Recent reviews by sand

play motherload instead

-spoiler free-

It's short, my 11h are from leaving the game open, i spent half of that playing and ended on 5h36m. Don't try Hard on your first playthrough, the menu makes it sound enticing with words like 'challenge' but it's sadistic and near impossible unless you know exactly where to go and what to do with what you find immediately. Good enough to try but it has nothing on the Dark Descent and SOMA

if you touched a PC win98 or older, this will invoke some bizarre feelings

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solid

great with friends, get the "pause-time" mod so that pausing in-game time still occurs when both of you are in menus and so on

hard game that demands a lot of patience from you. my first 4-5 hours were spent in short sessions, opening it up, getting massacred by the environment, and closing it. very happy that I kept going, the gameplay, art, world, and the emotions you have seeing all of it bit by bit while being so small made a huge impression on me.

might not be for everyone, i don't fault anyone for not having the mental fortitude to finish it, but if you do and you like it, i like you.

untouchable

playing V rising just makes me wish i was playing battlerite

changing my review because of mistlands.

Valheim has amazing untapped potential in terms of exploration, combat and making a steady living. I still remember the first couple weeks I played it, I was so enamored by every new thing I found in it. Every big creature, every new place, it was memorable to see it, run from it, prepare for it, and overcome it to go up in power. It was saddening to slowly realize that there was a lot less there than I was hoping. "I hope there are no krakens" became "I wish we'd just find something".

2 years pass and they've updated the mountain, ocean and added mistlands.

The mountain update is one new instance with 3 new enemies and a new armor set to farm. I like the addition but it feels like a small and optional aside to an already complete tier.

Fishing is a straight up downgrade from the old system because every fish now takes separate bait, adding a pointless layer of abstraction to receiving the exact same reward. New fish aren't used for anything, some don't even have a multiplier to their "raw fish" yield, so there is no point even attempting it other than larp as a master fisherman and hang exotic fish on your wall that won't shut the ♥♥♥♥ up. This was supposed to address that the biggest biome, the Ocean, had only one enemy in it. A great one, but a lonely one. Instead they added fish reskins and locked them behind bait. Reminder that fish were already in the game and functioning, now this empty ocean just has jumping fish in it that you can't catch unless you brought not only the rod but the specific bait that fish requires.

Mistlands as a biome is nothing short of steaming garbage. It has a constant, thick fog, extremely rocky terrain, with water everywhere. It took the worst parts of mountains and swamps (tolerable separately), and added not being able to see anything in it. Enemies are all flying bugs that take a lot of hits to go down, they no longer have damage-type weaknesses so you instead have to land precision attacks on these enemies that refuse to stand still. Worst of all is that the progression is locked behind rare finds. If you don't locate a certain resource, you will loot over 100 of each crafting item before being allowed to craft a single one. Compare that to plains where you take some flax home and suddenly armor and weapons are available. You can smelt black metal as soon as the previous boss dies. I don't understand why access is so extremely hampered, it's nowhere near as bad in previous tiers. Truly a shame because the pre-update "mistlands", the empty placeholder, looked so much more promising than this. Lastly the direction seems off. Bugs + dwarves + yggdrasil roots + black marble + ancient armor/swords + mist + rocks + magic. I can't see why those were combined.

All my previous enthusiasm for Valheim hinged on them still being in the process of adding to it. Every shortcoming I was telling myself that it was a matter of time before they solved it. It's now been nearly 2 years and all they have to show for it is 1 downgraded system in a place that sorely needed content, and a tier that is infuriating to play and progress in. I don't know who's to blame but poor resource management is evident, either crossplay and ports took all the wind out of the team or the recent hires ended up doing irreparable damage.

Valheim still has high potential embedded within, but mistlands was a big step in the wrong direction.