Valheim isn't without its charms. It offers a relatively unique experience in the way of a medieval survival-craft multi-player RPG with genuinely interesting sailing mechanics and a good amount of world immersion. Beyond that and perhaps on a deeper level, it's the sheer thrill of self actuation that's enough to get a sizeable amount of people hooked on these types of games and Valheim is one of the games that strives to do this. Watching your character go from a useless idiot that can barely climb up a hill or out of water while dying to a boar to being able to sprint a marathon to the other side of the zone to hunt down trolls twice your size strikes on those chords of deep RPG satisfaction that the genre should want you to feel.

Tragically though, it's this precise thing that Valheim struggles with in one sense while being great at it in the aforementioned sense. To put it bluntly, the game is devoid of much in the way of things to do in its world to justify its length, and as a result, it slows down the pace of the game to an absolute crawl to prevent you from noticing just that. All of the game systems that should and in a sense, do have you feel as though you're growing your character also feel like they are conspiring to work against you in just how slow progress moves in the game because of multiple factors such as extremely limiting bag space, extremely limiting weight system, extremely stingy stamina mechanics, and also because of how arbitrarily punishing the penalties are for making mistakes such as dying and losing 5% of all of your experience across every skill(???) and having to corpse walk to get your things back while your being mindlessly chased by mobs. It feels like the game is very deliberately and transparently designed to slow you down as much as humanly possible without losing you entirely. This all wouldn't really be much of an issue if the game had more in the way of content to break up the monotony of fetching resources and backtracking to your base on foot or an interesting gameplay loop to keep you hooked but as it stands, all it does is force you to notice the kinks in the proverbial armour such as the sloppy combat mechanics, sloppy building mechanics, obtuse menus, buggy and stupid AI that often would rather walk into walls and trees as well as spin around in circles instead of realistically outnumbering or overpowering you, the game's movement's inability to gracefully handle elevation, especially near water. It doesn't stop there but I'll spare you.

Now this is a game that's in active development, and is seeing regular updates to its content. It could very well be, and I would hope that my complaints about it do not hold over time. But for what it is right now, I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone but those that know exactly what they're getting themselves into. This isn't a very well rounded experience and it likely won't be for the foreseeable future. It needs more content and more polish, and It needs it quickly before it starts to show its age. I pray that it gets it before other similar games come along and bury it like many permastuck early access titles have went through.

Played from – to: (2021-02-23 – 2021-03-11)
‣ 5/10 – I will just sit down and wait for a full release or huge updates.
‣ Game Audio / Soundtrack - 7/10
‣ Graphics – 8/10
‣ Atmosphere – 6/10
‣ Side Activities / Exploration – 5/10
‣ AI – 6/10
‣ Ragdolls / Physics – 6/10
‣ Movement – 5/10
‣ Combat – 4/10
‣ Final notes: Since the game is in early access it is not finished and even though there is a simple end goal which to us is beating all the bosses, we could not keep playing this game. Yes, this is a fun survival game, but I don’t think I would have played it solo. Even after starting this game, I was not fully committed. Valheim to me was not some amazing new survival game that should deserve all the overly positive reviews and praise it got in such a short period of time. Overall, it is very cluncky and still very early in its development. There are barely and biomes to explore, enemies to fight and stuff to do, to be honest. Progression is slow and traveling from your base back to some far-off land because your portal broke is plainly a waste of fucking time. The fact that you cannot transport ores through the portal without a community mod is fucking astonishingly stupid. Combat in this game is jack shit, it is slow unresponsive and boring. Exploring feels useless and dead, the sound design is nothing to be amazed at either. The only thing that felt good were the unique graphics and how the pixel art style made the game look. I’m sorry but at its current state this game is not something everyone should praise. Yes, it is an early access game, but holy shit am I tired of these half assed early access games that give you 0 things to do and fuck all unfinished game mechanics.

Joguinho legal, divertido, tem uma progressão um pouco esquisita, as vezes rápida demais, as vezes devagar demais, balanceamento meio duvidoso, sinto que os inimigos dão muito dano as vezes, mesmo que você tenha armaduras e itens muito bons, e perder os seus itens longe de casa e ter que ir buscá-los de novo sem nenhuma proteção definitivamente deixa ele mais frustrante, o que pode fazer você dropar dele sem nem chegar nos chefes mais avançados.
Joguei ele com alguns amigos, e não consigo imaginar como seria jogar isso sozinho, imagino que deva ser ainda mais frustrante e entediante.

Pretty much every review I could find of this game hails it as the greatest thing since sloppy head, idk - it's good I guess! It has a lot of sensible design decisions that I like and I appreciate how it leans into realism in its building, having to actually build support structures and consider how real life architecture would function, but I feel like if you've played enough Minecraft this game isn't really doing much you haven't seen before!

It's very pretty even in Early Access and it has some great cosy vibes when you get a base setup and just chill out with a friend by the fire, but it also has a lot of frustration in its poorly communicated mechanics basically necessitating a guide, and in its random world generation standing a very good chance of fucking you over. Me and my pal had a pretty good time with this, but wound up giving up on it when the 2nd boss spawned in literally 5 islands away from the starting island and we kept getting one-shot by enemies from the much tougher biomes we had to cross through to reach it! Very frustrating when you keep having to scratch and claw your way to another island and the moment you make landfall you're killed by an enemy that's supposed to be from 30 hours in the future!

Once this leaves Early Access this could definitely be something special, there's a lot of good pieces in place. But right now I'm not sure I see what all the hype is about.