Valheim - Preview, survive like a real Viking

The panorama of the survival in the cooperative is increasingly saturated with more or less valid titles, thanks to the success over the years of productions that have enjoyed enormous success such as Rust, The Forest e DayZ. In a market where there should no longer be room for new contenders, in the last few weeks a game has bullied the rankings of the various store digital on PC. We are talking about Valheim, survival multiplayer developed by Iron Gate Studio and set inshe was a Viking. The game is currently in early access but that hasn't stopped thousands of players from buying it. So let's see our first impressions of the game in question below.

Valheim catapult us naked and raw in a hostile world dominated by nature. Without weapons and clothes our goal in the game is to build a house to keep us warm, forge more and more powerful weapons and armor and face the various bosses scattered around the game map. Our Viking must prove his worth to the Gods by defeating these formidable enemies to land right in Valhalla. Feature that distinguishes (even if slightly) the game is the presence of a real one series of missions that will take us to visit the six biomes on the map, randomly generated at the beginning of the game. The title can be tackled both individually and in a group of up to ten people, a limitation that suggests focusing more on collaboration between players than in PvP. Your character's progression system looks like it's taken from an old MMO. The various parameters such as running, attack, swimming and more increase in level by repeating the aforementioned action over time.

Although the game lays its foundations on mechanics already present in other more famous titles, it still manages to give considerable satisfactions, thanks to a system of content-rich crafting and progressive over time and a certain freedom in the modeling of the surrounding terrain. In solo the game could be boring after a few hours, given the repetitiveness of certain actions and an advancement of the character and the plot that takes time, however in co-op with even just one other person Valheim gives the best of himself, thanks also to a balance of enemies that changes according to the number of players on the server, thus avoiding making the game too easy. However, its nature as an early access game brings with it some not indifferent gameplay problems: one above all is the construction system, which is really tedious due to the maximum precision required to position the various pieces built during creation, for example , of a building. If the development team particularly focused on the variety of objects and materials featured in the title, it cannot be said that he did the same thing with his enemies. In fact, after a few hours it will be noted that the variety of these is rather small. Same thing for the local fauna, useful for getting meat and skins. In 10 hours of testing we found only four different types of enemies (not counting the bosses) and three types of animals.

Moving on to the more technical part of Valheim, the game shows up with a simple and light graphic design, with specially simple environmental textures to ensure greater fluidity to the title. Even the player characters and the NPCs are made in a simple but still enjoyable way. The lighting, on the other hand, has an impact, giving glimpses that satisfy the eye, The day / night rotation and the climate system are also done quite well, as well as impacting through certain bonuses and malus in the gameplay, making the atmosphere of Valheim ethereal and almost fairytale. However, bugs are around the corner, in fact, like almost every product in early access, the game brings with it several issues, such as interpenetration of objects and enemies and hit boxes not always precise. It is also worth mentioning an optimization of the title is not entirely sufficient, in fact, despite the marked lightness of the title in terms of required power, the game, even on a medium-high-end PC, tends to have repeated and consistent frame drops.

In conclusion Valheim is a good survival with an intriguing concept and successful gameplay ideas, even if strongly derivative. Lovers of the genre will surely find fertile ground, especially if in the company of some friends. The edges to be filed are many, however given the great success that the game has received in the short period of its release, we are pretty sure that Iron Gate Studio will try to improve its product even more in the coming months, in an effort to deliver the best possible gaming experience.