Recent reviews by shory

I believe Valheim is what people would call a steal.
Considering the game's status as an early access product there is a hefty amount of content to go through, enough to last you for tens of hours even if you're doing your absolute best to blaze through it.

The game is incredibly replayable, and there are various different ways to enjoy the game, be it building, combat, farming, or exploration. I believe all of these go hand in hand in a very elegant way, binding game dynamics together in an expertly crafted gameplay loop that keeps on giving. As such, there is constant incentive to progress through the game and its various aspects.

There's a lot left to be desired in terms of optimisation, however. One of the game's most prominent aspects, building, sees the player raising bases with layers of functionality intended for purposes such as crafting, farming, herding animals etc. However, building an extensive base, placing many light sources and flattening large amounts of ground results in less than stellar performance. My system runs the game at a consistent 70-80 FPS on a 2070 Super, but tanks to a sad 15-20 in the town that I've built. This can be attributed to many different factors, but the core issue remains the same. Game's of similar breadth and quality have no issues running smoothly. Even titles that have done an infamously bad job at performance such as Cyberpunk 2077 have less issues in cities than Valheim does in a big base. As someone who enjoys building immensely, this is holding me back from enjoying the game in the way I want to, as elaborating on my building projects is only going to perpetuate my problems.

Before content patches and feature updates, I sincerely believe the game needs to double down on optimization. The game is incredible as is, and there is no reason for it to be bogged down by something like performance.

If these issues strike you as worrying, keep an eye on the game and the developer's interactions with the community. They seem to listen intently and work with the feedback they're given. I don't want to scare potential players away from an amazing game. If you don't build huge bases like me, you're probably not going to be suffering from these issues as much, anyway.

Thanks for the great work Iron Gate, and if you're ever looking for game designers enjoy my shameless plug.

I'm going to borrow a colleague's words when he called this game "Dark Souls: Greatest Hits", the game takes a lot of the high notes of the previous game*—Dark Souls 1—and reuses them, albeit in a generally refreshing way. The game places a higher focus on boss fights, with a lot of monumental fights, many of which could be seen as final bosses if they were placed in other games.

That said, the game fails to deliver the tightly connected world design structure that made so many people fall in love Dark Souls 1. Moreover, the way stamina (and rolling) has been balanced makes it a lot easier to perform dodgerolls consistently simply through mashing. This could make the game feel a little bit less 'skillful', whatever that specifically means. If those things aren't a major holdup to you, then this title will probably provide you with a consistently high quality experience that tries its very best to please people who played the previous game*.

Overall I had a wonderful time with this game and found that its updated mechanics make for a somewhat smoother experience than the previous title*.

(*we don't talk about Dark Souls II)