Extremely fun game (bar the building gosh).
Played this with my friend a few years ago and we progressed well until we eventually came across the swamp monster and died, losing all of our things due to complications with the portal and not being able to get back to our area.

(26 hours on Steam)
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Controls/Gameplay - Basic Controls. Extremely fun game as you traverse the never ending biomes and oceans while having to fend yourself of dangerous monsters and trolls from their own biomes. The combat is this game is uniquely satisfying as well.

However, base building is a pain. It is difficult to get use to the controls whenever building and it is one of my only problems with the game.

Graphics & Sounds - Graphics is extremely unique and artistic. We rarely see a game being able to pull this style off and yet being so effective at it. Sound design is splendid as well, the OST and general ambience varies from different biomes and I thought that it was a nice touch. Really separates the tranquil to chaotic biomes apart.

Story - Nothing special, you basically have to scour the lands, fighting off bosses while exploring dungeons along the way.

Characters - Nothing of importance other than the bosses of each biomes.

Replayability - I could see this game being replayed since map generation is at random.

Overall - 4.5

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.