Recent reviews by RadTheReptile

Valheim has all the elements of what should be a very good game. Crafting, looting, good pacing, bosses. A lot of good things are in this game. Yet the flaws it has ruin the good. The game world is well designed with cliffs and biomes that are all interesting. But then you realize enemies can move up and down cliffs you simply can't causing you to get stuck and unable to do anything but die. Same for water. Don't even go in or you'll learn how you can't do anything while you swim while all the enemies can take free swings at you while you slowly move to land.

The stamina system seems simple enough. Manage your stamina so you can attack, block, run do most anything. This works fine until you end up in a battle and realize your stamina goes to 0 within 4-5 swings but the enemies have no stamina bar at all. They can swing away, chase you all without issue. But if you swing 2 times and then run you'll have 0 stamina and be stuck walking for the next 10 seconds hoping the enemies don't hit you. Much of this is off set by poor AI that mostly just runs at you, does some slow attack then sits there waiting for you to hit back. But poor AI coding shouldn't be the solution to a flawed combat system.

This really shows through when you do a boss battle. Bosses have the same horrid AI but unlike other enemies they have so much health and spam attacks. So you end up having 2 choices. Play with a large group so you can constantly take turns fighting and recovering gear while others distract the enemy or use a bow from a mile away and hope the AI is too dumb to do anything. But even this bow start has issues since the bow will break 4-5 times before you can kill any boss if playing solo. If you are playing solo and a boss kills you that's it. You're never getting that gear back. Even if you somehow get within range to grab it the boss will spam attack on you. Should you be lucky enough to get your gear back you'll have 0 stamina and no health (Because only food and gear give health. Which you'll have none of if you die.) Add to this the game spawning in enemies next to you mid boss battle out of nowhere and you end up with a lot of frustration. It's sad because the game has so much potential with great exploration and building. But the combat right now just does not work. The best fix is to have a group so you don't notice just how poor it all is.

Until the combat issues are fixed I can't suggest this game to anyone.

So let me start by saying this is an early review of this game and can change as they develop the game.

The game itself is very fun and is a solid RPG that emulates DnD quite well. Battles are fun, character creation is in depth and the classes all feel good. As an RPG the game is very good and if you enjoy them you'll enjoy this.

So why the negative review if there is so much positive? Lag. The game just lags all the time for me. Now I know many people ply it just fine but for me I get constant stutters and have to wait for areas to load. Every step my character takes requires 5-10 seconds of waiting for the map to load. I have checked any my laptop more than meets the requirements. I've even turned everything down to as low as it can be set and still it's laggy. I have checked and it seems I'm not at all alone with this issue either. Until they optimize the game it is unplayable for me which is a shame as there is so much good to it. but I can't give a positive review to a game that can't be played on a laptop that meets all the requirements.

fun