Here's Why You Should Be Playing 'Valheim'

One of the most addicting games of 2021, Valheim is the newest game that is beginning to capture attention but still remains relatively underrated. Recently passing two million sales, the game is challenging, thrilling, and sometimes frustrating, providing an adventure like no other in recent memory. Playing Valheim is a similar experience to games like Minecraft and Ark and even has the aesthetics of Outward, making it visually captivating. 

Released on February 2nd, Valheim already has two million active users in just two short weeks, making it one of the fastest-growing games on the market. Via Stream Charts, Valheim has ranked twelfth globally in the last seven days on Twitch alone with over ten million views total and a peak of 137,464 concurrent viewers.

Valheim is a testament to why Survival Multiplayers are going to be the next genre of gaming to blow up. When the Battle Royale game mode exploded, it exploited the strong desire for an open-world MMO, which is something that many gamers want to see more of. The reason I’m saying this is because right now, we are seeing the stage set of how we may actually get a new, strong MMO in the future. We started off with Battle Royales, and now we are witnessing a lot of people getting super interested in other popular SMPs like Terraria, The Forest, and Rust.  

Valheim is a great game! I love how you don’t fully know the map until you discover and explore it. The further you travel from ‘Spawn’ (the origin point), the harder the game gets—which is cool because it forces you to actually use your skills and play in order to learn the essentials and mechanics necessary for survival. In other games, you can see a crafting table, and it shows you everything that you can build—which can be a spoiler in a way. In my opinion, not knowing everything ahead of time makes it more exciting and the game more rewarding. Why? Well, because in real-time survival, there are two things: you only know what you know, and what you don’t know is what you don’t know.

I don’t know yet if Valheim will be trending in the sense that you will see big-time streamers playing it, but I do think people will enjoy playing it. In a world where we see a lot of free games become among the best, Valheim is worth paying. If I could pay $20 again, I would.