AC Vikings
So about 30 hours in now, just finishing up my 3rd story arc in Ledecestre (btw, fuck trying to spell Medieval England city names without google), and I like this a lot now! But everyone I've talked to whose playing it likes it for different reasons.
Makes me think AC is in that Final Fantasy situation where everyone's version of a good AC game is something different so good luck trying to please all the fans.
For me I actually really enjoy that the game has no central story. Breaking it into 5-10 hour story arcs, each in their own region with side stuff just makes this like the best pick up and play AC ever. I'm not compelled to beat this in a few weeks or months. Or ever play it as my main game I'm playing. But I'll probably beat it at some point some day. I like that I can just turn on the PS5 and quick resume (not like I'm playing anything else on that system) and toss up the raven and see what's the next dot between me and my next story mission and then ride over and do something. And just do a few of those and then shut it off and I'm good. Everything takes like 10-20 mins so it's really perfect bite-sized segments.
The world events that are like mini-mini-quests are pretty enjoyable and give the locations a bit more life. Hunting for treasures and solving the puzzles or platforming to get to them is fun. The only thing that totally sucks as is the flying paper chases from AC3 which still suck because the platforming controls will never be good on a tight timer in AC. If I was reviewing the game I'd subtract an entire point out of 10 for bringing those shitty things back.
But otherwise it looks nice, really good sharp textures and art direction, runs great (and makes me pretty impressed with the PS5), good music.
I think the weakest part overall is that this is a really uninteresting time period/location for the setting. Maybe historically it's interesting, but basically Dark Ages England is just like all the cool looking stuff from Roman Empire days are gone and we're not at the next cool architecture period, so it's an entire game map of drab boring villages & ruins. I think I would've rather had a Roman Empire era England, but I get that coming from Greece that'd be too similar, so they went with this.
Valhalla is good for everything other than cool looking buildings/cities to climb through. Though that's probably my favorite part of AC games so it is a bit of a bummer, but the story arcs and exploration make up for it.
Oh and I'm playing with very minimal HUD and it's working well with this not much handholding AC game. I keep lifebars and stuff, but that's about it. Instead I just swap between the map and using my raven to locate the next item and then head in that direction. Makes exploring and figuring things out pretty fun.