Every great game is built on the foundations laid by games before. Minecraft was inspired and forged out of the ingenuity of **Infiniminer**. The entire MOBA genre was inspired by a popular Warcraft III mod.

Following this theme, Valheim doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but rather draws from the wealth of experiences generated by the pioneers that came before. So descending into the world of Valheim for the first time feels both familiar and comfortable for those of us who have played popular survival games before.

However, that’s not to say that Valheim is a clone, in fact it does quite a few things differently. As a survival game, it dares to both be fun and, more surprisingly, respect your time. 

Valhiem takes the best, forgets the worst and throws interesting new mechanics into the mix to create truly unforgettable experiences.

Valheim has a unique style, one that harks back to simpler times while simultaneously being modern enough to be digestible alongside the modern graphics.

So why is Valheim better (in my humble opinion) than other survival games?

Valheim has phenomenal pacing, the entire map is freely explorable from the beginning, however, the true potential of each biome can only be realised after beating each of the bosses associated with each biome. This keeps things fresh and interesting as you find new uses for things you have already seen. Fully deformable terrain and robust building options allows you to unleash your true creativity under the shade of Yggdrasil. It’s not often that you get deformable terrain in 3D non-voxel games, and Valheim’s implementation is truly the gold standard for this. Building comprises placing building pieces from the ground up, with each piece having a foundation strength which determines how many pieces it can support above it. This makes the act of building, a fairly standard survival mechanic, a fun puzzle to solve. It also gives later game pieces actual function rather than just allowing for aesthetic freedom, which is a common trait in many survival games today. This mechanic adds a sense of realism to both the worlds and the buildings therein. 

Valheim further improves the mechanics of hunger and food in the survival genre by tying your max health and stamina to the foods you eat. This is better than some games where you just die without food,  or receive punishing debuffs which can become frustrating. In these games food becomes a checklist chore. Valheim revolutionises this by providing the player with base health and stamina values that go up for a limited amount of time after eating, incentivising the player to eat without punishing them. Each food provides a different ratio of health/stamina, allowing the player to seek out foods that best suit their needs. It also further incentivises players to partake in more of the game’s other mechanics such as farming, taming & breeding animals, and fishing.  

Combat in Valheim is Soulsplit (challenging combat, generally forgiving with regards to player death), with light and heavy combos, parries and dodging. Each weapon category has its own animations as well as strengths and weaknesses. These mechanics make combat feel impactful rather than just comprising the braindead spamming found in many other survival games. Combat has a component of skill to it which prevents the bigger stat sticks (items carried purely for their inherently high stats) from auto winning in PvP.

Finally Valheim is better because it respects the player and their time. It strives to improve the genre as a whole with several quality-of-life features  such as zero cost tool repairs saving resources to reduce resource grinds. 

In summary, Valheim is a better survival game than *insert your favourite other survival game here* because it is the no-nonsense, all powerful, simply electrifying Thor in a genre filled with a bunch of annoying, time-wasting Lokis.