Recent reviews by Riavis

The progression and gameplay in general seems fine, taking into the account amount of devs and age of game. However, I cannot currently recommend this game in it's current state. Turns out on a pve server, anyone can just walk up to your base with a hammer equipped, and immediately start destroying doors/walls and ransacking your stuff. You cannot fight back, they just immediately have permissions and can destroy/pickup/loot anything they want whatsoever. This is NOT acceptable.

Recommend as is as SINGLE PLAYER ONLY.

Responsive dev team, ambitious yet achievable roadmap, a pleasing art style that's still accessible by lower end machines. Very helpful official Discord! Issues seem to be caught fairly early there, and hotfixes implemented fairly quickly.

PROS
-Loads to explore and incentive to do so
-Alternative ways to gather materials via trading with NPCs that you must find out in the world
-Gold and Runestones for unlocking blueprints feel nice to unlock, but not truly necessary for progression

CONS
-Building is currently an unintuitive mess (but has been noted and will be improved/expanded according to road map)
-Repairing end game materials is REALLY expensive (will probably be hotfixed very soon)
-Inventory management is not all that polished yet

If you're looking for a game with loads of promise, fun to play, with what looks to be great return on investment go ahead and drop for this. It's great fun and has lots going for it still on the horizon!

I've never played an early access game with as much potential as Valheim brings to the table! Initially I avoided this title because of the low texture look, but now I wished I'd grabbed it a lot sooner.

I'll leave out the generic bits that people tend to leave on most survival games... you gather, you eat, you kill things when you progress to the point that you can take on better things, yadda yadda. Valheim excels at something that a lot of survival games struggle with, which is having a clear path to progression and a REAL impact and sense of achievement every step of the way! You don't feel like you should be rushing straight to end game! You get rewarded for exploration, defending a base early game doesn't feel like a hopeless endeavor, and you don't become ridiculously overpowered until appreciatively late game. And there's a road map in place for future updates already!

That being said there are still some things that need to be worked on. I get that a certain aesthetic was in mind, but there needs to be at least an option for better graphics or limited official mod support to allow for it. Base defense, especially with raids in mind, need to be fleshed out a bit more. Farm enough stone and you can make an impenetrable defense using terrain as a wall and dig out a ditch outside of it as an extra FU... if you have knowledge of this then you've just trivialized one of the major hurdles you're supposed to struggle at least a little to overcome in the early to mid game.

I had a few other suggestions in mind, but after rechecking the road map I'm confident that they will be addressed in future updates. Give this game a try! Especially for the price, it's an adventure you must experience! It's like the creative brain-child of Skyrim and Minecraft haha

You will need to meet higher than normal specs to play this game efficiently, it is an absolute resource hog.

Other than that there are plenty of different servers, official and modded, to go through until you find one that matches your preferred playstyle. If the official servers aren't your alley, don't give up! There are fantastic communities on other servers that vary gameplay types in all kinds of ways.

Overall I would recommend the game due to the steady updates, a stage-branch for future updates that you can monitor so nothing catches you by surprise (usually)... and there's antics unique to Rust that you just HAVE to experience.