Valheim Early Access Review

As a certified organic, not from concentrate East Coast Canadian, I feel I can be an authority on the ancient art of dodging trees. I’m also qualified to speak on beards, loosely constructed log homes, and flannel. While that last one doesn’t necessarily apply here, the rest of my qualifications could only lead down one road – and that road leads to Valheim.

If there was some sort of unholy trinity in the world of gaming, a strong case could be made that the worst of them would be an indie, early access, survival game. It’s all but expected at this point that anything that even occupies just two of those three descriptors forming a satanic Venn diagram will invariably be a hot mess full of broken promises. It might be a tentatively pleasant surprise then that a mere handful of folks at Iron Gate have managed to take the genre by storm, selling over five million copies in the first month alone. It’s hard to ignore that kind of buzz and so despite the fact that I traditionally have avoided early access games for review, I decided to put on my big boy Canadian logger pants and get to excessive deforestation in the pursuit of poorly engineered, period inaccurate Viking home building.

Before you hop in, you will of course be given the opportunity to craft your Viking look-alike with such granular detail as “blondeness.” From there you’ll pick a suitably Viking-sounding name, and then set off into either single-player or multiplayer. Like many games in the genre, Valheim generates worlds based on a seed which is represented by a string of numbers and letters. This is what more or less makes everyone’s experience different as it dramatically changes your playground. We’ll talk more about the multiplayer experience later, but let’s cover the basics first.

If you’re new to the survival game genre, and honestly Valheim is likely to draw in more than a few who are, let me quickly break down the general gameplay loop. You’re going to start out naked and afraid, usually in the middle of nowhere with nothing but your fists and a loose understanding of how to use them. Naturally, you will punch nearby small trees and beat them into submission to bend them to your will – and your will is to make a hammer. With that hammer, you’ll be able to build other things, but eventually, you’ll need fancier things that need fancier materials. Those fancier materials are oft guarded by fancier enemies to defeat, so you will defeat them. Occasionally the world will try to throw a wrench in your city-building plans, and so once you’ve handled that, you’ll continue collecting, conquering, and building until you’ve had your fill. Valheim mostly slots directly into this same loop with the veneer of Vikings, but while it doesn’t reinvent the blonde-haired, bearded wheel entirely, it does make some small changes that have likely led to its recent success.

The easiest way to describe the changes Valheim has made to accomplish this is to say that it leans more into role-playing elements than others in the genre have. Chiefly, your character has a stat sheet that covers most actions you can do in the game. These stats are individually increased based solely on how often you use them. Just like my poor handwriting skills, with enough practice, your ability to impale seagulls from a distance with a crudely crafted spear will improve. Also like my poor handwriting, whenever you die you lose a small amount of that in which you have learned which might explain why I still can’t read my own journal.

Beyond that, you’ll also discover that progression is partially gated by defeating world bosses. Want to start busting up those bigger rocks? You’ll have to take out a boss first. Want to stop building your house out of purely wood and upgrade to the far more troll-resistant stone? Also going to have to take down a boss. Upon defeating each boss and bringing its trophy back to its given stone monument, you’ll also unlock the ability to use…their ability. You can only have one ability equipped at a time, though, so choose wisely based on your needs. You can kind of see then, the ways in which they’ve weaved in the RPG elements. It gives the game more structure and a slightly better sense of direction which I personally think is a good thing in a game otherwise letting you loose upon the world. Survival games also have a history of not always giving you great tutorials or hints as to what to do or how to do it, and Valheim tries to bridge that gap by providing you with your resident talking raven who will show up occasionally to tell you about things. He’s not particularly verbose, however, so newcomers might still need to check a guide or two to get them pointed in the right direction with certain mechanics.

Many survival games really double down on the act of surviving and make hard to survive without food and water. This results in a lot of added micromanagement of resources, especially in the early game, and not everyone finds that particularly additive to a fun gameplay experience as it gets between them and the aspects of the game they find far more engaging. Valheim cuts out that middleman almost entirely, opting instead to make food more of a buff than a constant need. Depending on the food you eat, whether it be meat, fruit, or a culinary masterpiece, your overall health pool increases along with your stamina bar. Food then becomes more of a consideration when knowingly getting into difficult combat situations, or when going on lengthier adventures. While purists of the genre will possibly look down upon not having to eat to live, not having the constant fear of starvation hanging over your head goes a surprisingly long way in letting you enjoy the rest of the game’s elements. That’s not to say all of Valheim’s elements are enjoyable, but it certainly does a lot right.

Breaking down most survival games into their core components you’re presented with some common pieces. The big three categories that govern the genre tend to be combat, crafting/building, and character management which encompasses things like inventory management, food requirements, etc. Since Valheim is still in early access, keep in mind that some of these things are subject to change and might not be representative of the experience long after this has been written, but let’s talk about how it does as it stands right now.

Combat in Valheim is not particularly impressive. Characters are stiff, weapons are sometimes janky, enemies either barely do damage or will send you directly to the shadow realm, and perhaps most bothersome the stamina management is often soul-crushing. You can block, parry, and roll dodge in a way just similar enough to Dark Souls to have a lot of people make the comparison despite it being far less competent. It’s not uncommon to miss enemies that are just right below you, arrows are an unwieldy beast that can only be tamed so much, and since you chew up stamina doing anything short of sleeping, you’ll often find yourself out of breath and unable to defend yourself without taking a casual stroll in the opposite direction of your attacker to gather your strength. This gets doubly worse at night when you are hindered by the cold and your stamina regenerates at a painful rate. While there are items that can help mitigate the stamina issues, they aren’t something you have access to particularly quickly, and so it’s a nearly constant bother for a significant amount of time. At its best, the combat in Valheim is serviceable. At its worst, it’s probably the most glaring reminder that the game is in early access.

