Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Wrath of the Druids – DLC review. Assassin meets the Witcher again?

Last week, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: The Wrath of the Druids, the first story expansion to the best-selling hooded assassin game, was released. Has Ubisoft offered the expected quality? Read our review.

I will not discover America by saying that the last three installments of the Assassin’s Creed series resemble our national pride on many levels – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Assassin’s Creed: Origins was the first to draw heavily on RPG elements, but this mishmash of genres did not work for everyone. Ubisoft improved with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and even better with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, part that is by far the best of the “new trilogy”. Was the high quality maintained with the first expansion pack to Eivor’s adventure from Clan Raven? Sorry but no.

A journey into the unknown

This time the main character moves to the Green Island. There, he meets his cousin – Barid – who is trying to build his own country in Ireland. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of that country are not willing to help him because he is a pagan. Very compassionate and listening to every pagan subject, but these character traits were not enough to allow the above-mentioned character to play a greater role in Ireland.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: The Wrath of the Druids so focuses on helping a Viking from our family. During the adventure, we get to know many characters, but it is difficult to praise them for anything here. As far as the base is concerned, the inhabitants of the Green Island – apart from Ciara, who managed to surprise many times – are bland and it is hard to feel that they pay any more attention to Eivor – someone who conquered all of England. Their past and plans for the future did not impress me much and I miraculously refrained from skipping the dialogues.

You can also feel the unused potential with the Children of Danu, the counterparts of the Order of the Ancients. Watching promotional materials The Wrath of Druids I felt that they would play a bigger role in the plot, and any approach to their brushwood where they perform their wicked rituals would create goose bumps on the body. In the final version, the main opponents in Ireland were flattened to the maximum and while writing a review the day after the completion of the DLC, I don’t remember who belonged to them. This only proves how much the druids were treated neglectively by the creators.

No idea

Being already on the cons Wrath of Druids, it is also worth mentioning the story and side missions. The former are nothing more than a copy of those from the base (attacking strongholds, looking for members of the Children of Danu after clues found in guarded places, etc.) and maybe 2-3 tasks would bring a breath of fresh air. And when they did, the drawbacks of the add-on could be forgotten for a moment, because the general plot assumptions were not so bad. On the other hand, the side quests collected from the lofts were what AC: Origins received a sharp beating for – an artificial extension of the game by going to place X and eliminating target Y. The worst part of all is that about a fifth of the expansion was focused on them. .

You can forgive the DLC for AC: Valhalla thanks to the great soundtrack – Einar Selvik did the job again and offered the audience a soundtrack that could relax at the right moments, allowing you to explore nearby villages, and in others – to freeze the blood in your veins as we approached Eivor’s greatest enemies. Julie Fowlis, the actress dubbing the aforementioned Ciara, whose beautiful voice will be heard many times during the several-minute-long cutscenes, also did a great job.

As is already the case with Ubisoft, the French did not disappoint when designing the location. The northwestern part of Europe is famous for its marshy, wetlands, and it is they that predominate in 9th-century Ireland. The main character often drowns in the mud, jumps into dirty lakes or crosses rivers to get to less accessible estates. Honestly, when visiting the Green Island, you can feel the smell of the village floating in the air – the designers of the location once again showed that they can offer their clients phenomenal views.

The expansion pack for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla includes additional activities known from adventures in England, so fans of kissing walls will have a lot of activities here. Maximizing Wrath of Druids It will take up to 15 hours to find all the treasures, destroy contaminated places, kill legendary drainers and animals, or catch pages carried by the wind. The only new thing in this respect are the retail outlets that we must renovate if we want to improve the trade relationship between Dublin and England. This is an additional activity that introduces a breath of fresh air, which – if we are interested in a story that is about 6/7 hours long – can be avoided as we wish.

(Not worth it

Well … Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: The Wrath of the Druids follows the path of Assassin’s Creed Origins: Hidden. Both feature additions did not really introduce anything new and are only poor stuffers that will be liked – I dare to say – only people who have 100% cleared England and still want to do more activities in the Viking world. The new areas are beautiful, the story – apart from the shallow characters – is not that bad, but personally I was hoping for something more. For something that will bring the series about hooded assassins a little closer to the level of expansion for The Witcher 3. I keep my fingers crossed for making the conquest of Paris more effective.

The add-on was reviewed on a PC with GTX 1080, 16GB of RAM and an i5 8600K processor. In 1440p (QHD) resolution, graphics settings: very high, the game did not have any clippings, and frames per second rarely dropped below 65. Optimization fared much worse in the case of the stand.