I believe this is going to be my first thorough game review on steam. However, I believe this game deserves a well thought out and well laid out review. You will understand why this game deserves it as you read through the review.

But here is a tl;dr for people who have no time to read through this review:

Now, that all the busy ladies and gentlemen have left. Let us slowly take the above stated sections of the game and further break them down(in my opinion).

The survival aspect of the game is quite simplistic but unique in its own way. It gets the basics right in my opinion, not only that but Valheim has its own unique take on the concept of survival that is experienced through out certain actions you take in the game that dictate whether you are more likely or less likely to survive in different situations.

1. Let’s talk Food
The game gives you three slots for three different types of food and depending on the combinations of food you choose to eat you tend to gain different stats. Whether that be stamina, health regeneration of either so on and so forth.
The concept of mixing foods to gain different stats is beautiful and unique in its own way and encourages the player to go out of his way to pick those extra few mushrooms to make the carrot soup instead of munching on raw blueberries.

2. Buffs & Debuffs
The game gives you a choice of whether you want to sleep the night and gain a rested buff and have increased stats regeneration so you can take on challenges or venture out with a “wet” debuff at night in the swamp biome and risk losing your gear to a 2 star undead green Viking. *yikes*
The game does not force you to play a certain way but punishes or rewards you on the choices you make.

These are obviously not the only two points that come under the survival aspect of the game but how you approach these two points, I feel basically determines how often you survive or how often you need to run out naked to grab your corpse’s loot back.
I believe the game approaches the survival aspect of the game simplistically and beautifully but in my opinion, it could make use of some more “complexity”


Dangerous but fun. hectic but beautiful. The world map is gigantic, but the game forces you to go out and explore it.
Biomes of varying difficulties allow you to gain different items from mob drops. Those items and drops allow you to craft more items and have better building components.
Exploring dungeons grant you additional items and crafting recipe components and/or mark boss locations on your map forcing you to go seek further and bigger adventures.
You always feel the urge to go out of your way and just be absorbed by the beautiful act of the open-world exploration. The music in the background makes you feel like you are truly exploring the dangerous spooky swamps or sailing through a scary storm in the oceans or just enjoying the breeze in a warm sunny morning in the meadows.
However,there are game mechanics that defeat the purpose of exploration and make it feel like you are exploiting the act of exploration and not playing the game the way it is meant to be played.
The character’s inventory remains untouched when you log out and join another world, this means that you can skip mandatory long sails and ocean by transferring items that can’t be teleported such as ores to a different server and pass through the teleporter and then transfer back those items to your base. If at some point in the future, inventories can be server specific, and this will further force the player to play the game in the way it’s meant to be played. Maybe give players the option of having the server inventory locked or not?

The game makes the act of exploration risky, but fun and worthwhile if you avoid exploiting other features of the game to cut the act of exploration short.


Valheim borrows a lot from different games when it comes to combat, a lot of people may find the urge to compare the mechanics to games like dark souls. Although it is similar it is different in its own ways too.
Overall, the combat feels very good. The game gives you the choice to craft and use different weapons and reward you via skill levels the more you use a specific weapon over the other. In this way you truly feel like you are mastering a certain weapon and not all of them at once.
Another choice and reward this game offers in terms of combat.

I feel that these two features of the game really seal the deal and bring everything together.
Crafting of your weapons and or cooking of your meals to help you take on exploration and combat more efficiently.
Resting in your base to help you maintain buffs and that increases your chances of survival.
Or building your defenses to protect yourself against random raids from different biome monsters.
These two features truly bring the game together and transform an early access survival game to something much more robust and beautiful.

The crafting progression is quite unique and interesting; there are certain chains of items that unlock after defeating certain bosses. Or after visiting certain biomes and getting items or drops from there.

The building in this game is such a joy, building structures in Valheim tends to follow somewhat of a strict yet easy to understand structural integrity system. I’ve had a couple of YouTube videos to grasp almost everything about building, but it does seem intuitive at first.

However, in my opinion there are a lot of improvements that Valheim can see:

• performance fine tuning - I tend to struggle with framedrops on a rather powerful rig.
  
• Server specific character inventories.
  
• Increasing the number of bosses and mobs in the game.
  
• Introducing public servers with PVP forced on – that can maybe introduce base raiding and defense in the future against other players.

This game has so much potential to be truly one of the best games in its field.
I’d like to thank everyone responsible for bringing this game to life.


A review by
Al Sayad
Aal_sayad@outlook.com