Building and crafting in Valheim, on the other hand, is surprisingly robust and functional with only a few oddities. While you aren’t likely to be surprised by what you can do with Valheim’s building mechanics, you’ll also be able to quickly put together a shelter without much fuss if you’ve got any experience from other games under your belt. That doesn’t mean you can just go building giant phallic structures all willy-nilly, mind you. First, you’re going to need a crafting bench. Then that crafting bench is going to have to be raised, loved, and sent off to get an expensive degree so it can afford a house and be independent before you can use all of its knowledge to your benefit. That’s a poorly written and long-winded joke just to say your crafting bench needs a roof over its head and some walls around it before you can use it for…reasons. Once you’ve got that sorted you can properly get to work and start learning about the importance of structural integrity.

Based on whether or not a tile is directly or indirectly connected to the ground, and how high away from the ground the tile is among some other factors that honestly aren’t well explained in the game at this time, a tile will either be blue, green, yellow, orange, or red. The further up the scale toward red you get, the weaker the structural integrity the piece has, and eventually it will simply break if not properly supported. As such, you’ll need to be mindful of your builds, but you can still make some pretty impressive structures if you hold your tongue just right. Crafting benches also determines the radius in which you can build or, more annoyingly, deconstruct a building. This can sometimes lead you to having to build multiple benches to cover an area properly. Once you’ve built yourself a shelter you can build a bed and get to sleep…right after you’ve met some other requirements.

You see, just like your crafting bench needs to feel loved, so too does your bed. In order to sleep you’ll need to have a roof over your head, a fire nearby, and no enemies threatening to tear it all down. Also, you may quickly get an education in asphyxiation as your fire is likely filling your unvented shack with lung-caressing smoke. Venting smoke seems to be loosely based on physics, but your solutions to venting may vary so play around a bit to find what works for you.

Managing your character in Valheim, and by extension their inventory, is honestly pretty much par for the course with only one glaring issue. As mentioned before eating isn’t a constant necessity but it is good to have food on you at all times for when you do need it, and you’ll have a variety of tools and weapons on you as well so inventory space can sometimes be limited. It’s rarely a major issue as almost every item stacks in bunches, and so you’re more likely to become over-encumbered than run out of slots. So, what’s the issue, then? Item disposal. There is a lot of junk that you just don’t need but will inevitably pick up over time like endless boar and deer trophies, for example. Your only options right now are to pick them up and store them in a junk chest, leave them on the ground and hope they disappears (they likely won’t), or you can role-play a major shipping company and donate your junk items to the local sea floor. Hopefully, they will create a way to more easily dispose of unwanted items but for now, you’ll have to do without.

When you do get out into the world, finish your first boss or two, and begin exploring far further from home, you’ll inevitably run into arguably the most abrasive part of Valheim outside of its stamina system: the materials grind. All survival games come with a certain level of grind, but while Valheim does a good job at balancing this in the early game, once you get toward the back half to the back third of the available content, the grind becomes severe. Obtaining enough materials to progress both in your armor and weapons, as well as tools to explore further afield becomes a dominating portion of your gameplay time. This results in what feels like spinning your wheels instead of progressing meaningfully, and that might turn some people off.

What might also turn some people off is the current multiplayer performance. As it stands servers are capped at 10 players and honestly, it would be tempting fate to max that out for a couple of reasons. From a purely gameplay perspective, bosses scale with the number of players. This can result in some fights dragging on for a particularly lengthy amount of time. The bigger issue, however, is the game performance. Valheim doesn’t necessarily use a dedicated server in the same way other games might. Instead of the server handling all game logic, the game determines which single player at any given time should shoulder that responsibility. As such, depending on the chosen player’s computer power, their connection to the server, and your connection to the server, the performance can vary dramatically. This seems to make the game particularly sensitive to ping, even as little as 100ms, and simple things like opening doors or killing a deer become a lot more cumbersome and annoying – if not nearly unplayable. This isn’t likely an issue if all players are geographically close to one another, but I can’t confirm whether or not this makes a huge difference. What this also means is that a dedicated rental server is mostly only useful for being constantly available to players in your group.

One of the more standout parts of Valheim is its art direction. While it’s not a graphic powerhouse, the visuals are quite attractive and unique. A mixture of pixelated textures and heavily processed depth of field and lighting, Valheim could be described as a spit-shined PS1 game…which sounds bad, but I like the style quite a lot and find it homey. Perhaps the game’s biggest strength is its impressive world generation. It in no way strikes you as a generated world. Biomes are stitched together really well, and the geography all tiles seamlessly in a way that makes you forget you can technically terraform just about everything you see. The soundtrack is pleasant, and despite some annoyingly repetitive animal sounds, the sound effects are all serviceable.

Honestly, serviceable is probably the best word I can use to describe Valheim in its current form. It does everything you’d expect a survival game in 2021 to do with reasonable competency but it also doesn’t do a lot of things extraordinarily well. Having food not be a constant worry is absolutely a great decision for a lot of players that might not have enjoyed the genre before. Still, the world boss progression and character stats leveling are less meaningful additions. It is undeniable, though, that Valheim has a special something here. Five million copies for an early-access survival game after all that has come before tells you right away that it has that x-factor for a lot of players. There is a substantial amount of promise here, and with a fresh cash injection, it’s basically up to Iron Gate to bring that to fruition. With a recently released roadmap that covers finishing new biomes, major patches and updates to existing game systems, and more, it seems they’re committed to the effort. While Valheim isn’t perfect, it’s easy to forget that it’s just starting its early access journey and that says a lot. Despite the expected bugs and performance issues, Valheim is full of charm and promise that has already reigned in a huge fanbase and will likely only continue to improve with time.