30 minutes of Assassin's Creed Valhalla gameplay footage has leaked

While we'll have to wait until July 12 and the Ubisoft Forward event to get anything more official about Assassin's Creed Valhalla, half an hour of leaked gameplay footage is doing the rounds should you feel the need to see what is labeled "WORK IN PROGRESS", complete with NPCs standing around doing nothing in the middle of a fight and some animations that don't look quite final.

The YouTube video has been taken down, but it's been uploaded elsewhere. Give it a watch and you'll get to see a quest that involves uniting the folk of East Anglia to assault a castle held by one of the bad Vikings. Which you do with the aid of one of the good Vikings, who provides you with longships. While the interface, inventory, and much of the combat still seem a lot like Odyssey, there are some differences. Riding a horse through Northwic has a very Witcher 3 vibe to it, and I immediately flashed back to riding through Velen to see the Bloody Baron. There's a cinematic camera option that's a bit Red Dead Redemption, though it makes you bump into every other rider on the road—another sign this is early footage.

After fighting some wolves and gathering together Anglo-Saxons who have been shown the violence inherent in the system by their Viking oppressors, an assault begins. It opens with longboats in a storm being fired on by burning arrows as they approach the castle walls. A boat full of what is presumably gunpowder deals with the stone walls in a battle of anachronism versus anachronism, after which Eivor and her troops fight through successive gates.

While the combat is familiar, even featuring a version of the Spartan kick, it does include the ability to stomp fallen enemies and grab fallen weapons to yeet at enemies, just like in the trailer. There's also a special ability that hurls handaxes at multiple opponents, catching allies as well a couple of times.

The climax is a boss fight with a Viking named Rued and his hunting wolf, after which there's a moral choice moment where you can spare him or finish him off. Then we get to see the inventory, which allows for hiding certain gear if you don't want your helmet to be visible, and the skill tree which appears as a constellation of stars, like in Skyrim or Grim Dawn or probably several other games I'm forgetting.

Last we heard it's got a release date of "Holiday 2020." Here's everything we know about Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.