Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, can you check if there’s a silver vein in there?), you’ve probably heard of Steam’s recent mega-hit, Minecraft replica: Valheim. Despite still technically being in “early access,” the game feels complete already, perfectly synchronizing Dark Souls’ difficulty and Minecraft’s crafting depth, while adding special touches that make the Norse-inspired title something wholly its own. In a crowded genre, Valheim stands out as a unique, enthralling, and beautiful journey that has this reviewer playing with friends in a way that few other games have in recent years. This $19.99 PC game earns our Editors’ Choice award as one of the best crafting games in recent memory.
If It Can Turn Me, It Can Turn Anyone
Let me start the review with this: I do not like survival or crafting games. Through many attempts over many years, my core group of gaming friends have tried to get me into titles like Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, Terraria, and Space Engineers. Their enthusiasm waned with each failure to catch my interest. We had other games to play together—Sea of Thieves was a recent favorite—but they would inevitably fall back into a crafting world, and I’d play Overwatch or a new card game.
This is what makes Valheim so special, at least in my eyes. I’ve never enjoyed a crafting game; I find the mining tedious, and the crafting systems overly confusing. The “fun” is usually lost on me by the time my friends tire of trying to convince me to join their server. In Valheim, though, something just clicked.
A Viking’s Life for Me
Upon first loading into a fresh server, or seed, your character wakes up in what’s known as the Meadows biome; one of five currently in the game. Further out into the surrounding lands, you’ll find the Swamp biome, as well as Mountains, Plains, and the Black Forest. The developer, Iron Gate Studio, has already announced plans for two more to be introduced by the end of 2021.
Each biome is populated with an ecosystem of plants, animals, weather and terrain that are unique to each area. They can be mixed and matched throughout the procedural world that gets built every time you host a new server. A server that can hold a maximum of 10 active players at any given time.
Valheim’s small story is told through Runestone rock shrines scattered throughout the world, as well as your character’s dreams. It’s a fairly bland tale of a Viking’s road to redemption to please Odin, the god of the afterlife you’re currently trapped in. It’s a Viking crafting game, not Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
Technical Prowess
The graphics, while simple in their execution, truly wow in the quiet moments between tasks. The textures are ugly by today’s standards, just 32 by 32 pixels each. However, the AAA-quality lighting and reflections give Valheim its beauty and wonder.
Rarely has a low-resolution game used its available toolset so completely, squeezing every ounce of possibility from the restricted medium through intelligent level design and dozens upon dozens of small touches that add up to a completely immersive experience. Can’t say that for Minecraft, now, can we?
The simplicity-first approach permeates the game’s size, too. In a time when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare/Warzone takes up more than 200GB of storage space, the 1.03GB Valheim file size caused me do a spit take. That surprise continued as I saw the immense amount of content that Iron Gate Studio managed to cram into such a small footprint.
Then there’s the music. The simple, lulling string section of the Meadows, the drums of the Swamps, and that song which kicks in the first time you and your Viking crew take to the seas in a longboat. AAA game studios don’t have music this good, and all Valheim’s sound design, from the effects to the score, was handled by just one developer.
Game progress is gated by a potion, key, or other item that guarantees that you just can’t walk into any biome and jump the line for materials. Those keys and items are gathered from the five biome bosses, each of which get progressively more difficult to beat as you push forward through the game.
When we say “progressively difficult,” we mean it. As you progress, the amount of time necessary to prep for the next awaiting boss becomes greater, requiring better armor, weapons, and potions to proceed. In this way, Valheim almost feels closer to an MMO than a crafting game, with our server in particular setting specific “boss-clear schedules” where everyone who was going to fight needed to have their own characters prepared for what would be a thrilling, but difficult, battle ahead.
If you’re familiar with the crafting genre, there’s not a lot of “new” on offer here—you punch a tree, get some wood. Find a stone, make an axe. Axe chops more wood that you use to make more things. And so on.
