I had seen a few post about an early access game called Valheim for a couple of weeks, but when it hit over 3 million downloads in about the same amount of weeks of being released in early access, I thought I would give it a closer look. It had all the elements that appeal to me, survival, resource collecting, base building and a progressive tech tree.
So what’s not to love, and it really is good. So much fun on your own or you can go multiplay, but I haven’t tried that yet….. noob and all that….
It looks fantastic, such a great art style they went for, the weather is amazing, and the world itself just feels alive and rich.
You start with nothing, being dropped by Hugin the raven who will give you some early start advise. Then you are on your own. Knock down a tree, make an axe, knock more trees down. Before you know it you have made a workbench. Then you move onto a house which you can sleep in and store items.
After I was settled I went for the first boss Eikthyr. Not that difficult, and opens up more of the tech tree. Now I can dig up some of the ores, and also smelt metals.
I found a few caves which had some skeletons in, which with a good few swings of my axe were easy to defeat.
After a little more resource collecting I could now smelt tin and copper to make bronze, which leads me onto making my first raft.
Going to a new island was slow going and even more so when I went out into the open sea……but again, so much fun. I did finally come across a Troll which hitting from a distance wasn’t to difficult.
Overall first impressions are very positive. I believe we still have almost a year of early access, but its very playable even now, and I for one am looking forward to more updates and added content.
