Recent reviews by haizor

the only difference between every slop survival game is the amount of time that you have to spend doing the survival part. abiotic factor is absolutely the best example of this. you DO have to go gather food, but far more time is spent on exploring. it also has the benefit of being a hand-crafted map, which means even when you're doing the survival stuff, it's inherently still enjoyable.

valheim ♥♥♥♥♥ up on both fronts. everything takes so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long. want to make a single sword? have fun mining for 15 minutes? want to explore? have fun! you'll be on a boat the whole time, watching the same old procedurally generated landscapes, but doing sweet ♥♥♥♥-all. exploration sucks balls, survival sucks balls. i feel like valheim disrespects your time in every sense. it doesn't matter how well you play, you WILL spend at least half your time waiting, unable to actually do anything. the combat is lackluster, only having any sort of actual depth when parrying. the dodge roll feels so slow and clunky, same with swinging most weapons. there's no real sense of getting better in valheim. if anything, you feel like you're getting progressively weaker throughout the game as the content gets harder, and you don't scale in power hard enough.

i originally played this game with a friend when it came out, and the only thing the game had going for it at the time was the novelty. there was JUST BARELY enough interesting content to keep us playing (but we still spent half the time on our phones). i was hoping that any of these issues would be fixed by now, but it seems like it's a fundamental design philosophy to hate the player in any context and expect them to be miserable.

in the end, valheim does almost everything wrong, and i cannot understand why anybody would actually enjoy this game.