Valheim - An Early Access Review

If there is one universal constant when it comes to sandbox survival games, it’s that you have bases to build, a land to explore, and enemies to defeat. With all that said, Valheim finds a small spot for itself in the genre of sandbox survival games, bringing with it a Viking-themed world. So, what exactly is Valheim?

You find yourself in the unruly world of Valheim, and you are tasked with a single goal: slay the titans of the world. In order to get to that point, you must scavenge and explore the land you have landed in, gathering what resources you can to craft tools, weapons, and your very own base. Survival doesn’t come easy, as you have to weather the elements, maintain resources, and fight off enemies that come your way.

With Valheim still in Early Access, the details and features of the game will change over time. That being said, development is going at its own pace, so I want to take a look at how it’s going now. Perhaps in the future as the game continues to update, we can reflect back on where Valheim was and where it will be.

My First Impressions

Now, while I could spend my time simply building a base, I do have to progress in the game. This is where I have to address the elephant in the room, where the general gameplay loop is slow. This is less a problem with how long it takes to get from point A to point B, far from it. The first boss you find is only a couple tools away, but getting to that point takes time. A lot of time.

It’s not much, but it is honest work.

Let’s start with the bare basics: gathering wood. Once you can finally get yourself an axe, you’ll find something happens when you chop a tree. Every time you take a swing, you gain a little experience in chopping wood. Over time, you gain more levels in tree chopping, speeding up this process and allowing you to chop down more types of trees.

Now, if you are like me and want to build a proper base first, wood chopping skill builds up quickly, but every aspect has its own stat. There’s one for using Bows, or Clubs, and if you really wanted, punching with fists. In order to maximise your output, or even survivability in combat, you have to build up these skills. Run around, jump up, and get down (and by that I mean sneak) so you can build up skills to simply get around.

A selection of skills to improve throughout the game. From using certain weapons to making new items, even the act of running can be improved.

I don’t see this as either a good or bad thing. Any survival game that makes use of skill points has a very similar system like this, and it allows for fine tuning gameplay to your liking. In this case, it’s more automatic than gathering points to apply to a skill tree. Valheim, however, does take this to the extreme, where movement is not one skill, but a small handful. It encourages experimentation before you get to your next milestone.

The Sweet Spots

Let’s get some of the things I did like with Valheim out of the way. Before even starting a new world, I found myself quite interested in the world creation screen. Much like 7 Days to Die, the difficulty of a world only determines a preset list of modifications, and that difficulty can be further modified to your tastes. Want to play an easy world but with high death penalties? Done deal. Just want raids turned off? Slide that raid difficulty all the way down. This allowed me to create a slightly-harder-than-easy world for me to dive into.

A glance of the world around you. It’s quite pleasing for how low resolution the art style of the game is.

Now, if I were honest, I never truly pay attention to the world I am thrown into. Games such as Minecraft tend to set the world up in a way that it’s all malleable, but the overall feeling of the world is rather same-y. What Valheim does well is the presentation of the world. It all starts with a cold, dreary entrance that tells you that the world you’re in is hostile and unwelcoming. As time goes by, all that weather goes away, and it’s surprisingly colorful, the branches of an enormous tree spread out across the sky. It’s just fun to look at every once in a while.

Speaking of exploration, this is a main staple with this game. After all, there are different biomes to explore, resources to gather, and just landscapes to generally absorb, and the map is huge. Now, while travelling is not made simple with a way to move faster in the world in the early game, there is a silver lining to it. That is, the hunger mechanic is a little more intuitive. Rather than having to maintain a hunger level for perks such as health, stamina, or staying alive, hunger is a way to better yourself in the field and in combat. Sure, once you do get used to the food mechanics, running out of food buffs feels like a punishment, it does mean if you do want to endlessly walk around, you just can.

While a little clunky, I do find the simplicity of base building a soft spot for me. Valheim accommodates this fairly well even in the early game with a variety of structural blocks, enough blocks that no hole is left open in the wall. Of course, I do find it odd that the Door is only half tall, but there are solutions, and for some, it’s the perfect door. If I were given all the time and resources in the world, I would happily build away, but of course, to build better is to progress through the game.

The Nitty Gritty

Now, of course, Valheim is in Early Access, so I do have to cut it some slack for the time being. That being said, there are some rather notable pain points in this game that I did experience. This, of course, will vary depending on what kind of player you are. Maybe you do like a slow burn that has you carefully curate your abilities, but it can also be seen as rather grindy for the sake of slowing down the game. As one example, the ability to mine stone and ores is barred behind the first boss, so the ability to casually play around is limited by what you can fight.

This can become rather problematic as progression starts to expand beyond the starting area. You may have been grinding away for a while now, ready to take on the next area to reach the next goal. Next thing you know, you realise that there’s no good crowd control weapons, and the ability to maintain distance is rather non-existent. All it would take is one slight misstep or not looking in the right direction, and you’re done for.

Well, now what?

Remember when I mentioned how skill points work, and how every action has its own level? This is important, because death comes at a rather hefty penalty of losing these skill points. If you end up dying and lose your stuff in a precarious position, you will have to get yourself back to that death point and hope that whatever it was that claimed your life doesn’t happen again or is not still around. What this also means is that if you are near a base and a particularly nasty enemy killed you near it, you might have to lend your lease over to it.

My Overall Thoughts

With that all said, what do I think of Valheim so far? Suffice to say, it is grindy, you can’t really rush this game. If I did take my time to better understand the mechanics rather than assume if the game tells me to go to a new spot that I should right away, I might fare better. That being said, these are the first impressions that the game has left me, so as it stands, did the game hook me in? I would say it has.

Sure, the game is a little slow and clunky in some places, and the demand for resources does become a drag if it can’t be readily accessed. That doesn’t change the fact that if I went with the flow of the game, I could enjoy taking it slow, rather than just a big game of connecting dots.

It got me thinking as well, what if there was a way to speed up progress? Perhaps if there were a way to build a bigger base faster, or take down more and tougher enemies. I think Valheim is one of those games best experienced with friends, as it allows for more efficient survival, exploration, and hunting. With that said, if you have a group of friends and you would like to play Valheim together, we can make this process easy. Simply purchase a 3GB Adventurer Tier or higher plan from our selection of plans, then create a Valheim server. Need help getting started with a new server? Check out our handy setup guide, from creating the server to joining it.