Recent reviews by Colonial

Objectively the best video game ever made

Pretty fun so far! Will update probably once I've gone all the way through the Archonexus ending. I will say that Ideology is not for new players, since it's pretty complex and typically slaps you with mood debuffs right out of the gate.

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

Not only are the graphics and artwork very well done, the UI is crisp and responsive as well. I especially like the appearance of planets and slipways - the latter especially gives off the perfect "interstellar highway" vibe.

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Meh
☐ Questionable
☐ Terrible

Although I'd say it's more of a score-based puzzle game than a 4/3X, the gameplay is more addictive than the average line of cocaine.

In the standard mode, you've got 25 in-game years (or, to put it another way, roughly 300 turns/actions by default) to turn an uncharted sector of space into a thriving interstellar trade empire by colonizing planets and linking them together with the titular superluminal slipways. The catches are that A) the industry of a planet (input/output resources) must be decided from a limited pool when it is colonized and cannot be changed, B) goods will only flow between directly connected planets, and C) slipways cannot cross each other. Your goal is to create the most prosperous empire possible given these temporal and mechanical restrictions, and it's wonderful. Dopamine hits abound every time a self-sustaining constellation or research supply line clicks into place, and you often feel like you've just hit your stride when a run ends, leaving you crawling back for more.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

The soundtrack and SFX are very good and fit the game well. Out of context, however, they're pretty unremarkable, so no perfect here.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

You're going to have to *think* if you want to succeed. Little kids will probably have a hard time understanding why they've been kicked out of office because they left half their empire screaming for basic necessities while they screw around on the other end of the map - teens on up I'd say.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☐ Medium
☑Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

Some people seem to have a harder time, but the game clicked for me pretty much straight away, and once I started prioritizing research first thing from my second run onwards, my scores have been consistently high. However, bagging the elusive quintuple platinum rank (I have yet to get a single platinum) will take all the skill and brainpower you can muster.

---{Grind}---
☑ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

There's scraps of backstory floating around, as well as a campaign, but it's not super in depth - the focus is on the gameplay.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ Infinite*

*Probably. You can enable "quirks" on starting a run that affect the run both while it's in progress and on the scoring screen, which greatly extends replayability, and there's also a campaign mode and competitive ranked play on identical challenge maps. This will definitely hold my interest for quite some time.

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

Some things need balancing - energy and teleporters are disgustingly abuseable at the moment, among other things. I haven't seen any actual bugs however, and the dev seems to be hard at work squashing the few that have cropped up for other people.

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

It's definitely got that indie retraux pixel art style going on, but it's VERY cleanly executed and actually quite high detail if you take a close look. The UI is also quite intuitive and there's keyboard shortcuts for basically everything, which is always a plus to power users like me.

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

It's a masterfully-crafted roguelite that is equal parts brutally unforgiving and incredibly addictive. FTL can and probably will hand you your ass if you slip up, or even if the dice lands wrong, and it can seem frustratingly luck-based at first. But the game is more skill-based than it would appear - if you press on, all the pieces will begin to click into place, and you'll go from surviving to styling. When you do finally bag a win, you feel like you earned that motherf***er, even on easy.

Even failed runs aren't worthless. Every time your ship is wrenched apart or your crew brutally killed, be it through your own incompetence or bad luck, you take not only knowledge but potentially even new ships with you into the next run. This is the core element that makes this game a roguelite - there are ten ships you can unlock through various means, each with their own deeply interesting benefits and drawbacks. As if that wasn't enough, every ship has an unlockable B variant, and all but two have a C variant as well! (Tip: if you're struggling with the Kestrel A, try another ship - I got my first easy victory with the Zoltan A and my first normal victory with the Kestrel B.)

Combat, even with the ability to freely pause and give orders, is wonderfully adrenaline-rush-inducing, especially later in a run when you often find yourself orchestrating several moving pieces to defeat an enemy. Outside of combat, you'll find yourself chewing your lip at every decision, weighing the potential outcomes of an event choice or store purchase - I'm tempted to buy that really powerful gun, but I'm so close to level 4 shields...


---{Audio}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

Ben Prunty's soundtrack is an auditory masterpiece. I listen to it on Spotify all the time. The SFX are also quite good, with distinct chimes and clicks to indicate the status of your ship's systems and easily identifiable weapons sounds, so you can instinctively know that the enemy has just lobbed a fourth hull breacher at your rapidly-depressurizing ship.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

Most kids will likely get frustrated and give up. Many events can also feature vaguely disturbing content, and the game generally encourages opportunistic pragmatism and punishes being a good samaritan. Although this does fit in with the game's setting of a brutal, long-lasting civil war that has erased law and order in many parts of the galaxy, it's still probably not good for kids.

