Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok DLC Review

ign.com:

I really wanted to love Dawn of Ragnarok. On paper its premise of delving into Norse mythology is a promise to truly investigate one of the most interesting loose ends left by Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s story that would give Eivor the power of the gods. In disappointing reality, it's a mostly unchanged stretch of gameplay dressed up like a magical romp through the Nine Realms. Replacing European kings with giants and dwarves doesn’t change the fact that all of the moment-to-moment adventuring, looting, and combat is exactly the same as it has been in the roughly 150 hours of Valhalla that preceded it. How do you add a whole new set of supernatural abilities and without making anything feel new or different? Like the two DLC expansions before it, it’s not a letdown of Asgardian proportions, but it is a letdown nonetheless.

Dawn of Ragnarok, the third DLC expansion, channels Christopher Nolan’s Inception and goes deeper as Eivor – themselves a virtual reconstruction of an ancient viking – uses trippy drugs to relive the spiritual reconstruction of the life of their culture’s gods in order to sort out their own existential dread. This Assassin-ception idea was a clever metaphor during the main game, with Odin whispering increasingly paranoid advice into Eivor’s ear every time a new and more bizarre revelation is made about the truth of their world, but the story is far less poetic here. It’s more a straightforward tale of Havi’s (read: Odin’s) quest to save his son Baldur from the fire demon Surtur.

It’s a story that is largely standard fare for this series, and especially the Vahallaverse. The characters are well realized and nuanced. Surtur, his children, and his wife all stand as enemies in the way of your ultimate end,