Assassin’s Creed Valhalla absolutely did not need more content. A bloated and bland open world stuffed far, far past its breaking point, its rendition of England, Norway, the Isle of Skye, Vinland, Ireland, and France needed nothing more than less stuff. This puts Dawn of Ragnarök into a tough spot since, being a large expansion, it is naturally going to contribute to Valhalla’s most fundamental issue, an issue that could be offset by its fantastical and potentially more liberating mythical setting. And while it does inject a tiny dose of much-needed life into this banal, boring world, it also doesn’t escape the banal, boring game it is tied to.
Dawn of Ragnarök does at least make the faintest efforts in trying to break free of its shackles by transporting Odin, as seen through Eivor’s eyes, to the otherworldly realm of Svartalfheim. This dwarven home is adorned with titanic statues, vast golden mountains, huge floating spires, and what are presumably Yggdrasil’s entangled and charred roots across the skyline; all of which provide a substantial sense of scale. The plain plains of ninth century England just can’t compete.
Eivor’s move set has been altered to match these surreal elements. Through a new item called the Hugr-Rip, Eivor can suck abilities out of fallen foes like some sort of Nordic Kirby, only keeping two or three at a time out of a total of six. Combat and different sorts of puzzles force players to pick what powers they want depending on their style, adding in a welcome bit of strategy. Choosing whether to keep the ability to fly or raise the dead to fight alongside Eivor or channel the icy winds of Jotunheim spices up the typical array of traversal puzzles and melee skirmishes.
But it’s a mere pinch of flavorful spice being sprinkled into a cauldron of stew big enough to feed Asgard’s entire lineup of Æsirs. Valhalla has always been an unexciting game, so everything Dawn of Ragnarök does to improve those core shortcomings is relative to that base experience and falters considerably when it’s taken out of that narrow context and applied more broadly.
Combat still has impressive enemy variety and does benefit from being able to cause Muspelheim-fueled explosions and frigid blasts taken from the frost giants. But it remains an unbalanced mess with a litany of overpowered and cheap weapons and abilities. Much of this stems from Valhalla’s outrageously long drip feed of rewards and upgrades that constantly dole out game-breaking gear and a near-endless supply of stat boosts. When a game is this long and always compelled to heavily compensate players out of fear they will become bored when dopamine flow slows down, it is generally going to result in a heavily imbalanced experience that also has its share of useless items and moves. Few games can support over 150 hours of constant progression.
This all comes down on Dawn of Ragnarök because it is positioned as endgame content (even though it offers a level boost to new players) because it is coming out around a year and a half after the base game’s release. And the expansion is an absolute breeze for those who have stuck with it or have played a lot of the game, which is usually the audience DLC is made for. Not even Muspelheim’s fiercest stand a chance against those who have gathered many of the game’s numerous legendary weapons or are still spamming its array of busted weapon and ability combos. However, this doesn’t apply to one of its main bosses that bends the game’s difficulty in an unfair way by recovering an unreasonable amount of health — with a frustratingly uninterruptible healing animation — almost every time she spawns in her minions and shaking the player’s lock-on when she dodges.
Cranking up the many difficulty sliders and abstaining from using the aforementioned legendary weapons and spammy combos is almost essential for making encounters anything but one-sided, mind-numbing bloodbaths. It is on seasoned players to ensure that they get a better experience since it wasn’t designed tightly enough to accommodate them. Anyone who sunk a decent chunk of hours into Valhalla and plundered its rewards is punished by getting a game they must micromanage in order to keep it from becoming frivolously easy; a tedious process that shouldn’t fall so heavily into the player’s hands.
Combat bears the brunt of Valhalla’s sins, as does its exploration or lack thereof. While Svartalfheim is more visually appealing than the game’s realistic settings, it’s still rather generic and falls into almost all of the same traps as its other maps. It’s a big area where everything of note is stamped with a marker, leaving little to no reason to stray from those unmarked areas. Players are not led around by their curiosity, but glowing icons on the compass, which is extremely predictable and unsatisfying. A straightforward checklist can occasionally be soothing, yet that is almost all Dawn of Ragnarök is and has little to wake players out of the slumber it lulls them into.
But most of the items on that checklist are not engaging. There are the occasional passable puzzles that require the new abilities, but they still rely heavily on pushing shelves out of the way and shooting barred doors from another angle, two elements that were comically overused in the main game. Aside from the two or three with solid writing and a funny premise, the side missions are also often laughably meaningless and hardly worth the two minutes they take to finish. They barely even qualify as side missions.
The other objectives scattered about are similarly shallow to a baffling degree. Shooting cursed symbols and making offerings to altars are returning bits of filler that mix in with the new bits of filler like saving dwarves and finding fabled anvils. They’re all lousy in their own unique ways — the anvils are particularly bad since they’re ploddingly told mythological lectures — but they’re brought together by how they are all unabashed padding meant to fill out the land with literally anything, quality be damned. The new combat arena that lets players add modifiers in order to match Odin’s tall tales of his battles is an interesting idea and something the game desperately needed more of.
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Assassin’s Creed is complicit with staying in the past and its unwillingness to make any attempt to modernize itself within the open-world genre gets more and more unacceptable as time passes. It shouldn’t necessarily forsake its entire foundation, but it’s a dated approach that looks even worse in the wake of titles like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild. These games push players to think and engage with their mysterious worlds and not just mindlessly beeline from point to point. Ubisoft keeps insisting that the sheer scale of Assassin’s Creed is the impressive part when bragging about square mileage hasn’t been impressive since about 2014. And Dawn of Ragnarök still doesn’t realize that.
A lot of Valhalla’s problems transfer to Dawn of Ragnarök, but its narrative stumbles are all its own. Odin’s mission to dodge his destiny and save his son Baldr from the Muspel leader Surtr both crumble for different reasons. The Allfather constantly talks lovingly about Baldr, but he is hardly shown and doesn’t speak, essentially telling the player they should care about him without doing the work to get them to actually care. This relationship is at the centerpiece of the story and simply is not fleshed out enough to bear that weight, something made even worse by how insignificantly that storyline concludes and the tepid, MacGuffin-heavy main missions. The game also tries to draw some parallels between the families of other side characters, but these threads are greatly underexplored and are afterthoughts that quickly wither and die.
Odin’s fate also makes up a sizable portion of the plot and continues the prophecy that began in the Asgard arc. While a ripe topic for analysis, it only truly comes up near the last act when the game suddenly sprints toward its finale and abruptly ends. And seeing as though this beat doesn’t get its own conclusion and only comes more to light in the final segments, it seems like it will just be revisited in the future. While a follow-up hasn’t been confirmed, it’s disheartening either way since it robs this DLC of yet another payoff or stretches out this narrative even more and leaves this episode on an undeserved cliffhanger.
Dawn of Ragnarök could have righted some of Valhalla’s wrongs, but it mostly inherits and compounds them. The more imaginative setting is betrayed by its mundane and uninspired open-world trappings that focus almost exclusively on the quantity of trivial and all too familiar activities at the expense of discovery. It also fails to adapt to players who have played and leveled up in the main campaign, which is a massive oversight for a game getting a sizable expansion this far past launch. Ubisoft didn’t spend those many months trying to innovate with Dawn of Ragnarök or pruning Valhalla‘s many unnecessary branches. Instead, that time was devoted to overwatering this troubled tree in hopes that it would endlessly grow. But Valhalla is no Yggdrasil, and the rot at its unholy roots has gone unaddressed and festered in the meantime.
SCORE: 5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
