Stories, stories, stories. RimWorld sets you up for an ever changing game in which only your engagement remains the same, potentially for hundreds of hours. And when you’re done with the vanilla version of RimWorld, there are thousands of mods that enhance or change the game in such a way that it is all fresh again. I am in awe of RimWorld, and it deserves a Big Fat 10 out of 10.
The day has come when I will tell you about my favorite indie game - RimWorld by Ludeon Studios. It's a colony simulator. In the classic scenario, we crash-land with 3 characters and 1 pet on an alien planet with resources that will last for a few days. We must survive, build a base, gather food, discover new things, and not succumb to random events.I have the impression that in this game, you can truly do everything, and if it turns out that you can't, the Steam Workshop is full of mods, and you will surely find whatever you can think of
I'll focus on the base game, but there are also 3 DLCs that I'll review soon.
On the plus side:
+ 3 different storytellers who influence how often and what kind of events will happen in our gameplay, from peaceful idyll to continuous tragedy
+ Different game scenarios, e.g., "Naked Brutality" - starting completely naked and "happy" as a castaway, the ability to create your own scenarios
+ Extensive research tree - from lack of electricity to building a spaceship
+ Diverse flora and fauna; we can have animal husbandry+ Weather that affects the environment, e.g., we need to sew warm clothes for winter
+ Our initial castaways are generated randomly, each with their own statistics, personality traits, childhood and adulthood descriptions, mood, injuries, missing limbs, illnesses, and addictions
+ Hostile and friendly factions; we can fight and trade with them
+ Everything needs to be produced by ourselves or bought
+ Relationships between colonists
+ Quests
+ Prisoners that we can recruit, kill, release, harvest organs from, or worse, turn into, for example, a hat or food (and here's the hat puzzle in the picture solved; Rimworld players often joke that the game's biggest feature is the ability to make a hat from human skin)
+ Enormous replayability, and thanks to mods, we can create an entirely new game; some mods are like separate DLCsAnd I could go on and on.
I also have a series on my YouTube channel - feel free to check it out :) There's no better game for me - 10/10.
The diversity of environments significantly enriches the game and challenges experienced players in new conditions every time. It’s a hellishly good game – for me an addiction that makes me go back to it and reach for more and more. [13/2018, p.84]
This strategy game offers survival and business simulation in one package. With the player learning from trial and error, numerous unpredictable events bring additional challenges to solve, while enriching the story at the same time.
A satisfying colony-building sandbox with a lot of replayability that suffers from a lack of polish in the UI. A great aesthetic and quirky sci-fi take on the genre mean there is a lot to like here, it just takes a little digging to get there.
Ahh yes the Rimworld. The game where you can be a peaceful colony or have a organ harvesting empire with so much to do you cant decide would you rather start learning the game or just try having a good time. But not with our friends storytellers and our icon Randy that will for sure put you into muffalo madness.A game so addictive that it will become like Luciferium to you so just have some fun making human leather cowboy hats and make sure after some hours to check the modding comunnity if it somehow the game becomes boring to you and have fun!
I've tried the game with a 10-euros Epic coupon, making for a 16 euros price, which is, well, acceptable for what the game is. I honestly think the enormous success of RimWorld relies on two things, more than on its own merits:
1) an extremely dedicated, and actually somewhat fanatic, community, which made it kinda of a cult item.
2) Mods
Now, mods are very nice but a game should be judged by its own merits. If RimWorld was sold as a pack of developer tools, then fine, but it's sold a stand-alone game and so mods should be excluded from the evaluation. So, what is it? A colony management game with some clever ideas, a detailed character system, random events adding some spice. And then the bads: terrible AI forcing the player into extreme micromanagement and an overall lack of content (as I said, in the base game), even if compared with other indie games. Also, very clunky interface.
People will tell you this is a "story generator". Beyond the fancy words, it just means the game gives you random events, interacting with your colony and characters, and you make up a story from them. Yeah, kinda like The Sims. It's nothing extremely innovative or surprising. As I said, a lot of people seem to just venerate this game for reasons I don't really understand, and I think it's just one of those cases of perfectly normal products getting a cult following that reinforces itself over time.
Now, I would have given the game 6 or even 7 if it wasn't for one terrible decision: the game never goes on sale. The Epic coupon was just there for every game on the store, but RimWorld itself is always full priced. And we're talking an old game here (alpha was in 2013). This is extremely anti-consumer and if a mentality like this was to spread PC gaming would go downhill in the blink of an eye: many people, especially young people and folks from poorer countries, would be cut off from the hobby; and the market would concentrate around few extensively-covered, hyped games, because nobody could discover hidden gems during sales, kinda likes console market was years ago. This really shouldn't be supported and I will never buy something from this dev again.
It's also ridiculous if you think you can get four or five more recent AAA great games, on sale, for the fixed RimWorld price. Right now, XCOM 2 is 3 euros on Steam. Do I need to tell you how much better XCOM is? Really, if you look at the market, you realize that wanting to sell at full price an indie game almost 10 years old with little production value in it (there are no animations, no effects, sounds and graphics are even below indie average) is just arrogance and insulting to customers and other devs.
SummaryA sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Firefly. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.