Valheim Review

Iron Gate Studio’s Valheim is the best multiplayer survival crafting game since Minecraft. Valheim’s simple, lo-fi graphics may raise a skeptical brow in the same way Minecraft did 15 years ago - but the mastery over texture, lighting, audio, and mood on display here elevates it into a painted vision of the Norse afterlife. This and the game’s meticulously designed systems meld together to create a romanticized survival experience.

Players are dropped into a meadow in the “tenth world” by Odin, tasked with reclaiming it from the twisted monsters inhabiting the land: Greydwarfs, Trolls, Draugr, Drakes, and more. Each new biome introduces terrifying creatures that can punish any Norseman not practiced in parrying or the game’s dodge roll. Sweeping hills and craggy mountains dot the world, with towering pines and firs blanketing its forests - often with a thick fog settling in between the tree trunks, obscuring hungry glowing eyes of enemies scouting their unwitting prey. 

Valheim is a game about securing resources, crafting weapons, and battling increasingly powerful enemies. The “tenth world” is procedurally generated, and its winding rivers and vast oceans require players to explore in order to find their next objectives. Punch a tree down, craft a club from the wood, and beat a boar to death to gather some leather scraps. Use those scraps as string for a bow, and things progress from there. Enemies are constantly on your heels, and it behooves you to build fortifications to keep them out as you prepare for your next adventure. The power in Valheim’s gameplay comes from how these simple systems are woven together, creating fertile ground for memorable play.

Valheim can be played solo or multiplayer, and the cooperative multiplayer on offer here is the best distillation of human cooperation I’ve experienced in a video game. Your mileage will vary, of course, as it does with any game that relies on the good will of your friends. But Valheim encourages a rising tide that lifts all ships: the mutual benefit of sharing farmed goods, crafted armor, and a common homestead. 

Combat in Valheim is meaningful and rewards precision: satisfying parries that ring giant creatures’ bells, leaving them open to critical strikes with bladed, blunt, or pointy weapons. When using bows, fired arrows have a drop that can be mastered in order to land sneak attack damage on goblins minding their own business in the next field over. 

Crafting and farming in Valheim are simple, yet well considered - trees and vegetables need a little space to grow. They can be planted haphazardly, or in a manicured and fenced-in garden, with no need for watering. Game days need to pass in order to make things grow, so often in a Discord call or over the game’s chat (you type /s to shout across the world, which makes chat text APPEAR IN ALL CAPITALS) you’ll be asked to go to sleep to make the game’s night roll over to day, speeding along plant growth or metal smelting. Trees must be replanted when chopped down, encouraging proper forestry and even grinding out stumps. The land is malleable, allowing it to be raised or lowered in order to serve what the players’ Viking longhouse might need for a boat launch or moat. 

The construction and base building have a physics engine that will tear down any structures not properly supported by the ground below - stone provides the best benefit, and building wood upon that as a foundation can allow for heavy and higher builds. I’ve fussed over getting a roof to look just right, with sections at the tippy top of my house turning bright red as they threaten to crumble due to lack of proper struts. Player homes are to be cozy and functional - you need a kitchen, a place for sleeping, and space that can hold decor, which enhances the level of rest that warriors get. Being well rested and well fed is paramount, since it affects how much health and stamina you have, as well as how quickly you regenerate it. 

Unlike other survival games, players aren’t punished for not tracking food and drink properly. Instead of simply staving off starvation, a haunch of meat buffs health, while berries enhance stamina. Mead is a core consumable that requires fermentation over days but provides resistances against poison or frost. Rarer ingredients and more complicated recipes provide greater benefits, important for long excursions or drawn-out boss fights.

Valheim similarly refuses to punish players who want to experiment with construction or crafting. Build a three-story house and hate it? Dismantle it and try again - you get 100% of the materials back, allowing you to start over right there. Even equipment repair is free, so long as your crafting table or forge is at the required level. After a hard fight in the swamps, a crew of six might swarm the forge and you’ll hear a rattle of ting-ting-ting as everyone rapidly clicks to repair their gear.

Everything in Valheim is folded into every other piece, harmoniously requiring the player to pay attention to and learn about how each element can enhance survivability against increasingly difficult enemies and bosses. The ladder structure of Valheim feels like an organic twist on the formula of get-this-material, then-craft-this, then-beat-this-enemy. The exploration of different biomes and combat with their inhabitants begets these things as an earned necessity, letting you make pants or a hat out of a particularly nasty enemy’s hide.

More systems and wrinkles reveal themselves with every new tier of play. I spent one playthrough as a sort of warlock, crafting staves and growing food that could provide me with Eitr, the mana required for magic. This allowed me to summon Trolls-as-meteors, or blanket the land with animated vines that whipped my enemies if they got too close. I flung fireballs affected by gravity that required that I train my feel for how they fell, and I eventually found myself deftly punishing enemies with unfair levels of damage from far away. 

There are so many emergent moments in Valheim that rival some of the most hard-won scenes in larger, more expensive titles. Sailing the open ocean only to hear a screech off the stern, sending me and my friends into a frenzy as we whip out our bows to do combat. Jumping aboard a barnacled leviathan to mine it before it plunges itself and us into the ocean, draining our stamina as we frantically swim back to the boat. 

There’s a whole life to be lived in Valheim, with a variety of jobs that can satisfy combatants and cozy gamers alike. My friends have flocked into a Discord call every night the past week or so, all of us with our own goals but banding together to take on a poisonous goop monster in the swamp or a half-dead goblin god dragging itself across the plains. Valheim has quietly become one of the most successful and beloved games in its genre, and it deserves every flower for how it developed during early access and now finally into its 1.0 release.