Really cool game to play through with a group of friends.

Pros:
• Beautiful graphical style
• Great sense of progression, reminds me of Terraria
• Fun boss fights
• Really cool building mechanics
• Satisfying sailing

Cons:
• A lot of grinding (depends on how many people, but with just 3 of us we had to mine SOO MUCH just to make us armor and weapons)
• The world is very large, and if you're unlucky with your world, it may take hours of sailing to find a new biome or structure
• Minerals can't be taken through portals, which is annoying when you have your whole forge at home but already mined up all the minerals nearby so now you have to sail for 5 hours just to make a BRONZE SWORD

While the cons were annoying, mods fixed pretty much everything for me so yeah.

As someone who bounced off Minecraft and NMS, this scratched an itch here for a month. The combat jank is actually really fun in my opinion, definitely with elements of Souls-games with the dodge roll/stamina/blocking. Sailing on a ship has an appropriate amount of sim elements like wind / deteriorating boats / monsters to keep you on your toes. Exploration + jank combat = good stakes.

What ultimately fell apart for me is the late game. You simply increase the power of your weapons from wood —> bronze —> iron —> etc. But the abilities don’t change or grow in complexity. Coupled with ok boss design you kinda start to feel the grind without system intertwining complexity.

Maybe if it had an MMO-style environment with job specializations (via mods), or weapons with abilities that can be crafted or forged, there might be more to chew on.

But it’s still in beta so TBD. I just saw that quests are being added, but I doubt this will help fix the late game design problems. It’s also visually bleh and the music is non-existent.

I fell in love with the mix of PS1 textures and RTX lighting. The gamedesign shines in this because nobody really holds your hand, you gotta be curious and like to explore to then advance further into the game. But overtime, the game can feel a bit too long or grindy. I always feel a bit tired halfway through the game and it makes me sad because I never really got to experience the end game. The game is great but the pace is maybe a bit too slow. Try it with friends, you will not regret it, there's plenty to do.

Je suis tombé amoureux du jeu alors même qu'il est très loin d'être finie, c'est dire. Le système de build est ultra bien pensé mais très technique si vous voulez faire des construction réellement belle, la progression est très jouissive et malgré une difficulté un peu mal géré à mon gout on se laisse entrainer par l'ambiance calme et reposante apporter par la BO du jeu que je trouve perso géniale bien que maigre par moment. Avec quelque années de développement en plus il a le potentiel de devenir l'un des meilleurs jeux d'action survie en plus d'être une super expérience en multijoueur.

um jogo divertido de sobrevivência, traga amigos para jogar junto e você nem vai ver a hora passar.

tendo um sistema de Construção um tanto quanto realista que me conquistou de cara, além de que o jogo introduz muito bem um sistema de rpg, sua habilidade de cortar madeira vai melhorando, de minerar e etc. mas tudo de maneira balanceada é claro para não deixar massante.

Dica de amigo: cuidado com os lobos, a mordida doí

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.

Amazing pacing, progression, and addicting as fuck. Some biomes are obviously better than others, and it can get quite grindy at some points.

Bosses are good, but not amazing. The score makes them feel pretty epic, though.

The best building I have experienced personally.

Great atmosphere.

The graphics are simple, but effective. Charming.

Exploration is great in the beginning, but after a while you realize all the biomes are the same everywhere, so finding Black Forest #10 is not that fun. Hopefully as they release new biomes, they will fill more of the map and exploration might feel more fun.

My favorite crafting survival game of all time (so far), and I can´t wait to follow the development.