Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Guide – 10 essential tips and tricks

Learn how to become a Viking legend.

It’s launch day for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and, chances are, if you’ve got a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S on preorder, this is one of the games due to arrive alongside your shiny slab of next-gen hardware.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla should be largely familiar to those who have previously played Origins and Odyssey. It’s a gritty action roleplaying game layered with new and refined features to keep the rebooted formula feeling fresh.

Whether you’re a seasoned assassin or just happen to fancy a Viking romp, we’ve come up with XX tips to help you and Eivor on your joint voyage.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Tips & Tricks

1. You should boot up Ubisoft Connect as soon as you can. This is a meta layer for Ubisoft titles that offer exclusive challenges and rewards. It’s purely optional though there’s an item here that can help you out in those early stretches of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Spend 100 U points to unlock the Spartan Bow. Even after a dozen or so hours, it remains a permanent part of our Eivor loadout.

2. Experiment with every weapon type. In Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla you’ll come across various weapon classes from two-handed swords to flails, each with their own unique movesets. Mix, match, and get a feel for which combination suits you.

3. Staying with weapons, let’s talk about shields. If playing on tougher combat difficulty settings you’ll want to use that free fighting hand to defend yourself. While dual-wielding and two handed-weapons allow for quicker or more powerful attacks, the defensive capability of a shield can counter this. That said, if you master the parry in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla then you can pick up any weapon.

4. Upgrade your settlement as often as you can. While it’s tempting to blitz through story quests, raid monasteries, and explore England, you should be returning to Ravensthrope and spending resources on new buildings, each of them yielding new activities or bonuses.

5. Gunnar’s forge is the first upgrade you’ll buy for Ravensthorpe. Whenever making a journey to your base, pay the Norse smithy a visit – here you can exchange Ingots (looted from chests and elite enemies) to upgrade your weapons and armour, boosting their stats and allowing you to slot runes.

6. You should also waste no time in building a bureau for the Hidden Ones. This is where Assassins Basim and Haytham will be quartered and while it’s easy to try and ignore the Templar/Assassin conflict as on your Viking escapades, you’ll learn new techniques. It will also open a new menu tab called “Order”, populating the world with agents who need killing. If you’re late in constructing the bureau there’s a good chance you’ll need to backtrack to kill these Order members.

7. Sýnin the raven is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. From the sky, your avian assistant can get a general overview of your surroundings, scout enemies camps, and relay important intel. If you’re a keen treasure hunter then sending Sýnin can often reveal entrances and pathways which you can mark out.

8. Tailor the difficulty settings in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla to suit your playstyle. Instead of the bog standard “easy, normal, and hard” you can dial combat, stealth, and exploration to your own tastes. Fancy challenging battles but suck at stealth? You can adjust accordingly, making enemies tougher yet less aware when Eivor is sneaking around.

9. Acquire Books of Knowledge whenever they are in reach. Looting treasure is great, sure, though these chunky tomes will bless Eivor with new abilities. You can slot four melee and four ranged abilities at one time, each one helping to make battles more dynamic and flashy.

10. Gather natural resources as you move between objectives. Ore deposits and patches of wildlife are scattered throughout Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, offering the materials needed to upgrade gear. They can also be spent on increasing Eivor’s arrow and ration capacity. If hunting is proving too hard you can always buy leather, ore, and more from merchants. While you’re at it, check their stock for runes.


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Senior Editor bursting with lukewarm takes and useless gaming trivia. May as well surgically attach my DualSense at this point.