Rimworld: My New Addiction
It's not so often that you hear a game on steam going out of early access hell. Personally, I browse steam and see some games that are wonderful and still in early access, sometimes I tend to wonder what the full product becomes. I've tried out My time at Portia as well as Oxygen not included! Both amazing games in their own right and obviously a tad bit rough around the edges, which is to be expected in an early access game. I sometimes get worried though. If you were to browse steam's early access and greenlit games you might need to shuffle through a good bit of less-than-savory products such as Hentai Legends. But once in a while, you get an amazing game that just breaks out of its early access stages and gets a full release, and this game is Rimworld.
At first glance, I thought this game would seem to be a simple colony building survival game, a standard, collect the wood, build a house, hunt for food type of game. I was proven wrong almost instantly when I first started to see the world the crew that was randomly selected for me was being dropped in, After that, I knew that I was in for an interesting ride.
The game begins with you choosing a Storyteller and a difficulty, Each storyteller has their own way of handling events throughout the game. There are different types of encounters, like foreign settlers running away from another faction, traders selling weapons and sometimes slaves. You can choose to open your border and let them pass or attack them and become a raider camp. But when you land (depending on the scenario you choose) You have randomly selected individuals with different stats pertaining to, construction, crafting, medical and shooting. You work to create a safe camp for your settlers to live peacefully and survive.
This game is very slow and akin to tower defense game when you raise the difficulties. Waves of enemies coming into your base while you defend with the turrets and gunners. The difficulty doesn't stop there though, Your settlers can start social fights, threatening to kill each other, or have mental breakdowns. There's so much flavor text in this game it's going to be near impossible to read all of it in one solid playthrough. After a week with this game, I am still learning new things. New ways to handle temperature, different biomes, and savage creatures.
The fun didn't stop there for me, as someone who enjoys a lot of Bethesda games like Skyrim, Oblivion, and the Fallout series I am pretty fond of the modding community. Rimworld has so many mods that will vary your gameplay cycle leading you to more than just a couple of hours of digging, mining, and building. Some of my favorite mods added more biomes, dinosaurs, androids, and the ability to create scientific abominations! The games art style aren't really too much to write home about, but it really grows on you after an hour or so in. and well when you start building your bases, that sense of pride you feel after you make your first village or camp will make you forget all about that.
Now this game isn't perfect, there's quite a few that I feel its lacking when it comes to its boring yet complicated UI. The point where its harder to keep track of some areas and maybe a way to create more squads of units in an easier manner. Rather than memorizing some names. I would enjoy it more if I can sort my colonists based off their skills. Where instead of looking in the work menu and marking checkboxes I can have a whole window dedicated to a Logger, a Hunter or a builder. In the base game its really easy to keep track of 3-5 people but when your colony grows it grows difficult, and it's not because of lack of resources. It just gets harder to keep track of everyone's health. There's a point where the game isn't difficult because of the hard encounters, but difficult because you can't keep track with its UI.
There's another issue i feel that this game needs to improve on and that's the AI, There are so many times I want to point and click to what I want my settlers to do like a standard RTS, even though I know it isn't that way, the AI of some characters are so slow or dumb they can just stand and get shot at without even bothering to do a melee attack. The melee attack options feel almost pointless as well when there are guns that not only damage people so much, it leads fewer other options when it comes to weaponry of more in-your-face variety. My complaints can be fixed with mods but I feel that when there's a mod that fixes a problem in your game when it comes to balancing I feel it becomes more of a necessity than a modded addition.
I mentioned earlier that this game has a slow start, and to elaborate on it. I took almost 8 hours to get a pretty good colony of 10 (without prisoners) and feel extremely safe. The best part was that I wasn't burnt out afterward. I got some sleep just thinking of new ways to make my next start more efficient and ways to improve my current civilization, let alone start wars or be at peace with close factions. Though 8 hours is a long time, it felt really relaxing. I was able to watch my shows and listen to my podcasts while I play.
In total this game has just got out of early access and I really would recommend it to anyone who likes town building games, and anyone who wants a game they can sink hundreds of hours into while still only covering the barebones surface of what the game has to offer you.
If I had to give it a score I guess I would give it an 8/10 Its really good but I still feel like the mods give the game that extra edge that makes a good game great.