There is something special about the pixelated style and feel of this. Defending your base in Valheim with others is such a joy too. And although it's not official, playing this in VR is such a treat.

Do not get me wrong: I love Valheim. It is the game that fills the Minecraft itch for me, as once a year or so I will pester my friends to play it to its current endgame. Every time, more and more, my friends are more resistant. They think it is difficult, a slog, or unfinished. At first, these all felt like valid but personal excuses independent of the game itself. The combat - while simple - was a healthy challenge. It felt meaningful to prepare for excursions. Both the adrenaline spikes of being caught far away from home by a mosquito or a band of monsters were fun, and the gratification of being overly prepared for whatever given task felt worthwhile. But, as time has gone on, I have to agree with my friends and echo other reviews here. Valheim is just not a sustainable experience.

I stand by the first leg of this game being quite excellent. Everything from the meadows to the mountains is a wonderful exploration, building, ♥♥♥♥-around-and-find-out experience. The leveling system is fun in its passive nature; materials around you for what you can and want to build are plentiful; its food-as-stats system works very well, and what there is to see remains new and fresh even in repeated playthroughs. The bounds of the beginning feel like adventuring is exciting without setbacks being too frustrating, should a corpse run be needed, and even the biggest haters of this game have difficulty denying the beautiful scenery Valheim’s shader system affords it. There is, however, the first hiccup in this span that no one I know likes: the swamp.

The swamp is always the first thing my friends put forward for why they don’t want to play Valheim. It is an aggressive zone with environmental effects that make every part of the game you’ve learned hitherto difficult. The enemies hit hard, they emerge from a darkness that’s a hindrance in its own right, the enemies can easily overwhelm you, you are encumbered by marsh and rain, and that rain makes it nigh impossible to build an outpost within. Even with a portal on its outskirts to return, retrieving losses is cumbersome enough for most to stop playing here should they die. The biome’s saving grace is that, generally, there’s nothing to come back here for once you are done, and that by the time you do need something your gear makes revisiting trivial.

Personally, I think the harshness the swamp presents is a good thing. It comes at a point in the game’s timeline that tells you what to expect from the rest of it. Iron Gate is saying, “This game is hard and unforgiving at times, but as you progress old challenges get easier.” So that’s how the rest of the game is, right?

Now, I like difficult games, but there is a certain quality to this kind of system that depends on the game’s design. That demonstrates how much its developers care about their players’ time. And that is rooted in: how much of this failure is the player’s fault?

What follows the swamp is deceptive. The mountains, to turn a phrase, are where Valheim peaks. It isn’t a step-down in difficulty insofar as it is a better designed zone. The wolves, the ice golems, the wyverns are all fun to fight, and there are many layers both game and player sourced that make the experience easier when compared to the swamp. Things are still challenging in a novel way, and it feels like things are ramping up in every facet of the game.

The plains is where it starts to become evident that Iron Gate cares more about the game than you, the player. It is not the swamp, but it is not much of anything, really. By now, the gameplay loop is beginning to stale, and nothing new is happening. You’ve either mastered the parry system which is a small dopamine hit, or you have not and the game is definitely not fun anymore. To Iron Gate’s credit, the little new that is here comes in the form of building, and the structures provided are excellent additions, but we are now getting to a point that building something cool takes a couple of hours without console commands -- and so who is this really for?

To full circle back to the swamp, it is also clear that Valheim’s difficulty relies on two principal tenets: overwhelming you and making it hard to be somewhere. The mechanical or skill-dependent aspects of the game fall to the wayside by time you are in the plains, few as they were. The former being ‘do you have the right item for this,’ the latter being ‘did you think about where to stand before walking into this room/area.’ To be clear, I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with this. There is a lot of fun to be had in planning around combats or dungeons in this simple way; yet, if this is going to be the game, I’m of the mind that it should be easy to get to where the fight is. But that is increasingly not the case.

Hereafter, the critiques are as reiterative as the gameplay. Between the plains and the ashlands, there is some but little novelty to be found. The game remains picturesque throughout, and anything you want to do takes an ever increasing amount of time. Due to Iron Gate’s insistence on denying you teleporting ore/metal prior to the ashlands in the game’s default difficulty, the only way to play the game is to make exploration into a chore. There’s not a lot of room for spontaneity or surprises when several hours of gameplay to make one structure are on the line.