---{PC Requirements}---
☑ Barebones
☐ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

I'm not joking when I say that being able to run Paint is probably the minimum for FTL.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☐ Medium
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☑ Punishing

You will die. A lot. It won't always be your fault, and although you can mitigate almost all luck-based deaths through skill, FTL will never be 100% winnable. But that's part of the fun.

---{Grind}---
☑ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

The backstory is pretty lean, since you are effectively making your own story as you play. What's there is pretty good, however - the galaxy has been torn apart by a civil war between the peaceful Federation and the human-supremacist Rebellion, and the former is very close to losing. Your mission is to cross the 8 sectors of space between you and the final Federation stronghold to deliver crucial intel about the Rebel Flagship; for unspecified reasons, destroying the Flagship will cripple the Rebel fleet and ensure a Federation victory. During a run, events will often reveal tidbits about the universe around you, detailing the different alien races and their relations, as well as the struggles caused by the Rebellion's success.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ Infinite

You could easily squeeze a few hundred hours out of this game without even trying.

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

Really pretty, with lots of little details - like orbital traffic ramping up around your colonized planets as you level them up, eventually including little orbiting stations, as well as city lights on the planet proper. Textures are gorgeous even up close, and the parallax backgrounds for stars are nice as well. The comparatively simple icons used to represent your ships really help them pop, which is useful.

---{Gameplay}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Meh
☐ Questionable
☐ Terrible

Full disclosure: This *is* a port of a mobile game, with all the timers and such that entails. However, there is no Pay 2 Win - this game is rather best classified as Pay 2 Rush, as the premium currency (crystals) is primarily used to skip timers. You *can* use it to instantly acquire resources, but this is very inefficient, and still mostly falls under "rushing." That said, if you enjoy the game, buying the US $5 starter pack is a great way to support the devs.

Disclosure out of the way, Hades Star features two nested gameplay loops. The outer loop is the "empire building" loop, in which you develop your home system over time. You will colonize and subsequently invest into planets in order to generate and hold resources, build infrastructure to support trade, and mine the Hydrogen fuel that most everything consumes. Although it takes significant real world time, seeing your empire slowly grow is extremely satisfying.

Your empire fuels the inner "star" loop, which features you sending your ships into different types of timed "stars"/missions to strategize, fight and acquire items to fuel further empire development. There are currently three star types:

* Red stars - the first star you'll be introduced to, and the one you'll probably spend most of your time in, at least early on. Red stars are timed, cooperative endeavors; once started, you and the other players you are matched with will have 15 minutes to clear out the AI enemies and extract alien artifacts (which are subsequently researched over time for resources and sweet, sweet technology blueprints) - once that timer runs out, the star goes BOOM, and any ship not at its respective jumpgate will be destroyed. As an aside: you may see some earlier reviews complaining about griefing and competitiveness in red stars. This is no longer the case - AI behavior is adjusted in public red stars to prevent clownery, and artifacts are now per-player rather than shared.

* Blue stars - the second star you'll unlock, blue stars are short (~5min) free-for-alls. Each player sends in one battleship, which spawn evenly distributed around the edge of a star system populated with empty asteroids and AI enemies identical to those found in red stars. The edge of the system will periodically collapse inwards towards the center, destroying ships not in the safe zone, forcing all players to move towards the center, duking it out with each other and the AIs all the while. Victory rewards you resources and special "fragments" that are used to power a special station.

* White stars - Competitive matches between player organizations, known as corporations, where each member contributes up to two ships in order to retrieve alien relics and garner resource rewards. White stars are unique in that they do not take minues to complete - rather, they last five days, with the timescale slowed by a factor of 600. Tranists that would normally take minutes instead take hours, for example. This allows for more nuanced, long-term planning and revising. Additionally, to minimize the active time commitment, you have the Time Machine - an oracle of sorts that extrapolates out the next 48 hours from the current state of the match, and allows you to schedule and re-schedule orders in the future as needed. Miner going to reach capacity at two in the morning? Just lay in a trip to the nearest drop point right after it fills and sleep easy. However, it's not omniscient; while it shows the scheduled orders of your corpmates, enemy activity cannot be predicted beyond their current move, forcing you to analyze their loadout and adapt your strategy to their potential decisions.

All star types are very engaging, and you'll likely find your favorite among them.

