Valheim mini-review

Talk about your favorite games and any new or upcoming ones. Share cool tips & tricks
Post Reply
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Valheim mini-review

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I have a 110 hours into this time sink, and so far I've only defeated two of the five bosses, so maybe I'm 2/5 of the way through the game? Of course you play at your own pace, and I tend to be conservative, especially now that I'm having to venture into very dangerous areas like the Swamp.

This can be played solo or coop (someone hosts their world and others can join). I started out coop with a couple of friends to learn the ropes, and then started my own solo game.

The game is as addictive and immersive as any of the survival/sandbox games I've played (Minecraft, Astroneer). I do like how the game manages hunger/stamina/health. It makes you work for better high-calorie foods (like meat) over lower calorie, but more easily attainable foods (like blueberries), and you can eventually learn to use various foods as incredients in more complex meals like stew and carrot soup that may not give you more calories than meat, but satiate your hunger longer. You need to plan for this before going up against bosses especially. You want the most calories in you, that also persist longest.

As with the other games there are resources to collect/chop down/mine, and treasure to steal. The game has hard pauses that keep you from getting too far in over your head before you're ready. This usually involves beating a boss. Beating each boss gives you something that usually unlocks the ability to use new technology (for instance, you can't mine for copper and tin, and forge bronze, until you beat the first boss which grants you the necessary technology).

It's definitely like Minecraft in that you feel compelled to just play "one more hour" to finish X, which becomes 3 hours most of the time.

There is a lot borrowed from Minecraft. Your bed is your spawn, and you can have multiple beds all over the world and whichever one you last sleep in becomes your spawn. You can sleep through the nights. Chests hold your goodies, and if you're OCD like me, you'll delight in organizing your goodies. You can decorate your place, although my main house is pretty utilitarian, other than trophies hung on the wall (they get dropped occasionally, when you kill a beast or monster).

Image

The game forces you to build forts and bases all over, because you do have to range across large distances to find the different biomes. You start in the Meadows, but then you have to go to the more dangerous Black Forest to mine copper and tin, and find scary skeleton crypts and troll caves full of loot. The Swamps is where you can only find iron, etc. When you find something interesting, like a large amount of ore, you usually want to build a house nearby to work out of, but nasty things attack at night, so you need to build a wall around it eventually.

To deal with these distances, the game has Stargate type teleportation portals (once you've secured some special items only found in skeleton crypts). As you can see I have a dozen or more portals in my main house, that links to smaller houses and compounds around the world. Only limitation to the portals is you can't travel through them with raw ore or smelted metal (crafted metal objects are fine). This forces you to shlep a long distance with a cart or boat full of ore, or you can setup a smelting operation wherever the ore is, and then make whatever you need there.

Image

Image

I've just gotten to the Swamps, which are scary as hell. The game is VERY atmospheric - some amazing audio work involved. The background sounds in the crypts will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Swamps are hard to travel through because they're flooded, and you don't want to be caught in the water if attacked by something and unable to draw your sword (oh, and there's also poisonous giant leaches in the water - their guts make useful potions if they don't kill you first). So I spent a long time leveling a road out through the swamps to reach a swamp crypt that I had spotted from the ocean on a sailing recon. Then carried all the materials out there to build a small tree house (yeah, tree house, it was simpler than trying to build a compound on the swamp and monsters can't climb) and a portal so I could bypass the long walk, except for hauling out iron.

Image

Image

Image

The game visuals are often quite breathtaking. Not the highest quality textures (there are some improved texture packs out there but I prefer the vanilla ones) but there are just gorgeous vistas sometimes, and it hasn't gotten old in 110 hours. Sometimes the setting sun reflects the light in an interesting way, and I'll just stand there watching it. The fog will hug low areas of the forest in the morning, or a full moon will poke out between clouds, and it just looks very nice.

There's a lot of physics to the game. I began to notice that any wood structures not roofed over, would eventually deteriorate. Turns out rain damages anything not covered by a roof. After spending a considerable amount of time repairing my dock and boat, I finally built a roof over it. When you chop down trees, they fall in unpredictable directions, and you'd better run out of the way. They can hit other trees and knock them down as well.

Image

The game actually has a pretty good sailing simulation built in. You definitely need to manage your sail length, and tack into the wind. My first time coming back from an island with a load of copper and tin, I got caught in a truly terrifying storm (thunder, lightning, huge waves). The boat does take damage from severe weather, striking objects, or attacks from monsters. So yeah, my boat sank with all my ore on it. I assume I would have lost it all since it was deep ocean, but I was prudent enough to backup my game files before sailing out into the wild blue. Normally when you die, your stuff is all there where you fell, in a giant urn, waiting for you to come and reclaim it (it's marked on the map), but this would have been at the bottom of the deep ocean. I've gotten into the habit of backing up my game files every time I play.

Some sailing video (on a day with good weather). Make sure to crank up the video resolution. I recorded it at 1440p:

"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Some more videos. I just posted these so the HD version may not be up yet:

This is the part of the game that feels like a Roguelike. I'm raiding a dungeon full of skeletons:


Coming home with a boat load of ore:
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by FlyingPenguin »

One of the things I like about this game is that a part of it is an old fashion dungeon crawl. When you start exploring the sunken crypts in the Swamp areas for scrap iron and treasure, you need to make good old fashioned graph paper maps of each of the crypts, so you can tell if you've explored it all, and so you don't get lost. All these crypts are procedurally generated, and each is unique.

Image
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
Losbot
Almighty Member
Posts: 4991
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:59 am
Location: South Florida

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by Losbot »

That's crazy. You're having to graph out crypts? LOL
------------------------------------------

Image
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Took on the third boss, Bonemass, which is reputed to be harder than all the other bosses. After getting my ass roundly kicked by him a few times, I decided to out think him.

I built a tree house next to his spawn, and installed a stone wall around it's base to protect it. Sorta worked. He smashed through the stone wall, and did some damage to the lower parts of the tree house, but except for being hit by acid a few times, I got out unscathed and just kept pumping frost arrows into his ass until he died, then climbed down and cleaned out the other riff-raff.

Seems to be a bug that he can't spray you with poison if you're a certain height above him, so I suspect this will be fixed eventually.

"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
Losbot
Almighty Member
Posts: 4991
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:59 am
Location: South Florida

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by Losbot »

Looked like you definitely were better off staying up top. Every time you came down a bit, you'd end up in his green cloud.
------------------------------------------

Image
User avatar
FlyingPenguin
Flightless Bird
Posts: 32773
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2000 11:13 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by FlyingPenguin »

BUT OF COURSE "Let's Game it Out" did a Valhiem video. OMG the way be breaks things. I love how he avoids using weapons and just sets everything on fire with camp fires.

"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

Image
User avatar
Pugsley
Posts: 7454
Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2002 11:54 pm
Location: NW Indiana
Contact:

Re: Valheim mini-review

Post by Pugsley »

Freakin Johnny Hot Body!
Post Reply