izigame.me

Ok so after finally committing to the game after finally finding people to play it with I can safely give criticism with confidence behind what I'm saying.
Valheim is a world that feels alive with some very satisfying mechanics, Wood cutting? great. Mining excluding copper? great.
Combat feels very satisfying with quite a few weapon options. Enemies have certain strategies with select weapons being more effective to fight with against them.
Boss fights feel very satisfying and give a good sense of progression excluding Eikthyr and The Queen, the first being super easy and needing no gear and the latter will be a bigger breakdown below.
I think up until the Mistlands the game feels very complete and really well made.
Now onto the Mistlands, This may come across as biased? but i have looked around on reddit and the feeling seems to be super mutual. The mistlands feels more like a chore rather than something to actually take in and enjoy, despite having Iron Padded armour that is fully maxed out which black metal weapons that are completely maxed out. I don't expect to walk with this gear into mistlands and breeze through it. However, I also don't expect to become a blood smear on the impossible to traverse terrain from a couple hits unless I'm running Bonemass Buff.
I spent 40 hours+ looking for the Infested Dungeons in the Mistlands fine combing through MULTIPLE of the mist biomes. i knew what i was searched for because after around 10 hours in I had to search up what they looked like because I thought I was somehow missing them? It turns out we had came across a few derelict structures that were MEANT to have the dungeons attached but for some reason did not?
After about 30 hours of having zero luck with dungeons we used a website where you could basically see everything on the seed and we were surprised with how few dungeons there were and how spread out they were. after managing to find several dungeons this way we could also not find a single Lore tablet that would ping the boss altar and had to use the website to find that also. I just think with how bad the terrain is. Its a great concept but why must I have to traverse this terrain which is also ridiculous with the energy consumption and then have to be super paranoid about having a swarm of seekers or a gjall nuke me to high heavens because visibility is poor? Sure I can place down torches but only in areas that I haven't been.
The Queen Bossfight herself we had also found ridiculous, we were buffed, Level 2 carapace gear and weapons. it took us a while, we found all previous bosses quite fun even the last couple that had some challenging mechanics but we never sat there and went yeah, that boss fight sucked. Why does the Queen's health pool have to be so large? despite all of her attacks none of them were surprising but there were zero pauses in the fight you're a melee user? be prepared to get thrown across the fight arena every time you get close. you're a bow user? yeah no damage. This boss fight is nothing short of complete frustration, not to mention with how much HP she has. you will break your Mistlands tier weapons before even getting her down half her HP, is this annoying? sure. but even with a maxed out black metal shield and a maxed out mist walker sword which seemed to be the most efficient way of killing her, we could not stand toe to toe without Bonemass buff. This is the only way we found that we could stand our ground.
If you are hit by the queen without bonemass buff and you dont time the block like a parry. you take an immense amount of damage which combined with seekers that she spawns is pretty much a death sentence. you can only pop Health pots every few minutes which means that the downtime is insane and I can understand why some people opt for cheesy strategies that involve multiple bows and hundreds of arrows or hundreds of bombs and sitting in spots where she can't reach you.
To conclude I think the game is super satisfying to play up until the Mistlands where the game feels like it changes genre's from a nice survival type of game with a good sense of progression to the new end-game biome where it feels like it transforms into a souls like game while wearing a blindfold of mist. where you have to perfect parrying and dodges in order to survive
If Mistlands were to receive some power tweaks to the mobs or increase the gear dps by a small amount it would certainly help, or even being able to see more with your wisp pet.
Shouts out to Bonemass for having our back in the fight else we would have probably resorted to cheesing her with bombs and bows