a new game mode that adds three new and small areas of the map for you to visit, all at points on the west side of Britain that the base game never ventured into. In fact, “explore” is the wrong word here, because you will do almost none of that.
Instead, these new areas are all built around narrow river corridors, with the idea that they were designed to take the invasion system from the game’s main monastery and activate it, aligning the banks of these rivers with farms, bases military and, yes, more monasteries to invade its path. There is a lot of river, a narrow strip of land to place these attack targets and that’s it. In fact, there is so little land that you can’t even summon your horse.
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River Raids is not something you can do just in the middle of your existing game. Instead, they exist as their own standalone game mode, accessible by building some unique structures related to it in Ravensthorpe and then hitting the option to board one (kind of like going out to Vinland).
It is an interesting concept. River Raids must be an endless game mode, where you can just jump on your boat and steal some things whenever you want, because even if you burn a place, it will soon be rebuilt and you can plunder everything again.
My problems with this, however, come from the fact that there is almost nothing that compels you to do this. The only notable the items available here are a complete set of armor and armaments modeled after São Jorge, with the armor randomly scattered in chests found in military camps and a sword his prize for defeating a “champion” in a discouraging battle found at the end of the third River.
After all of this was found, and it took me only 3-4 cruises to do this, I had no interest in getting back into the mood. I didn’t need the resources you can cultivate by repeatedly invading the same locations, and it’s a shame that many of the attacks focus on a certain type of resource – “foreign supplies” – that can only be used to buy cosmetics and upgrades in River Mode Raid (although if purchased here, you can later apply cosmetics to your regular ship).
There is no story to be expanded outside of a few brief chats with the River Raids mascot and instigator, Vagnor, and as I said with the three new maps so small and devoid of anything but attack targets, there is little exploration as well.
Also, hacking was never so much fun in the first place? The real strengths of Valhalla’s the gameplay was its stealth encounters, its environmental puzzles and its larger siege battles. The attacks looked like a mix of all three that fell short in all three accounts, and that is even more so here, as many of these attacks are minor and less interesting.
In fact, sometimes it seems that the only reason for this to exist is to give the candle a little more time in the limelight, since it was little used in the main game (besides, surprise, raids).
To look, River raids it’s a free update, there’s no harm in trying it out and seeing if you’re more interested in it than me. But more grind by grind is the last thing this game needed.