Welcome to our article where we discuss our experiences for the latest AAA title to arrive on Google Stadia, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla!
This review is not intended to be a plug for the game as more than enough reviews and praises have been sung for this game. Gaming Boulevard has recently reviewed this game as well and you can find our review on the following link.
Personally, I follow our review for the most part and despite personally rating the game at a 9 out of 10, I can see where my colleague Lander is coming from and I respect his arguments greatly. But this article is not about how great this game is and how it should be in the annual GOTY conversation, no, this is all about how a triple-A game delivers on Google Stadia.
I have played various games on Google Stadia before and while there were games from pretty much any genre, this is my first experience on the platform with the biggest exposure possible. Assassin’s creed is a gorgeous game on Xbox, but on Google Stadia, sadly not so perfect.
First off, the technical side of things, I played at various times of the day with a minimum download speed of 68 and like always, my upload was always above 20. With the 20 gigabytes announced for hours of gaming experience, I was well above the required speed. I always do my due diligence to see whether or not my bandwidth might be the culprit, but it is usually stable enough to handle the stream. For testing purposes, I also made sure no additional bandwidth hogs were active like any downloads/updates or Netflix.
My first gameplay was on 4K and that was not the best of experiences. Sadly enough I encountered quite a few issues on 4K streaming and while they never were of the technical kind, I had numerous visual glitches happen. From blurry faces from people, I passed by to unnatural blackish insides of huts. I compared them to the game on Xbox Series X to make sure they were not just random, but I can vouch for the glitches being real.
Another thing that happened, I often had blurred fighting sequences. Nothing I could not endure, but it was very noticeable throughout the several hours worth of testing that I did. In all fairness, I am being very critical but I honestly feel I should be because aside from the visual glitches, the game played quite properly. Nothing out of the ordinary happening otherwise and well, I was already quite happy with my experiences.
But then I played the game on a full HD and that was nearly perfect. The game suddenly became that much better, aside from some faces still being in low resolution, I had literally no issues with it. Double-checking my bandwidth and not finding anything wrong, just to be 100% sure.
In conclusion, Google Stadia is a great home for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and it already proves that both the game and the service are ready for the next experience out there! I do wonder if I had better bandwidth if my experience would have been even better?
