Valheim is an amazing open world survival game with some QoL hiccups that can be easily remedied with mods.

In addition to most of your actions having XP and Levels, Valheim has the classic loop of: Gather materials > Upgrade your Gear > Fight Boss > Gather better materials with upgraded gear, rinse and repeat. A very addicting dopamine cycle that feels rewarding.

And for those who want to unwind, the game also provides the player with simple yet effective landscaping tools and a surprisingly complex building system. You can't just place blocks anywhere willy nilly, everything has to have a foundation or support to stay where it is placed. This turns building a large/tall structure into a bit of a puzzle, trying to turn your vision into an actually stable building. There's also farming and animal husbandry that goes hand in hand with landscaping and building to create some visually stunning AND functional bases.

The combat in the game is also fairly good, but has some issues that make it frustrating from time to time. The balance of using stamina for both attacking AND running makes it hard to kite enemies effectively, which makes some fights very exciting. And when you've got a shield, this lets you do one of my favourite moves in video games, parrying! If you time a block right before an enemy attack lands, you parry their attack which stuns them for a short duration. During this stun, your attacks do critical damage as the reward in addition to the enemy being unable to attack during the stun.
The issues that make fighting more annoying are height difference, where if you're fighting on a hill and the enemy is either below or above you, your attacks will very rarely land. There's also surrounding objects, since nearly everything in Valheim takes damage, including buildings, walls, the ground, bushes etc. and doing damage to multiple targets in one attack spreads your damage out, this leads to combat in tight corridors or small buildings a lot slower since your damage is being spread out to random walls or trees.

With Valheim having such a huge open world, it uses portals to aid with long distance back and forth travel. This is incredibly useful to save some time and make the game less of a walking simulator. But for some reason, some of the most important materials that you spend a lot of your time gathering from far away locations are excluded. You cannot bring ores or smelted bars through the portals with you. I can't think of a great reason for this decision other than encouraging multiple bases near some more dangerous areas, but the people that don't wish to do that will simply just build a boat to fill and use that to transport the metals to their home base. And depending on the wind, that trip might take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes of doing barely anything. Thankfully this is easily addressed with mods that make metals transportable through portals, but I wish the vanilla game had at least a command or world setting where it allows you to choose what can go through a portal.

Overall an awesome game with some very minor issues.