Valheim

Valheim is the oath of the ultimate survival crafting adventure fulfilled, with a gorgeous art style, deadly dungeons, charming homesteading mechanics, and a breathtaking scope.

Valheim is already a paragon of the survival crafting genre, with excellent art and music highlighting a world that generates endless exciting stories from only a few simple ingredients.

One of the best survival games around is finally complete.

Valheim might be the rare exception. The game as a whole is not complete, but the parts that are there do feel complete, if that makes sense. I can see the areas in which I'd like it to grow, but Valheim feels refined and satisfying as it is right now. I've put 70 hours into it so far, and I fully expect to at least double that, and it's a $20 game. No matter what happens in Early Access, it's hard not to feel like I've already gotten my money's worth.

Valheim's world is low-poly for the most part, but features enhanced lighting and water refraction effects that create a beautiful blend of the early 2000s and modern graphics. Oceans and rivers look lovely, while even the dreariest of environments somehow stand out. Particle effects bloom and blossom in snowy locales, with dense fog sometimes permeating endless meadows of yellowing grass. It made me stop and appreciate the environmental design and procedurally generated scenery. This approach also allows for those even with fairly low-end machines to run the game.

“Valheim” is a good, even great, game. But these days, games have to be more than just games. And “Valheim” is pretty good at that, too.

Valheim 1.0 is finally here and it brings an atmospheric, challenging, and compulsive persistent world to Switch 2. An epic survival-crafting game with solid fantasy worldbuilding, it's a fascinating hybrid. Performance issues and uneven crossplay blight the release experience, so let's hope Iron Gate keeps an eye on this version with future updates.

The intentionality behind Valheim’s base-building mechanics makes it feel like I’m not just surviving in the world, but living in it.

Valheim is an absolutely massive survival adventure, spanning a large randomized world containing danger and beauty in equal measure.

These issues will be ironed out and Valheim's content roadmap ensures that plenty of new content will be added to the game as well throughout 2021. In its current state, it's an incredibly engrossing experience and perhaps the first survival game of its kind to match Minecraft in pure fun factor. And if it's already this impressive in early access, one can only imagine how good it will be when it has its full release.