The plan was to review Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, a difficult proposition because OH MY GOD, IT’S HUGE! According to Ubisoft, Valhalla is actually smaller than the bloated Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but it doesn’t feel that way. Anyway, along the way I’ve discovered that Valhalla is a bug-ridden game, filled with not only the typical Ubisoft issues but also a much more serious problem that has brought my time with the game on PS5 to a bitter end.

At around the 35-hour mark I realised that in order to complete the story I had to go and pacify Lunden. I had attempted this some 10-hours earlier and encountered the game-breaking bug that would return to haunt me, but at the time I had written the issue off because it didn’t look like I would actually need to deal with Lunden to finish up the main story. How wrong I was. After hitting a certain point in the story the only way to progress is to fire up the Lunden chain of missions, something which the game doesn’t actually bother telling you, which is why I spent about an hour beforehand trying to figure out what the hell I needed to do.

So, here’s the issue: on the first mission in Lunden, titled Walls and Shadows, you are supposed to arrive at the gate of Lunden where a cutscene should trigger, introducing a new character and then dumping you in a fist fight. What happens for me, and quite a few other people it seems, is that a loading screen pops up and then the cutscene fails to play. Instead, I’m dumped back into the game, except I can’t move or do anything. The only thing I can do is move the camera around. If I jump into the menu I can load a prior save to escape my ghostly existence.

I’ve tried everything I can think of do get around this. I’ve approached the objective marker for every direction, including literally dropping into it from above. I’ve swapped in and out of the two graphical modes, shot random citizens, gone off and completed various other quests and so on and so on and so on. Nothing is working. And so at 35-hours in, I literally can’t finish Valhalla. I’m stuck.

I do have one possible plan, and that’s to fire up the Ubisoft+ version of the game on PC, use my cloud saves and see if it’ll work on their. But my experience with Ubisoft + was a disaster already. See, before I got Valhalla on the PS5 I bought a month’s subscription to Ubisoft+ so that I could get started on Valhalla and then use the handy cross-platform progression to carry on where I had left off. As it turns out, though, Ubisoft+ is a glitchy mess. It’s currently suffering from some sort of issue where it loses connection every few minutes, which in turn boots you out of the game. Based on the various Reddit posts, there are a lot of people suffering from this. In the end, despite having the game on Ubisoft + nearly a week before it arrived on PS5, I only managed to play about 3-hours of Valhalla.

The only other things I can do is wait for an update, or try re-installing the entire game.

I’m going to give the Ubisoft+ thing another go, because if I can get it to connect for even five damn minutes I might be able to skip past the game-breaking problem. But for now, I wanted to let you know what was happening with the review. and just warn you that Valhalla has a shit-load of problems. I mean, I ran into 4 different side-quests I couldn’t finish due to problems and loads of visual hiccups. But it does have some good concepts and moments. Hopefully I get a chance to talk about it all properly if I can get the game to work.