Welcome friends. Sit back and allow me to regale you with a story from a time long ago. From a time of myth and legends when the gods walked the Earth and darkness was but inches away. When monsters roamed the land and heroes strode tall across the sky. Welcome to an age of miracle and wonder!
Welcome, also, to Dawn of Ragnarok. The latest expansion for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla wherein we experience the tales of gods and monsters and how often there’s no difference between the two.
Set after the Asgard arc in Valhalla’s main campaign, Dawn of Ragnarok drops you back into Odin’s, or Havi, as is his other name, shoes. The fire giants of Muspelheim have invaded the Dwarven realm of Svartalfheim and brought it to heel. Surtr, the unkillable fire giant, has captured Baldr, Odin’s son and it’s up to you as the titular lord of Asgard to rescue him. And if you happen to free Svartalfheim in the process, that’s all well and good.
You’re journey begins well after the Muspels have broken the Dwarves and taken over Svartalfheim, something Odin could have stopped, along with Baldr’s capture, had he not been so self-interested in saving his own keester from Ragnarok. In keeping with his character arc from the main campaign, Odin is a selfish god with his motives working towards stopping Ragnarok and the prophecy of his death and saving Baldr while his blindness brings ruin to all in the process.
Told as a dream quest through Eivor, there’s clearly meant to be a comparison to Eivor’s own fears and single minded determination. But there’s a saying about self-fulfilling prophecies. . .
In many ways, Dawn of Ragnarok is simply more of AC: Valhalla. The bulk of what you did in Valhalla you will be doing here: clearing out hostile camps, searching for wealth, skill books and armour and fighting Chosen elite enemies. There are some differences that do spice up the proceedings though. One is that you’re playing as Odin with some nifty new abilities and two, is the running time.
Dawn of Ragnarok’s main campaign runs roughly about 25 hours. Up to 30+ if you decide to be a completionist. So while that makes it pretty substantial as far as an expansion goes, it’s significantly shorter and thus more enjoyable than Valhalla’s 100+ hour epic. If it wasn’t for the need to rack up some skill points and better armour for two of the campaigns boss fights, I could have shaved some time off of it. That said, I choose not to chase all the wealth in an area that wasn’t a skill book or new armour.
Story wise, this is certainly one of the better and more compelling expansion stories told since AC: Origins afterlife expansion. Odin’s arc is an interesting one, as is watching how he manipulates everyone around him into furthering his own agenda. Even when those he uses are at their lowest point. There is an interesting parable between him and Surtr since Surtr can’t be killed and wants to be the death of all worlds, while Odin is trying desperately not to die and usually brings ruin wherever he goes. The lines between godhood and monstrosity blur here, as both are, ultimately self-serving forces of destruction. Lines that could be throwaway during Odin’s monologues and reflections while you’re running across Svartalfheim turn out to be more narratively insightful than merely making sure there aren’t too many quiet moments.
Visually, Ubisoft’s environment artists have, yet again, outdone themselves with world design. Like Valhalla, Dawn of Ragnarok utilises a more artistic visual design to imbue the environments with character. Whether you’re running across snowy fields replete with deforming snow, climbing mountains of pure gold or trekking through a mist-filled swampy area, Svartalfheim is a visually rich world. The environment design owes a lot to Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings trilogy as Svartalfheim feels very Middle-Earth. With cavernous Dwarven mines, titanic Dwarven statues, massive bridges and gorgeous, ivy-covered buildings, Svartalfheim is a joy to run across and take pictures using the photography mode. It certainly didn’t hurt having a quest in which a dwarf has to destroy a cursed ring by throwing it into magma becoming one of my favourite moments in the game. It goes just about as hilariously bad as you’d expect.
As Odin, you’ll be rocking some new powers courtesy of a fancy new gauntlet, the Hugr-Rip. Essentially it’s a device that sucks out the souls of your enemies and their abilities with it. While the device has the potential to really throw open the game design to more interesting play, there are only a handful of these enemy abilities and you can only stock two of them at a time. The Hugr-Rip will let you disguise yourself as a Muspel or Jotun and brave the fiery lava or cold, infuse your weapons with fire or ice for explosive attacks, arrow teleport around the environment, resurrect recently killed foes to fight for you and to turn into a bird to reach higher places or perform a death-from-above assassination.
Most of these abilities also play into the environment puzzles though, practically, I found fewer moments to use them all and ended up rocking the same two through the bulk of the campaign, small swops out here and there aside. The rebirth power is one of the most useful since you can use it in boss fights as well when they spawn ads in. Like the rest of your equipment, the Hugr-Rip can be upgraded to use both powers at the same time or for longer durations.
To make sure that you’re not OP with these abilities, there’s an energy bar for the powers that run down during use. Killing enemies while an ability is active will restore the gauge a little as does harvesting certain plants in the environment. Killing enemies fills portions of the Hugr-Rips bar while Yggdrasil roots can fully fill it up at the cost of your health. As interesting as these were, they didn’t change up the gameplay as much as I was hoping they would.
One area that Dawn of Ragnarok does suffer from, as does Valhalla overall, is the combat system. It’s just. . . not good. The changeover to this pseudo-Souls-like combat style has gotten worse since Origins introduced it to the series. Here it feels slow and cumbersome, especially when you’re dealing with enemies that are faster than you, can teleport behind you and can interrupt your attacks and abilities. Two of the boss fights fare the worst until I put my faith in raw levelling numbers and figuring out that the Sparta style kicks pretty much works on everything. Then it simply became a case of ability spamming. It’s been a long time since I rage quit a game, especially a boss fight, but Dawn made me do just that.
It’s good then that stealth finally works well in an AC game. It became my preferred playstyle through the bulk of the campaign and its areas unless I needed to clear an area quickly or needed some breathing room in a boss fight. Then the resurrection power became gold itself.
One thing to note is that you don’t have to have completed Valhalla’s main campaign or even the Asgard story arc to play Dawn of Ragnarok. Sure there are some returning faces, but for the most part, it feels standalone and if you know even the basics of Norse mythology, you won’t be left in the dark. You do, however, have to be at a certain point in the main campaign to start the expansion. Most notably you need to already be at your Viking settlement in merry olde England and have Valka’s building built.
If you do decide to jump in early, the expansion will boost you to the correct power level and loan you a starting set of gear and abilities. The loaned gear and abilities will disappear once you return to the waking world, but you’ll retain a significant power boost and whatever gear you pick up in the expansion. So be warned, it can unbalance the main campaign for you early on.
Despite, essentially, being more AC: Valhalla, Dawn of Ragnarok throws you into an interesting campaign, in a visually stunning setting with a story I would love to see continued. The game’s combat system needs a desperate overhaul but even that wasn’t enough to distract me from my enjoyment of the campaign as the hours rushed by.
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Google Stadia, Microsoft Windows
Developers: Ubisoft, Ubisoft Montreal
Reviewed on the Xbox Platform
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