Its alright

ive tried many times to play hardcore no saves and cant survive the 1st winter... yay! fun times.

It's a very niche game; you'll either love it or hate it. The best description I can think of is that it's the Sims but for psychopaths. As indicated by the description, the game is a colony simulator and an AI storyteller. As a colony simulator though it’s rather simple. If you’ve ever played games like Banished or Frostpunk, you’ll probably find yourself underwhelmed by Rimworld and you’ll quickly find yourself overflowing with an abundance of resources. Storage management, therefore, plays a huge role in this game but unfortunately this requires creating several storage zones and then shuffling through an un-intuitive UI to determine what can be placed there. Instead, most people create a generic stockpile and dump everything there because it’s a chore to do anything more complicated.

To counter how easy the base management is, the game adds radiant disasters in the form of raids which essentially means the game will suddenly spawn a bunch of baddies who then proceed to rush at your base with little regard for tactics or even their own self preservation. Any defenses you have set up will easily be chewed through -a neanderthal wielding a pickax can destroy a plasteel wall (the strongest type of wall) in mere seconds- and you’ll have to go fight them off. The size and strength of these raids are largely based upon the colony wealth which actually ends up disincentivizing the construction of large bases as, after a certain point, the raids will simply become too large to effectively defend against, especially at higher difficulties. This then creates a game-play loop where you build a base, watch as half of it gets destroyed by a raid, rebuild just in time for the next raid, repeat. To deal with this, most players create dedicated ‘kill box’ which can feel very cheesy and are hyper unrealistic which, for an aesthetic player like me, is a bit of an annoyance.

For most people, however, the colony management aspect is auxiliary as they’re more interested in Rimworld’s social dynamics. Each colonist is a unique person with their own traits, moods, and behavioral quirks. They can fall in love, get married, lose limbs to battle, age, etc. In addition, they are simultaneously your greatest assets but also your largest liabilities and dealing with their moods form one of the core aspects of the game. Your colonist moods can be fickle, however, and I find the largest challenge tends to be giving your colonists enough time in the day to actually do everything they need. A day is about 15 minutes real time which gives your colonist about ten minutes real time of wakefulness (3 minutes real time when playing at the highest speed). This is woefully short and becomes a major problem whenever you need to do anything more significant than haul a piece of wood. You’ll have about two to three minutes with a colonist before needing to rotate them out with a new one so that they can deal with their basic needs. Some may enjoy this micromanagement, but I find it tedious.

Now there is the simulation aspect and this is where the game really shines, especially now with the DLC. Among the many simulations I’ve ran include the following: Aztec cannibals who kill and eat anyone unlucky or dumb enough to come into our territory; a group of mad scientists hell bent on creating the perfect waifu; a drug empire reliant entirely upon enslaved neanderthal labor; and recently I just finished my anomaly play-through where I role-played as Steve and Terri Irwen desperately searching for a cure for their ghoulified children only to fall under the sway of a mysterious monolith in the area. The stories are endless and wacky and this is the main draw of the game. If this sounds like something you’ll enjoy, then buy it.