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.

A fast paced 3v3 Arena shooter with a large emphasis on movement, abilities and classes.

You have the choice between Shift, Vector and Gunn. Think of these as the Light, Medium and Heavy classes respectively. With each class having its own abilities and movement properties, they all have their own purpose in the game(I'll be specifically talking about the CTF game mode, as TDM is a lot more loose with your choices).

Shift is a faster, smaller and harder to hit target. This combined with its healing abilities makes it a hard enemy to catch and eliminate, making Shift the go-to for assisting the capture of the flag.

Vector is the medium class, with abilities that assist in one-on-one combat as well as making its way around the maps. This guy will be the one doing the heavy lifting in CTF, as it can eliminate flag defenders in a quick manner using it's very combat focused abilities. One of the most potent and most versatile abilities, not only for the class, but for the entire game would be the grappling hook. Using the grappling hook, Vector can grapple onto enemies, pulling itself to melee range and deal a huge chunk of damage instantly. This combo of grapple + melee is definitely the bread and butter of the vector class, as it is the fastest TTK combo in the game and it also lets you pick up any health drops you might get from killing the enemy. The grappling hook can also be used to latch onto most surfaces in the game, which lets you start an extremely fast wall ride that is faster than the Shift class.
What you combine with your grappling hook depends on what you're going for, but for a very combat heavy combo that absolutely wrecks house, the damage booster ability takes 15/120 of your health and boosts your damage by 50% for 5 seconds. With your grappling hook and melee combo being your close ranged guaranteed kill, using damage booster with a longer ranged weapon can make you a threat at medium to long ranges as well.

Gunn is a big large tank, reminiscent of reinhardt from Overwatch or Heavy from TF2. As the designated defender class, Gunn is decked out with shields, traps as well as a pseudo-grappling hook that grabs enemies to you, which is another nasty way to melee someone right after. His traps also slow you down in an area, which leaves any squishy little flag grabbers vulnerable to your team.

As you may have noticed, my words for Gunn and Shift were very brief, that's mostly cause I've almost exclusively played Vector as it seems to be the most versatile and potent class as of the February 2024 Steam Next Fest open beta.

For movement, you have dashing, sliding, wallriding as well as rail grinding. Combining all these movement types can get you up to some ludicrous speeds when used right, namely the wallride doesn't seem to have an upper limit on speed. But when landing on a rail or starting a slide, they will take you back to a more sensible speed that isn't as crazy. Using all these to traverse the map gives the player near infinite choices when running for the enemy flag, or chasing down to get your own flag back.

To sum it up, Contenders: Arena, when mastered is an amazing experience that gets the blood pumping as you either defend your flag, chase down the enemy flag or just gun down opponents in the chaotic battlefield. The game has huge potential as a fun competitive shooter much like Unreal Tournament or Quake but for the modern audience.