Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s New River Raids isn’t that

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the latest game that needed additional content at the moment, but this week there are some anyway, and since I’m still fresh on the game, I thought I would come back and check it out.

This stuff has arrived in the form of “River Raids”, a new game mode that adds three new small areas of the map to visit, all in places on the west side of Britain that the base game does. never dared. In fact, “explore” is the wrong word here, because you won’t be doing almost any of that.

Instead, these new areas are all built around thin river corridors, the idea being that they were designed to take the monastery raid system from the main game and bring it up, lining up the banks of these rivers. with farms, military bases and, yes, more monasteries to walk through. There’s a lot of river, a thin strip of land to place these raid targets on, and that’s about it. Indeed, there is so little land that you cannot even summon your horse.

River raids are not something you can just do in the middle of your existing game. Rather, they exist as their own standalone play mode, accessed by building a few unique structures linked to it in Ravensthorpe, then choosing to embark on one (much like going to Vinland).

It’s an interesting concept. River raids are meant to be a never-ending game mode, where you can just get in your boat and steal things whenever you want, because even if you burn a site to the ground, it will soon be rebuilt and you can loot it. once again.

My problems with this, however, come from the fact that there is almost nothing that requires you to do this. The only notable items available here are a full set of St. George-inspired armor and weaponry, with armor scattered randomly in chests found in military camps and a sword your prize for beating a “champion” in a disappointing battle found at the end of the third river.

Once everything was found and it only took me 3-4 cruises to do it, I had no interest in going back to mode. I didn’t need the resources that you can mine by repeatedly attacking the same locations, and it’s a shame that many raids focus on a certain type of resource – “foreign supplies” – that can only be used to purchase cosmetics and upgrades to River Mode Raid (although if purchased here you can later apply the cosmetics to your regular ship at least).

There is no story to develop outside of a few brief chats with the mascot and instigator of River Raids, Vagnor, and as I said with the three new maps so small and devoid of anything other than raid targets, there’s little exploration either.

Plus, the raid was never this fun in the first place? The real strengths of Valhalla the gameplay was its stealth encounters, its environmental puzzles, and its biggest siege battles. The raids looked like a mix of the three that failed on all three counts, and it’s even more here as a lot of these raids are smaller and less interesting.

Indeed, it sometimes feels like the only reason this exists is to give the sail more time in the spotlight, as it was not used much in the main game (apart from, surprise, raids).

See, River raids is a free update, there’s no harm in trying it out and seeing if you’re more interested than me. But more grinding for the pleasure of grinding is the last thing this game needed.