Recent reviews by CitrusTree

Oh wow, where to begin with Rimworld? It's been a long road since the alpha versions and I've been along for the ride all the way. Accounting for time played off-steam I might be around 700 to 800 hours deep in this game, which is by a large margin the longest time I've spent on any videogame of my library. Rimworld is quite an amazing and unique game, a colony simulation of sorts with a focus on storytelling (Both for good and bad). I'm not a great writer so I'll just make a list of what I think is the best and the worst of this game. I'm obviously biased, as someone who has played for so long, but I will try to be as fair and transparent as possible.

----------------------------- The Good -----------------------------

First things first, the vanilla game is great but I will tell you most of the fun of it comes from modding. The way Rimworld is built allows for amazing amounts of modification from the community, and I'm willing to say that were it not for mods Rimworld might have not gone nearly as far as it has all these years. There's mods ranging from the simple addition of Quality of Life features that make you say "Why the hell isn't this on the vanilla game?" to mods like Rimatomics where you can build your own fully functional nuclear reactor and nuclear warheads to destroy everyone on sight. I'm willing to say 80% of the community and players I've talked to have at least *one* mod installed, and the vast majority have *a lot* of mods installed.

The game itself has a surprising amount of depth, depth that you can either go into or just completely ignore if it's not your thing. My personally aspect of this is the health and body parts system; People that have played Dwarf Fortress will see a few similarities here and there in how the game handles "pawns" (The common name for each one of your individual colonists). They have body parts, each of them influencing their ability to do things and how well they do them; Arms, legs, eyes, kidneys, stomach, heart, brain, spine, bones, etc. Each of these parts can lead to some fun (and completely optional) minmaxing where you can turn your colonists into almost entirely mechanical cyborg monstrosities that can crush a man's skull with their bare hands. There's also other optional elements to the game like caravaning that some find very interesting and fun, but they aren't my cup of tea so I can't give an in depth review of the system that can make it justice, but if going around the world like a nomad is something that sounds interesting to you, do check up on that.

Combat in the vanilla game can be rather hit and miss at times, to the point there's a few major mods that completely revamp the combat system. I don't personally find *that* much of an issue with it, but it can be rather frustrating to see your max level sniper pawn miss two shots in a row because he just "got unlucky" (More on luck and my issues with it from a design perspective later). Combat is more of a secondary thing I feel once you reach the mid or late game, as you end up building defenses with automated military turrets, IEDs, mortars, uranium slug turrets and other forms of defenses and missing your shots doesn't matter that much when you can concentrate enough fire down range to make the US Army in Vietnam cry. Overall, for those seeking a game where combat is intense and action packed I would not really recommend RImworld, at least not in its vanilla state.

The management aspect of the game is where it shines, I feel. The game can be incredibly comfy and relaxing to just lay back and watch once you have a colony running that is self-sustaining. Your pawns running around the place, crafting things, farming rice, cooking illegal drugs for sale, butchering your enemies and turning them into kibble for your army of angry war elephants. There's many aspects to the management of your colony that makes the experience rather deep and entertaining, you have to take care of your colonists' mood so they remain happy and don't break down into tantrums or outright kill themselves, you have to make sure you are producing not only enough food but also enough power to keep your walk-in freezers working and your food not spoiling, you have to make sure you can produce enough clothes for all your colonists as their clothes will wear and tear with time, and other many aspects to bear in mind. The management aspect of Rimworld is probably my favorite, it's deep and challenging but deeply entertaining.

In general I would recommend Rimworld to those that enjoy games like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria and such but want a unique take on the colony sim/base building formula. It's a very fun game, a bit frustrating sometimes but overall a great game nevertheless.

----------------------------- The Bad -----------------------------

As a fair warning, I might be a bit rough on the negative aspects of the game. This isn't because I hate Rimworld, quite the opposite it's my favorite game on Steam, it's just I really want to hammer home that the game is not perfect and is rough around the edges in some areas. Specially rough on the design department:

Rimworld's Dev, Tynan, has an... Interesting, to say the least, view on game design. He sees Rimworld less as a Game and more as a "Story Generator" of sorts where you are less playing a game to win it and more witnessing a drama you can interact with. This leads to some "interesting", if not frustrating, things like random events that you can't do much about other than just pray they go away soon or completely unwinnable situations where you can't do much other than savescum or just give up and try again. I'm talking situations like having your batteries discharge all their power right before a solar eclipse, leaving you without any power for days, followed by a raid that can exploit your unpowered turrets. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the absolute pain in the arse that are situations like this, but they are still a pain in the arse that I feel is quite unecessary. Some might find stuff like this fun, I personally just find it frustrating.

The game just has several things that feel unbalanced, or balanced specifically just so they can ♥♥♥♥ you over. Things like getting deadly diseases very early into a game start as a tribal group (See: Without modern medicine), raids that land right on top of your most important colonists essentially killing them instantly, etc. Hell, there used to be a random event where a tornado spawned and you could do nothing but wait for it to leave the map and hope it doesn't instantly destroy anything important on its path.

This is something that has pained me for ages, and something I honestly don't see going away. Some people enjoy the "hardcore" aspect of getting ♥♥♥♥ on and having to deal with it and that's valid. But I wish there was a way to make it optional at the very least without having to go in and manually disable each event permanently when starting a new scenario (Which sucks, because I think these events are actually fun when they don't happen unfairly).

Other negative aspects are honestly minor in my opinion, things like the pricing of both the game and its expansion (Which is fair criticism, but I still feel the game is worth its price) and such.

----------------------------- So? -----------------------------

Honestly, I love the ♥♥♥♥ out of this game and I highly recommend it. I've played it for YEARS and I probably will continue doing so. Fantastic work from Ludeon Studios.