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RimWorld

RimWorld

After an extended stint in early access, version 1.0 has finally landed.

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It can be hard to know when you've seen enough of a game like RimWorld to write a review. And that's not down to the number of hours that we've put into the game, not at all, but rather the fact that Ludeon Studios' space colony management sim offers such an expansive range of gameplay possibilities that it's impossible to ignore just how much remains to be discovered and what's yet to be experienced.

The thing is, though, that much of RimWorld will never be experienced by us, by you, or by pretty much everyone else - the emergent scenarios that play out on the edge of this galaxy are very much defined by the player and their decisions. Sure, there's an AI director which throws friction your way in the form of disasters and pre-made story beats designed to advanced your bespoke narrative, but the characters you create, the bases you build, and the lives you help them lead ensures that everything is fundamentally and uniquely yours.

It's fitting that we get it out of the way first because our main complaint is that getting started can be a bit of a chore. There's an in-game helper to offer advice, and a short tutorial that gives you some of the basics, but there is a lot to take in and not all of it is explained as well as it could have been. It's not a total mess, but when the rest of the game is such a pleasure to explore and discover, better onboarding would have made getting to the good stuff a much simpler experience for everyone concerned.

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It's not a huge problem because the community that has built up around the game while it was chugging its way through Early Access is a welcoming one. There's a decent range of mods in development that expand the game in interesting ways and open up new possibilities. On top of that, there are tons of anecdotal stories doing the rounds, the kind of stuff that inspires you to boot up the game to see what might happen in your world today. There are guides and videos out there to help you find your feet, and we'd certainly recommend seeking out a little preparatory guidance before you start to play.

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Once you've got past the opening bump in terms of complexity, it's mostly smooth sailing from then on. Better help tools would have been nice if only to save us from the inelegance of tabbing out and typing out a Google search, but for the most part, it's intuitive enough that you'll get along just fine. Your resource levels are displayed top-left, real-time info bottom-right, and the menus foot the page. The pop-up menus, in turn, reveal a wealth of options, and while RimWorld isn't the most visually stimulating game you'll ever encounter, it certainly offers a huge amount of depth with very little fuss.

In terms of visuals, it shares a similar style to Prison Architect with its no-nonsense top-down world populated by big-headed characters. It does the job, but ultimately it's extremely minimalistic. It's hard to criticise the lack of visual polish though because the relatively uninteresting sprites are only thus because it allows Ludeon to explore so many more interesting avenues, and you won't meet a single RimWorld player who'd have it the other way around. Like its ASCII inspiration Dwarf Fortress before it, the emphasis is on the simulation rather than pretty pixels, and that key sacrifice allows creative depth the likes of which we've rarely seen in a video game.

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RimWorld

There is, at least, a nice balance between simplicity and detail, and you can see clearly what everything is, even when some of the items are particularly small. The standard experience (you can choose from different scenarios that make the game harder as well as drastically change the dynamic in terms of your colonists and how they interact) has three characters crash-land on the planet surface with a bunch of supplies. The standardised setup gives you a couple of weapons, some basic supplies, and then drops you in a biome of your choice. Most of the time we went for the temperate (read: easier) starting regions, but you can plonk your crew of misfits down in sand and snow, in forests, near mountains, and by the water. It's a simple choice, but it has huge consequences.

Naturally, setting up shop in the side of a frozen mountain is a bigger challenge than building a colony in a lush green field where it's perpetual summer time. It's a case of "you do you" at the end of the day, and RimWorld really is a shining of example of a game that lets the player facilitate the experience that they want to have. This is further highlighted by the difficulty options, which can be tinkered with to a surprising extent, with Ludeon letting you guide the experience by dictating both its general pacing and the severity of the events that befall you.

Once you're up and running and you've found your home among the stars, it's time to build. It takes time to stabilise your colony and really find your feet. You can direct your colonists to do specific tasks, such as shooting at a target or talking to a visiting NPC, but for the most part, they do their own thing, albeit with their daily schedule dictated by your planning. Different characters have their own personalities as well as skills (for example, you might have someone who's really interested in doing something, but who's not very good at good at it), and you have to balance keeping everyone as happy as possible with getting the essentials done in a timely manner.

At the beginning your colonists will sleep rough; then they'll have wooden beds on earthy floors; then you'll lay flooring and build furniture and enhance their living conditions. It takes time to get things just right, but time isn't always on your side and as you look to balance colony management with personal comforts, the story director will throw events at you to further disrupt your plans and challenge your priorities. Whether you'll have to manually direct your band of survivors to open fire on approaching invaders, or hide indoors because manhunting cats are patrolling outside, every now and then something will come out of left field to throw a spanner in the works.

We say "spanner in the works" like it's a bad thing, but the more challenging moments can often be the hand that tips the first domino, setting in course a series of events that happen only to you, only to these characters, and that for better or for worse tells a unique story on this backwater planet in the middle of nowhere. Tragedy is often just around the corner in RimWorld, and we've watched our colony burn to the ground in front of very eyes - not because we failed, but because that's just how this particular story had to play out. We shed a digital tear, no doubt, but then went back to the drawing board, generating new characters and searching out new stories on this hostile rock.

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It's the characters that make RimWorld such a special game. Their individual quirks interact with each other brilliantly to create plausible relationships. We've seen them making friends, fall in love, fight to the death, lose their shit in hilarious circumstances, and everything in between. Life and death is just part of the experience, and new faces will regularly join your colony and change up the dynamic. There's enough complexity there to bring your characters off the screen and into your imagination, and the potentially extended playtime means you'll have plenty of time to get to know them. Ludeon Studios gives us just enough dots and, in return, all we have to do is join them together as we see fit.

While there's an element of everyday life to contend with, there's plenty of the fantastical in there too. Certain scenarios can be a little on the absurd side (for example, we've been attacked by more than one stark bollock naked raider before, and don't get us started on the crazy chinchillas), but we suspect that's a matter of taste and most people will thoroughly enjoy the off-the-wall moments. There's a lot of charm woven into the experience even if, for the most part, there's still an overall focus on logic and plausibility. Apart from the fact that your colonists never need the toilet, the emphasis is on creating a believable scenario that's grounded enough to help you stay in the moment.

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The alternate reality that's painted before your eyes can become extremely involving, and this is helped by the sheer number of adjustable features. You can obviously build your base, either out in the open or by burrowing into natural landmarks, but beyond that, you'll need to grow the resources needed to survive, store everything properly and securely, make sure everyone is well fed and rested (you can even tweak individual sleeping patterns), as well as build defences to keep out nasty raiders. There are opportunities to trade, sending out caravans to swap items with nearby settlers, and players can even traipse across the whole map to a ship that'll take you off the planet.

So there is an exit point in there somewhere, but we expect most of you will be like us and have zero desire to escape this inhospitable planet. To paraphrase an old saying: it's not the destination, it's the journey that's important. Life is hard on the RimWorld, but that's no bad thing - quite the opposite in fact. It's through adversity that we find out who our colonists really are, and it's when these little digital people come to life that RimWorld shines brightest. After years in Early Access, Ludeon has released an utterly brilliant space colony simulation. It's the kind of game that you'll wake up thinking about, that you'll sink untold hours into, that'll run in the background while life goes on all around you. If you can get past the initial resistance offered by its complexity, a spellbinding and intoxicating experience awaits.

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10 Gamereactor UK
10 / 10
+
The deepest, most engaging sci-fi colony simulation we've ever played, Lots of systems to explore, Amazing community, Fascinating lore.
-
Could have done with a better tutorial.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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