Valheim
🙂4
76561197960374843
A really solid, unique survival game with an atmospheric artstyle.. Unfortunately, it's currently plagued with a myriad of issues preventing it from being great. Rather than regurgitating in detail what everyone else has already complimented the game for, i'm going to list the current problems it has while trying to stay away from any possible spoilers.
1. Progression.
Valheim has a system where your progression is hard-locked behind murderboning bosses in a specific order (you can't skip) that unlocks what metals you're able to smelt, which is incredibly linear and gets stale quick when replaying. To make matters worse, all your recipes for crafting will also not be revealed until you pick up ingredients which causes confusion for new players (leaving you guessing as to what the next step is) and annoyances for replaying. Additionally, in order to do said progression, you NEED to find specific things in specific biomes.. And said biomes can be rare with the things in them usually being even more rare.. And you require a LOT of these things. Did i mention there's basically no methods of transportation or quick-travel early on? And that there's no map sharing between players & no way to increase your view-range on the map? In it's current state, it is very unfriendly towards solo players and creates huge resource deficit problems for groups. Current map gen is that there's a circle with a bunch of islands, and all of the islands are identical repeats of each-other. Miles upon miles of land, but absolutely zero depth.
2. Difficulty.
This is both a strength and a weakness for Valheim. On one hand, the game starts out easy and gets progressively more and more difficult in a curve that has a few spikes i found myself enjoying as for once, dying is quite harsh & has serious consequences. On the other hand, the AI and it's pathfinding is woefully inadequate for both the terrain and the methods of combat & cheesing tactics players can employ. For example, most mobs completely struggle when you're kiting them in open fields. Now add trees, boulders, hills and other obstructions to that formula. They've tried amending this by giving enemies "attack run" patterns after they've swung at you but this will realistically only help once or twice before you learn them and in many cases, it only aggravates their pathfinding troubles in difficult terrain. There's also "upgraded" enemies that do 5-10 times more damage to you which is made a problem as they're very hard to actually tell apart most of the time.. It also exists for ranged enemies that can shoot you far away from the shadows through their friends. Basically, expect to die instantly & repeatedly from something you couldn't see at any given time.
3. Building system.
It's a mess. Things are 100% dependent on you precisely looking at them from certain angles or crevices while the camera is crooked over your right shoulder. There's currently no free-form camera at all and the "snapping" function that exist is laughably demanding to the point where you need the following things to snap something correctly: 1-3 Pixel accuracy. 1-2 Degrees accuracy. Looking at correct surface. Have a correct rotation. Be within a narrow range. As you can imagine, it takes quite a while to both learn it and get used to it. Additionally, in it's current implementation, it's often impossible for you to create certain things like bridges in steep rivers (can't have a hammer out while swimming + you need a workshop + said placement restrictions) and the system feels unnecessarily tedious at times as to build anything, you NEED a nearby workshop. I had to put down 3 of the things because their radius is so small when making a house. Similarly, i need 4-5 of them to make even small-ish bridges. It's not like they're expensive or unique as you get a full refund of their cost when destroying them, making the ordeal just 100% unnecessary tedium.
4. Performance.
To be frank, Valheim runs like a turd lit on fire rolling down a hill. While the shockingly small game size is very impressive, you can expect to be forced to play on low-medium settings for a steady framerate unless you have a needlessly powerful PC.. And even then, you're gonna have to restart it once in a while as it suffers from memory leaks, especially in multiplayer. There's also no options to turn off some obnoxious flashing effects like during thunderstorms or when you take damage repeatedly (such as being poisoned) which has been giving people seizures. For me, anything that emitted smoke wrecked my FPS the most. I went from steady 60 to 20-30 just from placing down a couple of campfires which is unacceptable. Large structures, village'esque things, singular farms or just mild amounts of terraforming will also completely tank the framerate. Acceptable for a game that basically only have 16 bit textures right now? Hell. No.
5. Item system.
In every other game like this, you pick something up by pressing (E).. In Valheim unless it is a loose item that's been thrown or something, your character just dislodges said item from the ground to put it into a "lying around" state and requires you to press (E) again to pick it up or walk over it. Might not seem like a big issue at first, but Valheim is extremely grindy and having this be as it is right now effectively DOUBLES the inputs required from you for literally no reason. The only way to mitigate this is to walk over every thing you're trying to pick up but the "item vaccum" effect the game has is very tiny and it's something that stops working completely with small amounts of lag. If you're close to being encumbered, items aren't picked up at all with no notification to you, either. This item vaccum system also frequently backfires. Say you just died and you're running back to your corpse. It weighs 295 and you can carry 300, but on the way there, you automatically stuff a bunch of rocks into your inventory. Pick up said corpse (probably with enemies nearby) and voilá, you're now encumbered & crippled! There's also other issues in multiplayer games when you use throwing items and you have a friend meleeing (or just running around) whatever you're throwing stuff at, he will automatically suck those thrown projectiles up into his inventory, leaving you disarmed for the fight. TL;DR: It needs serious tweaking, adjustable settings or a rework. == Rest of the review here: https://pastebin.com/qiBagtu8
76561197960374843Valheim
🙂476561197960374843
A really solid, unique survival game with an atmospheric artstyle.. Unfortunately, it's currently plagued with a myriad of issues preventing it from being great. Rather than regurgitating in detail what everyone else has already complimented the game for, i'm going to list the current problems it has while trying to stay away from any possible spoilers.