The sailing system is fun, but by now the distances traversed are extreme with no new challenges. If you like to build, you will be dedicating hours of travel for ores into now-tired, overdone mini dungeons. If you like to fight, it remains the basic system of parry, hit, dodge, with the only offer of difficulty being more dudes, dudes everywhere, and give them an unreasonable amount of health. And, to speak plainly, I get the siege gimmick Iron Gate is going for with the fortresses here, but it is complete ass and impossible for a singleplayer experience. And so, I ask again, who is this for? What player has persisted up to this point? What player should persist up to this point?

Ultimately, besides the modders and the builders who bypass these issues with developer tools, I do not think Valheim is being made for any normal - or even hardcore - player. There is a profound lack of QoL elements in this game that feel dismissed or overlooked due to a leaning on ‘the game is meant to be this way.’ Past the mountains, the game gives you nigh on nothing to make any of its qualities (exploration, building, combat) smoother or more accessible. If you turn off the game’s limitations on player freedom, I think there is still a good time to be had with the building system; there is plenty of room to make something pretty. However, by that point I would ask if they’re making a sandbox builder or an RPG. I do not know the drama of development time for games, or anything about Iron Gate really, but, as someone who has played this game periodically since its initial release in 2021, I am not convinced this game deserves money -- even for a promising future full release. The small celebration of player builds feels manipulative and a distraction from Valheim’s faults and shortcomings. Even if the Deep North is somehow an immaculate experience akin in its energy to the first leg of the game, this does not dismiss the neglect to the player’s experience or time that comes from its bulk.

As with any negative opinion I possess, I hope to be proven wrong about the longevity of this game. But, even as someone who loves it and can get by through its entirety even with its frustrations, I would be remiss to ignore, one way or another, that Iron Gate does not care about its playerbase in a meaningful, actionable way within its game design, and I do not expect them to adjust the core aspects of this game to improve or enhance the player’s experience. Pretty shaders can only do so much.

This review will focus mostly on negatives, because being positive is boring.

The game desperately needs quality of life improvements.
Inventory space is way too small, especially since the diversity of items (materials but also new consumables and equipment) has increased a lot with new biomes.
Anything involving slopes is frustrating and clunky and feels broken:
- climbing/running on slopes
- fighting on slopes
- shooting up or down slopes

Aiming of ranged weapons actually needs a complete rework. You kinda get used to having to aim 1-2 meters above on even terrain, but when you need to aim down for example it completely reverses and suddenly you have to aim below.
The system is broken and it's unacceptable.

You want to fight the environment and not constantly feel like you are fighting the controls.

Knockbacks are too strong and destroy the flow of battle, forcing you or enemies to walk before being able to attack again.

The fact that your character can't do a short dive in shallow waters to recover dropped items is also unacceptable.
Ships having no collision when you drop items on them is unacceptable.

The spawning logic of enemies when you are mining/lumbering feels too artificial/unimmersive.
Basically all you need to do is sneak when you hit something and then check if the eye changes.
If it does you just made new enemies spawn by hitting something.
There is little point in clearing an area. You don't feel like you conquered the land because with every hit of an axe or pick axe, the game reminds you that it is a game. It's like a constant gamble to spawn another mob which eventually just becomes tedious.

View/rendering distance is terrible and it leads to very glaring issues of whole structures and enemies popping in right in your face.
So for example you can spot a dungeon entrance in the mistland while standing at a vantage point and then 3 seekers suddenly spawn in when you are over halfway done swimming there or gliding there.

Enemies spawning in way too late is also a constant issue when travling by ship in coastal regions.

The very aggressive depth of field (that you obviously turn off anyway) seems to exist to hide some of these issues.

The overall incentive to cheese enemies and game mechanics seems a little bit too high, because they are too devastating.
So for example when I enter mountains for the first time and I immediately get hit by a wolf hunt, i obviously drop a portal and either let the timer run out or get a hoe and the big hammer.

Another big point of frustration that rarely gets mentioned is that enemies are not gated by stamina. This issue gets compounded any time you get knock into water or are forced to run/fight around slopes.