Valheim is an early access viking survival game developed by Iron Gate Studios that has taken Steam by storm as of late. In Valheim, you can explore, build, conquer, craft, survive, and cooperate across the entire world. Valheim is the tenth Norse world and has been besieged by creatures of chaos and ancient enemies of the gods. You play as the “newest custodian of the primordial purgatory” and you are tasked with slaying Odin’s ancient rivals and bringing order to Valheim. So what exactly does Valheim offer players? Why are players so obsessed with the game? Let’s take a look and see what’s up with the latest and greatest viking survival game, Valheim!
Explore
Valheim is a beautiful world that is ripe for exploration. You can venture into deep and dark forests, climb snow-peaked mountains and gaze at lush valleys, or take to the seas on a mighty longship, just don’t go too far from land. The best part about the world of Valheim? It’s procedurally-generated, meaning no two experiences will be the same.
Build
In Valheim, you can “raise your own mead halls, houses, castles, and more with our powerful construction interface. From knarrs to imposing warships, build legendary vessels to conquer the seas and discover new lands.” So what I’m gathering from this is that Valheim is essentially viking Minecraft. I think that sounds awesome, I would love to build a massive viking castle and construct my own viking ship that I can use to sail across the seas and engage in fierce marine warfare.
Conquer
You can conquer just about anything in Valheim as you battle the mythical beasts of the tenth world as well as animal wildlife with engaging dodge and block based combat. This seems like a very souls-like combat system in which you focus less on offensive attacking and more defensive maneuvers. I’m typically a pretty big fan of defense-based combat like this as it tends to require more strategy and less of a head-on attack method. That’s why I loved Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order so much, because it felt like there was some sense of strategy surrounding the combat that you had to take into consideration when engaging higher-tier enemies or bosses.
Craft
Crafting is also a fairly big part of Valheim, in the game, you can forge increasingly powerful weapons and armor as you advance through the game, you can also craft food and mead to maintain your health. This is the one thing I’m hoping is not like most survival games, I can’t stand games that have food and water meters and require you to find food and water to survive. I get that that the entire point of survival games is to survive, but man I really can’t get on board with this whole starvation/dehydration meter thing. I just can’t do it. It’s not fun and I wish that survival games would move away from it, or at least make a couple of changes to the system.
Survive
It looks like there’s also various environments (think biomes in Minecraft) that will present unique challenges and enemies to face off with and vanquish in Valheim. I’ve always loved the whole biome/environment system in survival games – it keeps it fresh and prevents the experience of playing the game from getting stale with each biome or environment bringing a new experience and almost seeming like an entirely new game.
Cooperate
“Valheim supports independent, player-hosted servers and as many worlds as you wish to create, because no one wants to continuously die alone.” This is great news that Valheim allows players to create as many worlds as they want on player-hosted servers, because it means that there shouldn’t be any issues with the servers being full or log-in queues (*cough* Destiny *cough*) to worry about no matter how many people are online and playing the game.
While I haven’t dived into the game yet myself, this definitely looks like my kind of game. I love vikings, I love surviving (except for starvation/dehydration, we can still get rid of that), what more do I need? What do you think? Are you going to try Valheim? If so, you can get it on Steam for $19.99 on Steam! The game is currently in early access and is available for Windows and Linux, but a Mac-version may be in the works if there’s significant demand. Unfortunately for you console players, there aren’t any current plans to bring Valheim to other platforms, but Iron Gate Studios isn’t ruling it out.
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