I don't usually write reviews, but I will make the effort here because I'd really like to save you from trying out this game. No, honestly, don't do this to yourself unless you're deeply masochistic. Most games are fun - this one however, teases you with fun but is mostly just pain.

First off: if you don't have at least 5-10 friends to play this with you, forget about it. Valheim's gameplay is designed as a private MMO and is a complete waste of money if you intend to single-player it, because it's literally impossible to finish the game alone. You'll hit a wall long before you're even halfway through it.
Side-note: a group of friends also comes in handy to be able complain to each other just how much you hate every aspect of this game.

We played in a group of 4 for a bit (sorry did I say "play"? I meant grinded, Didn't really get to play all that much between all the repetitive grinding). The difficulty keeps ramping up exponentially as you progress (where difficulty only means hours spent grinding), so that we eventually saw ourselves forced to lower the difficulty setting more and more, which allowed us to get a little further in the game while also limiting damage to our sanity. Eventually that option hit rock bottom though, so we also threw a bunch of mods at it to try and make things somewhat more reasonable, which was a glimmer of hope but ultimately to no avail.
I don't see much room for personal improvement or skill in the game's mechanics, it's mostly about patience and resilience. Keep doing the same crap over and over again until you happen to make it a single step further, after which the cost for the next step increases tenfold. Rinse and repeat.

Usually, the high difficulty of hard games heightens the feeling of success whenever you achieve something, but Valheim somehow manages to do the opposite. All you get is a hint of relieve, paired with a disheartening realisation of what's next.

The more we kept playing, the less I still could make out the game in this game.
We left every play session feeling somewhere between mildly frustrated and completely pissed off.

With all this considered and after spending the past 4 hours on a boat, doing nothing but trying to find a path to the next waypoint through this unnecessarily large and fragmented world, I'm in no way compelled to ever start the game again.

My job at work feels more like a game than Valheim and is certainly more fun. At some point this game is nothing but a chore and you're torturing yourself by trying to finish it.

I want to start this off by saying this is a fun game that feels like the developers went out of there way to make unenjoyable to play. From the extreme stamina requirements to perform any action and the awful stamina recovery. The extreme amount of metal used to craft and upgrade anything. The insane amount of damage you take from creatures and how insignificant armor and armor upgrades feel. The only way you get better at anything in the game is skills, but you lose your skills every time you die so it never feels like you're getting better at anything. I want to go through all of these and other complaints that contain spoilers in their own sections to really break them down and give my opinion on how to fix them for an official release.

**spoilers ahead**

Stamina - Stamina is a core feature of every survival game I've played, some handle it better than others but valheim is the worst by far. Every action requires stamina and a lot of it swinging an axe to chop a tree is around 15 stamina a swing and chop a tree down, break the log into 2 pieces, and then break both pieces into actual wood takes more stamina than you have at early parts of the game and even later on since you rarely want to eat 2 stamina heavy meals. So you then have to sit there as you meter fills up so slowly and this never gets better throughout the entire game until you get to really far into the mistlands and it only lasts for 5m. The other thing that effects stamina is conditions, some of these are good and some of these are really bad. My biggest issue is without rested bonus the entire game feels unplayable. You have to keep running back to your base just to sit there for 30 seconds to get a bonus that at early levels only lasts 5m and for me currently after beating the mistlands lasts for a whole 17m. This is a game with a massive world and all these really cool areas to explore, so why the hell am I almost required to go back to base every 5-20m to get a bonus just so I can actually play the game without sitting in place watching a meter fill up. God forbid you tried to play the game at night before getting frost resistance. The cold condition is crippling (-50% recovery speed to stamina and health). The fact you can be in the swamp at night and have the following conditions: cold, wet, and not rested makes the swamp so frustrating because you will die all the time. I love the idea of get gud but dying not because you suck at the game but because you don't have enough stamina to even swing your weapon or run away is BS.
*My solution to this is simple just increase the base stamina generation by a LOT I mean rested bonus level regen just as a base, increase rested bonus for double the time minimum and this needs to stack on top of increased base stamina regen. I am fine with the conditions being a hindrance as long as I normally have enough stamina to just play the game.

