Valheim

A promising intervention in the crowded survival-craft genre that ultimately fails to deliver something satisfying and new. Despite this bottom line, I did enjoy playing this game with friends for many hours, and you might, too, but when I quit it was with a sour aftertaste. It's hard for me to recommend others get invested in this game because I suspect you will end up as bitter as I am. It's not a bad game! But it's also not good enough if you don't like quitting games in the middle.

The core problem is an intentional, overarching adversity to experimentation. The world is very big and very empty and you will quickly have no interest in and even have a fear of discovering anything new. There are no other characters to meet, so single-player especially must be abominably boring. All treasure chests you find have the same useless contents. Worst of all is that new biomes you discover are death sentences until you beat the boss of the previously-ranked biome. Want to explore? Valheim will punish you so hard for even having that curiosity that you may regret being curious.

There is a relentlessly annoying hardcore group of fans who will be happy to tell you, as Boris Johnson did, that "them's the breaks". In other words: "in for a penny, in for a pound". You should have known that a survival Viking game would be punishing and repetitive! Sure, I did know that, I promise. But I also knew that I was playing a game, and I expected, or at least hoped, that it would add those quintessentially charming and exciting characteristics associated with the Vikings: fierce accomplishment, naïve discovery, and brutal conquest. But Valheim doesn't do charming. Rather, this is a game where you build a boat, travel to distant lands that are identical to your lands, and find chests with stuff you don't want or need. Sounds good?

There is some fun to be had in that initial fumbling, trying to understand how the game works (controls are super clunky) and how its systems interact. But once the game is on track it stops delighting. Worse, it frustrates. There are random events that can kill you and take away all your progress. But the bottom of the barrel for me is that vast emptiness of its world. You can play the game properly for hours and not encounter anything of interest. After many such hours ... I was done.

Is it worth waiting for the game to exit Early Access in order to buy it? I don't think so. Its essential emptiness is by design, and that design won't change. This is what the game wants to be.

If you're one of the people who loves this bland-brand of survivalist gaming, good for you! But is it wrong to think that there's room for improvement? The stifling of critique in the forums has gone far beyond reasonable moderation. So, sadly, community engagement is even worse than the game itself. If you care about that aspect then you should stay away from Valheim.