Assassin's Creed Valhalla

25% of the longer reviews call the game repetitive, bloated, padded, too long or a chore, more than raise any other complaint. The main story is built from regional alliance arcs that follow a similar pattern, and players describe following NPCs, fetching items and clearing near-identical sites for dozens of hours. "AC Valhalla feels like a 15-20 hour epic that was stretched in every possible way to reach 100+ hours of content," one wrote. Recommending players raise it too, usually with advice to play in short sessions, skip side content or follow the main story first. Players who finish the game describe the last stretch as the hardest to push through.

Crashes come up in 21% of the longer reviews. Reports range from a crash every few hours to every few minutes, often starting after the first hours or on reaching England, sometimes taking the whole PC down. Players with high-end hardware report the same, and a list of community workarounds circulates in the reviews: capping the frame rate, borderless mode, turning off overlays or Ubisoft Connect cloud saves, playing offline, clearing caches. None works for everyone. The damage is worse where the game does not allow saving: crashes during River Raids or long assaults wipe the whole run, and one player warned "you can't make a manual save mid mission." A typical recommending verdict reads: "I love the game, when it works. Which is unreliable."

Bugs or glitches come up in 18% of the longer reviews. Most are the familiar kind: NPCs failing to follow, characters stuck in geometry, a horse that runs away, flickering ground textures. A smaller set is serious, with quests that will not trigger, a boss that stays burrowed underground, region completion items that cannot be collected, and autosaves that trap players in a broken state. One player wrote of "a game breaking progression bug on a main story quest with NO SOLUTION." A few say these problems have gone unfixed for years.

Movement, climbing and controls come up in 13% of the longer reviews, mostly as a complaint. Players describe Eivor jumping the wrong way, sticking to ledges, refusing to drop down, and a slow, heavy feel compared with earlier games; "sometimes it feels like the character is going the opposite way to what you tell him/her to go," as one put it. Keyboard players single out the default bindings, such as dodge on Alt, and some controller players report missing or confused inputs.

The activities wrapped around exploration draw complaints in 8% of the longer reviews: barred doors and locked chests that need a hidden key, an explosive jar or a window to shoot through, rock-stacking cairns, mastery challenges, flying tattoo papers and Animus anomaly puzzles. "I'm always coming across locked wooden doors, that i'm unable to open with the 2 axes i am holding," one player wrote, and another said the "stone cairn minigame ruined the entire game for me." Cairn and mastery-challenge complaints come almost entirely from completionists, who also report bugged medals and items that block 100% completion.

The required Ubisoft Connect launcher and account draw complaints in 7% of the longer reviews. Players describe being asked for a CD key or activation code on a Steam purchase, logins that are not remembered, launcher outages that stop a single-player game from starting, cloud saves that fail to sync, long "checking for add-ons" waits and unskippable splash screens after every crash. "Locked out of my own purchase because it asks for a CD key," one player wrote; another asked Ubisoft to "Fix your ridiculous, trash Ubisoft Connect forced login to actually remember people's credentials instead of ignoring the problem for years."

Just under 5% of the longer reviews bring up the in-game store, mostly to object to it: cosmetics and gear sets that outshine what the game hands out, XP boosters and "time savers", and even map markers for sale. One player was surprised to find "they are still selling in game currency and even map markers in the store." Some say the slow grind for upgrade materials feels designed to push the store; others say it is easy to ignore, and a few like the free weekly item.

Smaller groups raise two systems. Stealth draws complaints that guards detect too fast or not at all and that raids force open combat. The constellation skill tree is called confusing, with many small stat nodes between real abilities; "1 skill point for 2.0 light damage? Come on," one wrote. Others like the free respec and the auto-assign option.

Players on headphones say dialogue and effects sound heavily compressed. Many of the reviews raising it come from players in their first two hours, several of them refunding over it: "I cannot put up with listening to this game through a tin can."

A handful of players walked into end-game expansion content from an early-game quest marker without warning, met enemies far above their level, and found autosaves had locked them in. One gave blunt advice: "Do not go and sleep under the tree."