PC Critic Reviews

Valheim is the oath of the ultimate survival crafting adventure fulfilled, with a gorgeous art style, deadly dungeons, charming homesteading mechanics, and a breathtaking scope.

After more than 300 hours, I know Valheim well. Though somehow, it can still surprise me. That is why I suspect I will keep playing it for years. Version 1.0 may mark the end of its journey into Early Access, but for me, it doesn’t feel like an ending. Valheim has given me hundreds of hours of stories and discoveries, and, after all this time, I’m still not ready to leave.

Valheim is already a paragon of the survival crafting genre, with excellent art and music highlighting a world that generates endless exciting stories from only a few simple ingredients.

Valheim is a technological masterpiece, despite its graphics. Initially frustrating, the game's procedural generation system and unique progression mechanics truly shine. It avoids typical procedural pitfalls, offering a sense of direction without repetition and encouraging exploration of both new and old biomes. Despite a small development team, Valheim delivers a rich, individualized experience where players constantly return to earlier areas for resources and new discoveries, making advancement about world exploration rather than just increasing difficulty.

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.

Boiling down Valheim into a single word isn’t easy, what with its multiple biomes, staggering amount of crafting recipes, deceptively complex and detailed base-building mechanics, heart-pounding combat, and all. But if I had to choose, I’d call it epic. I don’t just mean that to describe the game’s awesomeness, of which it has plenty; I also mean that in its saga-like length and the downright mythical feats players get to achieve on their way from simple survival to the halls of Valhalla itself. This is the quintessential hardcore survival experience—don’t ever let anything convince you otherwise.

Valheim is probably the most polished survival game I've ever played, with a ridiculously satisfying upgrade loop that kept me hooked.

One of the best survival games around is finally complete.

A game that hands you a goal (and a dozen better ones on the way there) and trusts you to pick whichever one you want. The Deep North just gave me a colder, more beautiful place to get distracted in, and I can’t wait to start exploring again.

Quotation forthcoming.