Don’t Half-Ass Two Things, Whole-Ass One Thing
Valheim has a generic story, and game mechanics seen in literally hundreds of other crafting titles made by indie developers—so what makes this game so special? Simplicity.
Whether by design or as the result of the constraints placed on a small team—Iron Gate Studio was a two-person team for much of its core development—Valheim is a streamlined crafting game with a limited number of recipes, items, and potions that players can create. Hardcore crafters may see this as a drawback, but the game’s accessibility hides the true depth of Valheim’s genius: forced exploration.
As mentioned earlier, each biome is gated (besides Meadows and Black Forest). To get to the next one, you must beat the boss of the last one. That’s only possible once you start building vital components for your battles, such as battle-axes, scale mail armor, and tower shields. But to build the workshop to craft your armor, you’ll need a homestead.
There’s No Place Like Home
Valheim entices you to push further into its procedurally generated lands, but it also gives you plenty to do at home. Its building system, while simplistic on the surface, is quite deep. The semi-realistic world physics demand that every piece you place is properly supported, and these restrictions make for creative solutions.
Though it may seem antithetical in a game about building, limiting what you can do and focusing on simplicity creates a more novice-friendly experience. Building is often one of the most daunting challenges in a crafting game, but Valheim makes it approachable, adding the fun that often gets lost during long sessions of placing, positioning, and replacing the perfect block to give your home that personal touch.
Can Your PC Run Valheim?
Valheim’s one major issue right now is that it’s not nearly as friendly to lower-end computers as it is to the higher-end computers when you’re in a village. That’s because each added or subtracted terrain block counts as an instance. The more instances in your game, the more your PC needs additional CPU and GPU computational power. That said, Valheim, runs perfectly on my gaming desktop that features an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 3080 GPU.
Friends of mine in the server have seen their game performance dip as low as five frames per second while in our village, but my machine pushes polygons at roughly 75fps. However, you’ll see frame rate improvements once you leave your village. Everyone in our server enjoyed frame rates above 60fps, while my testbed pushed the game along at a 180fps clip.
Valheim’s Steam page states that your PC needs at least a 64-bit processor and operating system, as well as:
- OS: Windows 7 or later,
- Processor: 2.6 GHz Quad Core or similar,
- Memory: 8 GB RAM,
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 950 or Radeon HD 7970,
- DirectX: Version 11, and
- Storage: 1 GB available space.
The game doesn’t come with many customizable graphics options due to the engine’s simplicity, and in testing between friends, lowering the graphical demands through techniques like turning anti-aliasing down (or off completely) don’t seem to affect lower-end machines as much.
It seems this is because the game relies on your CPU just as much as it does the GPU to render the engine. So even the beefiest graphics card with all the settings turned down will still run slow if your CPU isn’t up to the task.
One for the Record Books
Since Minecraft launched, it’s become the single most popular video game of all time. Since Terraria launched, it’s become one of the most popular Steam titles. With Valheim’s launch, it looks like yet another cartoony crafting game is going to rocket up the charts, both in sales and (likely) a plentiful bounty of GOTY awards come next season.
Despite its early access tag, Valheim already feels like a complete series of near-perfect design decisions made back to back to back. Every element is exactly as difficult as it should be, takes just as long as it should take, and no part of the experience feels bogged down by unnecessary resource gathering or crafting limits. I say this as someone who has put off months-long gaming sessions with close friends exclusively because of unnecessary resource gathering and crafting limits.
On that basis alone, Valheim should be recognized for the achievement it is. Like Stardew Valley and Undertale before it, Valheim’s story is one of a labor of love. Iron Gate Studio created a heck of a platform to build upon.
The company has already announced its roadmap for the year, including multiple content updates that will add even more ways to customize your castles or Viking longhouses. After that more enemies, recipes, items, and biomes to explore are on the way, and I can’t wait to see what’s waiting around the next beautifully rendered bend. Vikings, ho!
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