Valheim

Welcome to Valheim, the place where warriors go to prove themselves worthy. This is an open-world survival game with a Norse style. The world is procedurally generated, so everyone will have a different world. From there, you slowly work your way up from wooden sticks to mining silver and more. Your goal is to beat all the bosses of the world.

This game is still in early access, so things I say now might not still be true later on. Find it on Steam.

Valheim can be played multiplayer, but I’ve just been going about it in single player.

Though the game is in early access, it seems to already have the basics down really well. Combat is simple, but it does have a lot of different weapon types. You can block, dodge, and even parry with certain equipment. And you’ll want to parry as that is pretty useful. Building things work simply enough. You select a piece you want to build and rotate (only along the up-down axis) and then place it. Further pieces can snap on to other pieces for easy aligning.

The game has all the things you would expect from the genre including, and the mechanics are already pretty solid.

The graphical style is a sort of 3-D pixel style. It took a bit to get used to, but it actually looks fine and there are a lot of effects such as light rays and fog that make the game look cool.

All your actions work on stamina, from running to repairing buildings. I feel that stamina regains too slowly, but it does make managing stamina important. For instance, if you use all of it chopping down wood and an enemy shows up, you’re going to struggle. Especially since stamina drains when running so trying to get away to regain stamina also takes strategy.

The game does follow a strict progression sense. Each biome or area type can be considered its own tier of progression. For instance, you start in the Meadows. While you can go to more difficult biomes, there isn’t any reason to as you can’t do anything there without defeating the previous boss. In a way, the way through the world is set despite allowing you to go everywhere.

Of course, there are some advances tricks you can pull to skip around, but you can discover that for yourself. Stepping into each biome does feel new and exciting, though, and there is a noticeable difficulty jump each time. Care must be taken as you go forth.

Still, once you get to know the new place, it’s time to get the resources from it. The game can be a huge grind when it comes to gathering resources. Mining is slow, and you have a carry limit so you can’t bring back a lot at a time. You also need a huge amount of ores to make and upgrade new equipment. This leads to many hours doing the same thing, mining and getting more resources. In later biomes, the danger is high enough that you need to be alert while doing it, too.

Beyond mining, you also need wood to get coal to smelt ores or gather ingredients for food and mead. The balance of the game shifts to doing the same task over and over again. I would say you experience something new about 5% of the time and then do the same thing for the other 95%. So you can either be zen about it, or try to make things more efficient. Even then, efficiency also takes time to set up.

Building things can also be a challenge in the game. You need a crafting station to make basic stuff such as walls and roofs. Then, you need to make sure your crafting station is sheltered in order to use it to make weapons and equipment. Equipment also breaks as you use it, so you need a sheltered crafting station to repair it. That means no plopping down a station just to repair stuff, you’ll need to build at least a roof and some walls to get it to work.

The main case where it gets ridiculous is when you want to make a paved road. You need a crafting station to make it, but roads tend to go on for long distances. That means you need to build a base crafting station, then use that to make the advanced station, and then use that to pave the road. Once you’re out of range, you got to pickup and move the two crafting stations just to extend the road. I hope that gets changed.

As for your viking, your health and stamina can only be temporarily improved by eating food. However, you can permanently level up some skills such as various weapons, running, jumping and more. Slowly, you’ll feel your viking get stronger. Just don’t die as you lose skills when that happens. You’ll also drop all of your stuff, so I hope you have a spawn point nearby otherwise, it might be a really long journey to get back your belongings.

The game does have great atmosphere, though. You do feel like a viking trying to survive in harsh lands. Just wandering into new places looks great. The landscape is dotted with cool things to look at such as old ruins or rock formations. Nighttime gets dangerous, but still, take a look up at the sky during the night for a wonderful view.

Also, sailing in this game is great. While it is slow, the feeling of going out into the ocean is terrifying. The waves are just and just washes over your small boat. Then as the land slowly fades into the fog and there is nothing but water all around, you just feel a sense of foreboding and the desire to get back to land. I like to stick close to the shore as much as possible.

Valheim is a survival crafting game that has a slow pace. You’ll be doing the same thing over and over again as you slowly inch towards new content. It has a solid foundation from building to combat. There is a lot of content in the game already and more is planned to be added.

Find it on Steam.