1. Progression.
Valheim has a system where your progression is hard-locked behind murderboning bosses in a specific order (you can't skip) that unlocks what metals you're able to smelt, which is incredibly linear and gets stale quick when replaying. To make matters worse, all your recipes for crafting will also not be revealed until you pick up ingredients which causes confusion for new players (leaving you guessing as to what the next step is) and annoyances for replaying. Additionally, in order to do said progression, you NEED to find specific things in specific biomes.. And said biomes can be rare with the things in them usually being even more rare.. And you require a LOT of these things. Did i mention there's basically no methods of transportation or quick-travel early on? And that there's no map sharing between players & no way to increase your view-range on the map? In it's current state, it is very unfriendly towards solo players and creates huge resource deficit problems for groups. Current map gen is that there's a circle with a bunch of islands, and all of the islands are identical repeats of each-other. Miles upon miles of land, but absolutely zero depth.
2. Difficulty.
This is both a strength and a weakness for Valheim. On one hand, the game starts out easy and gets progressively more and more difficult in a curve that has a few spikes i found myself enjoying as for once, dying is quite harsh & has serious consequences. On the other hand, the AI and it's pathfinding is woefully inadequate for both the terrain and the methods of combat & cheesing tactics players can employ. For example, most mobs completely struggle when you're kiting them in open fields. Now add trees, boulders, hills and other obstructions to that formula. They've tried amending this by giving enemies "attack run" patterns after they've swung at you but this will realistically only help once or twice before you learn them and in many cases, it only aggravates their pathfinding troubles in difficult terrain. There's also "upgraded" enemies that do 5-10 times more damage to you which is made a problem as they're very hard to actually tell apart most of the time.. It also exists for ranged enemies that can shoot you far away from the shadows through their friends. Basically, expect to die instantly & repeatedly from something you couldn't see at any given time.
3. Building system.
It's a mess. Things are 100% dependent on you precisely looking at them from certain angles or crevices while the camera is crooked over your right shoulder. There's currently no free-form camera at all and the "snapping" function that exist is laughably demanding to the point where you need the following things to snap something correctly: 1-3 Pixel accuracy. 1-2 Degrees accuracy. Looking at correct surface. Have a correct rotation. Be within a narrow range. As you can imagine, it takes quite a while to both learn it and get used to it. Additionally, in it's current implementation, it's often impossible for you to create certain things like bridges in steep rivers (can't have a hammer out while swimming + you need a workshop + said placement restrictions) and the system feels unnecessarily tedious at times as to build anything, you NEED a nearby workshop. I had to put down 3 of the things because their radius is so small when making a house. Similarly, i need 4-5 of them to make even small-ish bridges. It's not like they're expensive or unique as you get a full refund of their cost when destroying them, making the ordeal just 100% unnecessary tedium.
4. Performance.
To be frank, Valheim runs like a turd lit on fire rolling down a hill. While the shockingly small game size is very impressive, you can expect to be forced to play on low-medium settings for a steady framerate unless you have a needlessly powerful PC.. And even then, you're gonna have to restart it once in a while as it suffers from memory leaks, especially in multiplayer. There's also no options to turn off some obnoxious flashing effects like during thunderstorms or when you take damage repeatedly (such as being poisoned) which has been giving people seizures. For me, anything that emitted smoke wrecked my FPS the most. I went from steady 60 to 20-30 just from placing down a couple of campfires which is unacceptable. Large structures, village'esque things, singular farms or just mild amounts of terraforming will also completely tank the framerate. Acceptable for a game that basically only have 16 bit textures right now? Hell. No.
5. Item system.
In every other game like this, you pick something up by pressing (E).. In Valheim unless it is a loose item that's been thrown or something, your character just dislodges said item from the ground to put it into a "lying around" state and requires you to press (E) again to pick it up or walk over it. Might not seem like a big issue at first, but Valheim is extremely grindy and having this be as it is right now effectively DOUBLES the inputs required from you for literally no reason. The only way to mitigate this is to walk over every thing you're trying to pick up but the "item vaccum" effect the game has is very tiny and it's something that stops working completely with small amounts of lag. If you're close to being encumbered, items aren't picked up at all with no notification to you, either. This item vaccum system also frequently backfires. Say you just died and you're running back to your corpse. It weighs 295 and you can carry 300, but on the way there, you automatically stuff a bunch of rocks into your inventory. Pick up said corpse (probably with enemies nearby) and voilá, you're now encumbered & crippled! There's also other issues in multiplayer games when you use throwing items and you have a friend meleeing (or just running around) whatever you're throwing stuff at, he will automatically suck those thrown projectiles up into his inventory, leaving you disarmed for the fight. TL;DR: It needs serious tweaking, adjustable settings or a rework. == Rest of the review here: https://pastebin.com/qiBagtu8
76561197960374843
