Valhalla Creed Assassin is an finally a game that needed more content right now, but this week it got some anyway, and since I’m still new to the game I thought I’d jump back enter and take a look.
That material arrived in the form of “River Raids”, a new game mode that adds three small, new areas of the map that you can visit, all in places in western Britain where the base game never started. In fact, “study” is the wrong word here, because you do almost nothing of that.
Instead, all of these new fields are built around shallow river corridors, with the idea that they were designed to take and bend up the main game monastery predation system, lining the banks of these rivers with farms, military bases and, yes, more monasteries to make your way through. There’s a lot of river, a thin strip of land to put those predatory targets on, and that’s about it. In fact there is so little land you can’t even call your horse.
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River Raids is not something you can do right in the middle of your game. Instead, they exist as their own independent game mode, accessible by building one or two specific structures related to it in Ravensthorpe, then tapping into the option of starting one (kinda like leaving to go to Vinland).
It’s an interesting concept. River Raids is supposed to be a non-stop game mode, where you can just hop into your boat and steal some stuff whenever you want, because even if you burn a site to the ground will be rebuilt soon and you can fire it again.
My issues with this, however, stem from the fact that almost nothing forces you to do so. The same famous thing items available here are a complete set of weapons and armor modeled after St. George, with the weapons randomly scattered in chests found in armor camps and a sword as a reward for beating on a “hero” in a shaded battle found at the end of a third river.
Once all that was found out, and it only took 3-4 cruises to do it, I was not interested in returning to mode. I did not need the resources you can farm by plundering the same places again, and it is worrying that many of the raids are focused on a particular type of resource – “foreign supply ”- which can only be used to buy cosmetics and upgrades in River Attack Mode (but if purchased here you can at least put the cosmic ones on your regular vessel).
There is no story to expand on the outside some brief conversations with the River Raids mascot and the Vagnor launcher, and as I said with the three new maps being so small and bare of anything but attacking loot targets there is little further analysis greater.
Other than predation that was never that fun in the first place? Real strengths Valhalla’s it was a playthrough of his greatest stealth adventures, environmental puzzles and siege battles. Predation felt like a combination of the three that fell short on all three counts, and that’s even more here because many of those raids are smaller and less interesting.
In fact it feels at times as the only reason for this to take a little extra time to navigate on the spot, as it wasn’t used to much in the main game (outside, surprise, prey).
Show, River raids is a free upgrade, there is no harm in trying it and seeing if you are more into it than I am. But more erosion for the cause of erosion the last thing this game needed.