[Spoilers]
tldr: This is a game in which you play the role of a Thief who lives in a Utopean society where nobody locks their doors, or ever gets upset if you rummage through their house and take all their things. Even as they look right at you, ransack to your heart's content... because they are all too busy worrying about the ongoing alien invasion to notice.

Long version:
You're supposed to be a traindriver, but that's overshadowed by the bizzare start of the game where you find yourself mainly of wandering around cities, & ransaking homes. I'm reminded of Star Trek Generations where Klingons sabotage the chief engineer's visor to transmit what he sees, and are patiently waiting for him to go to engineering so they can see the Enterprise's shield frequency. The Engineer goes everywhere but engineering, to the point where one of the Klingons cries out in frustration; “The only engineer in Starfleet who doesn't go to Engineering!”. This is the story of a train driver, who would rather be anywhere else but on his train!

And given the monotony of his job on the train, who can blame him. The slowcomotive sequences draaaagg... you are subject to boring micromanagement of people and equipment. The riveting pulling down of levers, clicking of down arrows, fiddling of menus etc etc. The train section is basically the gameplay of Cook Serve Delicious that's been boiled until all the fun evaporated. Passengers, who are sometimes your reward for exploration, are particularly self-aware and understand just how middling the train sequence is, as demonstrated by how readily they will starve themselves to death at the earliest opportunity.

Upon arriving at every destination you will be subjected to a painfully contrived scenario that forces you to explore the town/city/village/place. It's a bit of a tragedy, because I don't believe it would have been that much more effort for the developer to construct a narrative reason for the driver to continually leave the train. Instead they chose to go with a succession of cooincidences. The exploration sequences are quite average, and they don't make up for the micromanagement sequences. Furthermore, the start of the game also suffers from the aforementioned discord between your ability to help yourself to the contents of containers, and the owners/residents staring right at you while you do it.

Later on in the game when the apocalypse happens, your ransacking will finally make sense, since the buildings are abandoned at that point. But really, how hard would it have been to shift the loot at the start of the game (prior to the apocalypse) from houses occupied by NPCs to places it would make sense for the driver to have access to, like railway buildings? There were containers in the station that the driver had access to as part of his job, and those could have been filled up as a reward for safely making it back. I don't expect games to be consistent with our reality, but I expect them to be self consistent with their own fictional reality.

The graphics are for the most part beautiful (although there are one or two areas that let it down). Such lovely graphics are absolutely wasted when paired with the gameplay. The game does a good job of establishing an interesting setting. The world is in the midst of a very tense situation. And it even goes so far as to maintain an appropriately forboding atmosphere to go with it. The idea of using a train as part of a narritive adventure is a good one. In fact, it's a really good one. Paired with the interesting world, the game really had the potential to do something incredible. So it's a bit of a letdown that it didn't. The game has a lot of flavor, that is undeniable. The fact that this game has very positive reviews shows there are a lot of people who value its particular flavor, even in spite of the gameplay. A point worth considering in its favor.

Gunplay is passable. Mele is of the punch and strafe backwards variety. You can throw objects, but every random object in the background that you can interact with (including other throwable objects) will turn the throwing of an object into a clown fiasco where you just drop the thing you wanted to throw at your feet instead. Ammo is suitibly scarce, which works well with the atmosphere and setting, but there are some parts that will make you burn through it like candy.

Some ladders let you scoot up and down them really quickly and let you attempt some fun fisticuffs with enemies while giving you a fair chance at escape if things go south. But there is another type of ladder that has enough added frames of animation to make the process painful, and to make things worse, during those frames you can't shoot. It gets old real quick having to watch as your character embodies the discount pixelart version of Conrad B. Hart from Flashback (in all his rotoscoped glory), for what feels like an eternity (but is likely only quarter of a second).

A cheap move the developers pull sometimes is to have half a dozen enemies waiting for you at the top or bottom of one of the slow ladders, in a room so small that unless you burn through your ammo wailing on them they will get some cheap hits on you, and there's nothing you can do about it since to try to escape would trigger the slow ladder animation and lock you down long enough for the enemies to kill you.. With this in mind, combat at the start of each level devolves into straffing backwards and meleing to conserve as much ammo as possible for the aforementioned deathtraps.

Maybe it's just me, but I like video game difficulties that are based on enemies being dynamic, interesting, and having a wide range of things they can do. Wheras here game spams a few enemies that all do one thing, and the difficulty is based on the level design getting the player into tight spots where limited mobility and slow ladders exasperate each other.

The interface is another ♥♥♥♥♥♥. You control your character with AWSD and E to interact, and mouse for aiming. There is a reticule for shooting, but you will also need to use the reticule for interacting with some objects (with their many varied interfaces), But the catch is, the game hides the reticule when you don't move the mouse! So every time you open a menu to do your job on the train, there will be a moment of discombobulation, while you work out where your mouse cursor is located when it comes back from invisibility.

In summary: a game that is quite atmospheric and builds a fascinating and dark world. It makes good use of the train to spark some feelings in the player, and as provocatively beautiful pixel art vistas roll by, it's hard not to be captivated by the charming concept and haunting world. Sadly the game doesn't follow through with all the other aspects of the game. With the effort put into worldbuilding sadly derailed by tedious gameplay. I wanted to finish it to find out whether the story lives up to the setting, but couldn't force myself to press on any further through the monotony.

I give this game two slowcomotives out of five.

I can't recommend it currently. But I'll update this review in a decade or so. Judging by current pace of the release schedule, I think it will finally be out of early access around 2032, which fits nicely into my schedule since I anticipate I'll need something to play in the lull just prior to Elder Scrolls VI releasing (on the 3/3/2033).

I cannot in good conscience recommend Valheim to new players because it skirts the border of that 'abandoned early access' category of games that is the reason most sane people just don't bother buying EA anymore. But, still, I do find value in this game; being a Star Citizen fan it's nice to have a game in my library with such a painfully slow release cycle as to make the Star Citizen release cycle feel fast by comparison.