Metal Requirements - I will give credit where it's due having free repairs in these kinds of games is so nice. A system like what Grounded has is so annoying it makes me not even care about armor. So to craft a single set of lvl 1 bronze armor it takes 15 bronze. That is 30 copper and 15 tin, why the hell do I need 3 pieces of refined metal to make the very first metal in the game when no other metal in the game is like this. Make it 2 copper and a tin makes 2 bronze that's fine but right out the gate this is such a tedious annoying thing to deal with when bronze armor is barely better than troll hide armor. A single set of bronze lvl 4 armor costs 69 bronze that is 138 copper and 69 tin. WHAT THE F@*K? these upgrades are barely noticeable and cost so much there is no reason to ever go above lvl 2 or 3. A set of lvl 3 bronze armor gives 36 armor and then you can spend a good 2 hours or more just to get 6 more armor. Then when you finally get to move onto the next generation of armor it doesn't even feel that much stronger which gets into my main issue with armor which is will go over in the next section. Tool/weapon cost requirements are like this too but you just never need higher than lvl 1 or 2 items and lvl 2 is normally just for durability.

Mistlands - That's right I saved the best for last. I will have to try extremely hard to not use profanity and obscene language when discussing this region. I do not care how much you like to grind or how much you enjoy a difficult game, this region WILL break you. First off who thought it would be a good idea to have players run around for hours basically blind? You go through all the trouble of beating the boss in the plains just so you can see a whole 2 meters in front of you and sometimes because the fog glitches and doesn't load properly you just can't see your character at all. I also noticed the wisp needs time to illuminate an area so as you're running around the wisp doesn't even light up anything. Enemies will appear out of no where and I do not know why but I find so many 1 star seekers in the mistlands.
THE MISTLANDS FEEL COMPLETELY EMPTY AT TIMES. It's just rock cliffs and watching a YT video on your second monitor because you can't see anything in the game anyway. I will be walking for easily 5-10 minutes without seeing a dungeon, ancient skeleton, or an enemy. I had to spend over 2 hours and went through 3 different mistland biomes to find a single dungeon because I needed cores. Granted one of those three was rather small and only took like 20-30 min to explore. No other biome is this devoid of dungeons. Black forest and swamp have dungeons everywhere, the mountain and plains have far fewer dungeons/camps but I always found at least one per biome of significant size.

Let me praise the game on some cool aspects.
#1 Boss fights are so much fun and actually balanced - As awful as I think the scaling for normal creatures is in this game I found the boss fights to be amazing. I did not care for the elder but I was new to the game and you don't have health potions that point so I spent most of it hiding behind a pillar. The boss fights feel challenging but doable. I find it ridiculous that a 2 star or even 1 star mob can do more damage than the biomes boss but whatever.
#2 Exploration and a really cool world that's actually a globe - I enjoyed sailing around with my friend and exploring so much in this game at the earlier parts. I'm not going to complain about metal teleportation because I do like having to sail around. I just want to be able to move the metal to said boat easier via the belt and having silver not weigh 40% more.
#3 So many diverse tasks - There are so many fun side projects in this game like farming, breeding, base building, cooking, crafting, ect... and they all actually matter aside from breeding. It's a creative way to get players to actually do the side projects and not just build a fire with 2 walls, a roof so you can place a bed like Palworld.
#4 Steamlined Progression system - I played through the game without having to really look anything up. Games like Terraria I call wiki games. They're games you get annoyed with and just end up having the wiki pulled up 24/7. This game is not like that and does such a good job revealing new resources to players to the point you never really miss anything in a biome.

As I said at the start I do really like this game I just feel like there are a lot of artificial roadblocks put in place that do not need to be there. I'm at 109 hours and I'm just getting to the ashlands. I figured I should give my thoughts on the game and hope these things get changed. I would love to do another play-through when the game is officially released if these complaints are ever addressed. The major ones being stamina, mob damage balance, and how much I hate the mistlands.
*I had to remove some sections due to steams character limit.*

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