If you don't look problems up on the web until you're stumped, Valheim can be an Icelandic saga. People who have fast internet connections can race through it and kill all the bosses in less than a hundred hours, but if you play the game naively, the way any game is meant to be played, you will die a few times and it will take a couple hundred hours depending on your general gaming experience.

Unless you get distracted by building elaborate bases. Then it will take longer. Building fancy bases is a good way to recover skill points after dying, since the practice mobs are unrelenting.

I have 800 hours in my current game, started afresh when H&H was released. I have just reached the Iron age. The third boss is a long sail east, but I'm not worried about him yet.

I found the Maypole. So my headquarters must be moved for the sake of one extra resting buff, just as I happen to be able to build with stone and iron. That's going to take a hundred hours or so that won't move me one inch closer to Bonemass.

If you can resist that sort of temptation, you will finish your first game quicker than me, but you won't have as much fun.

The combat is not hard unless you wander into a biome you're not ready for, though Valheim is an RNG game, and sometimes you get mobbed by everything but Pacman. From the start, the game forces you to make forays into the next level biome, until you can steal enough stuff to make the weapons and armor and food you need to be going there in the first place.

Valheim is a great game, and it's getting better all the time. Some people think it is too grindy, or too this or too that, but the cure is in the devcommands and mods. You can shape Valheim to suit your style. Come for the scenery. Stay for the many colorful ways to die.