Valheim

While this game feels awkward at times, it is pretty fun and as far as early access games go I would consider it to be promising. I am interested in where this game will go in the next couple years assuming there are plans for it.

Out of nowhere this game became virally popular and it's easy to see why. It's a solid open world survival craft with an interesting fantasy setting and action packed combat for fun with the pals. I am interested to see where it goes but I will not be returning any time soon, it needs a lot of work.

THE GOOD:
- The combat feels great and rewarding, with a swing and hit, dark souls-esque stagger system. I can't get enough of the screen shake when I attack an enemy, and heavy hits sending the enemies flying, it feels so satisfying to kill enemies who stand no chance, and getting swung on by a log troll feels really dangerous.
- The graphics are beautiful and minimal yet also detailed in their own way, say no more.
- The building system is excellent and easily the most polished and extensive part of the game, if you like to build, this game is great for it.
- The preparation for a trek feels important and in bad conditions you can certainly get slogged down and die. Being well fed and rested is crucial to survival and if you're not, you'll certainly die when adventuring.

THE BAD:
- The "survival" aspect of this game is mediocre. You don't need to eat or drink to live, you could effectively sit in a house forever and not suffer whatsoever provided its in a safe area with the vermin-like, mischievous Greydwarfs & Greylings, who are much like the troublemaking teenagers on a Halloween night you'd see in those dated movies: TP'ing houses and running around vandalizing pumpkins. Meals are just health and stamina buffs. That's it. One's max health or max stamina is determined by the three meals they ate or didn't eat. Weather is mostly a debuff. I prefer a real survival system of hydration and satiation, or weather that matters.
- Progression. Trying to move forward up technologies, skill levels, and ages (if you'd call them that), feels like a total grind and often very hardly rewarding if noticeable at all, and when it feels rewarding, that's a fleeting feeling as the next enemies make you feel like you're fighting them with sticks and they're fighting you with the sharpest weapons in all of the land. By the time you grind the gear from the area with the once-were dangerous enemies and resource nodes, you've already conquered them and fully understand them, so you end up meeting the next, stronger enemies and resource nodes that dwarf your shitty gear. It turns into grind or die repeatedly, or even worse: grind AND die repeatedly.
- Farming is so boring and a big time chore, you will certainly wish for any kind of efficient system, why can't I plant more than one seed at a time? Why do I have to point at each crop to harvest each, one at a time. Why cant I harvest handfuls? Upgraded cultivator? If you're growing for your crew, it is an awful chore.. I love farming in games, but not this one. Especially with so few crops
- Scaling in this game is god awful, with the amount of players in a radius, monsters become far more difficult (stat-wise) and the grind necessary to adequately fight those monsters is ridiculous and painful because the resource nodes don't scale with the amount of players, but the monster difficulty does. So you'll find yourself doing chores collecting scarce materials for hours just to suit up your group and if you read my section on progression above: it very quickly becomes worthless as you hop out of the pan into the fire.
- WHERE DO WE GO NEXT? I don't read wikis or follow guides when I play so I tend to rely on the game's ability to show me the way (or at least make it intuitive to some extent) and Valheim hardly helps the player at all and looking up how to tame boars and where to find silver was a must. We fought our way through the plains after the black forest getting a handful of items we had no idea how to utilize (especially those damn black metal scraps) only to search for the mountain biome and struggle to figure out how to traverse it without freezing to death and making lines of campfires just to get murdered by drakes and wolves felt like shit, just to somehow find the hidden silver ore and THEN make the lox capes and wolf capes but hey we tried the frost mead after 20 campfires and 15 deaths so eventually we progressed, and it still felt like shit.

- Difficulty in Valheim gets so steep so fast. Fighting greydwarfs to trolls to draugrs is great fun and feels linear and proper. BUT THEN, plains biome and everything is super dangerous, even the individual goblins and shaman are as challenging or more dangerous than the bosses leading up to them. the mountains very simply just have frost resistance gear to counter so much of the damage you'd receive. Which is so silly. Don't even get me started on fighting Yagluth. God. what an agonizing mess. After hours of preparation, we still died dozens of times because every weapon and arrow we shot did no damage to it except for the two silver weapons we made.

Even though I am a strict blind player especially with games like this that have exploration and discovery: DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME BLIND. save hours of your time and dodge the frustration and confusion that comes with this counterintuitive design.

Valheim is a great survival game with some quirky graphics that take some getting used to. The progression is very linear and easy to understand however is very punishing if you aren't in the right places. Nonetheless the game is great and really feels like its own world. The first time I found a troll I ran away screaming, and my rage at being killed by a falling tree and my first encounter with a deathsquito is hard to forget! The building in this game can also be very fun and is easy to understand. Highly recommend this game, especially if you have a small group to play with.