I’m about 20 hours into Valhalla. In my circle of friends, I talk A LOT of shit about Ubisoft’s open world formula, probably the result of brainwashing by Yahtzee, but I am having a really good time. I find myself having trouble putting it down to play other games, which is a good sign.

The game smartly lets you set, to some extent, how much Ubisoft-style handholding you want. You can’t turn it off entirely, but you can tone down the icon fatigue quite a bit. I see they are positioning this type of thing as “accessibility”, and that’s a good thing: it’s no longer being forced on True Gamers™ like myself, who loved Elden Ring until it got too difficult.

However, Valhalla is annoyingly buggy when it comes to Quick Resume. It’ll resume and then say it’s unable to save, then if I quit to the main menu it forgets that it’s running in HDR mode, and I have to close the entire game and re-open it. Just annoying, makes the console experience feel like playing on Windows PC, which totally invalidates all the compliments I paid to the Xbox the other day.