Also of note is that the game is not really meant to be played in long sessions - it's designed for people with pockets of free time to be able to pop it open and progress at their own pace.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

Each star type only has one music track. They're not bad tracks, but I find myself switching it off and playing Spotify instead.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

Hades' Star is a long-haul game, where you slowly build your progress for 15-30 minutes a day over months and years. You've gotta have commitment, as well as some strategy sense to succeed in stars. This is not an ideal game for younger kids with little sense of long-term planning, or those who want a quick endorphin hit.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

It'll ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RIP through your battery if you're playing on a laptop - like, multiple percent per minute for me - but the actual computational power requirements are pretty low.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☐ Medium
☑Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

You can clear out the early stuff without trouble, but as you advance, your strategy and metagame must become increasingly complex. Some of the late-game modules can have hilariously complex (and effective) interactions, especially in white stars. One technique involves using two ships, a handful of modules, and an NPC enemy to kidnap and lockdown enemy player battleships.

---{Grind}---
☑ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

This game is designed to discourage grinding. You can only do so much in one go, before you run out of shipments and Hydrogen and simply have to wait for your planets to refill and your miners to mine.

---{Story}---
☑ Nonexistent
☐ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

I've heard that there's a dev-approved fanfic-♥♥♥-novel, but I haven't read it, and there isn't really any story in the game proper.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ Infinite

15-30 minutes a day, if you're dedicated, can really add up.

---{Price}---
☑ It’s free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

Actually looks really nice, even on a potato. The nebula when zoomed out is especially beautiful.

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

You'll be spending most of your time running relatively short, high-adrenaline missions in which you infiltrate an enemy spaceship to complete an objective, such as assassinating someone or stealing a mystery device. Your only advantage against the hordes of guards you will inevitably encounter is your inventory of tools and the ability to pause time at your leisure to plan out how to use them. About to get shot by five guards at once? No problem! Just pause, equip a teleporter, and zip away.

The game also rewards out-of-the-box thinking in regards to missions. Need to assassinate a target, but they're too difficult to reach by boarding? Just hijack a smaller enemy ship and pummel the objective ship with missiles until your target is blown up or spaced! Need to steal something under heavy guard? Use the Foundry Brick pod and ram open an entrance right next to the crate it's in. You get the idea.

Outside of missions, there's the metagame of liberating new asteroid stations, which gives you cumulative bonuses and unlocks, and your final goal is to liberate enough stations to conquer all four faction strongholds. Very rewarding.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

The music is nice, and the sound effects are good as well. Gunshots sound impactful, and you can really hear the pain when you brain someone with a pipe wrench.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

You *will* be mowing down enemies with shotguns and chained sword-strikes, with blood splatter but no gore. Also requires decent reaction times and the ability to strategize. Kids could enjoy it, but I'd say teens and up.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

Graphics are simple enough that almost any potato can run it.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☐ Medium
☑Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

You'll be able to clear out easy and medium missions pretty easily from the get-go, but when you start getting to "Mistake" and "Glory" difficulties, well, you had better know your ♥♥♥♥ inside and out.

---{Grind}---
☑ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

Decent story with a cool twist ending. Pretty non-linear. Most lore is obtained by talking to characters in stations, and what little there is is nice.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ Infinite

The skill ceiling is pretty high, but with the investment required to prepare a character for the really challenging stuff, you'll likely get bored after maybe 60 hours?

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

Supposedly there are a tiny amount, but I've never encountered them, just seen them in the patch log when the dev pushes an update.

Fantastic expansion, 10/10. As a modder, I can safely say that none of the features were "stolen" from mods, so ignore the entitled whiners claiming otherwise. If you're newer to the game, I'd get more experienced before buying Royalty; otherwise, jump right in.

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

Models are crisp and well textured. Scenery porn and gorgeous alien skies can be found everywhere, even on the most hellish worlds.

---{Gameplay}---
☐ Perfect
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Meh
☐ Questionable
☐ Terrible

The core gameplay loop is certainly much better than it was before Beyond (from what I've seen.) It's still open world survival crafting, so resource gathering and other tropes are to be expected. However it's still quite fun and there's lots of diversions to pursue.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

The "procedural" soundtrack is amazing and is pretty rockin' at times. Other sound effects are also crisp and clean, from your gun to ship to suit AI voice.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

Teens and up meet the minimum patience and intelligence requirement to understand and correctly utilize the game's fairly dense interlocking systems.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato (barely)
☑ Mid-end (recommended)
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

In the past, I managed to run this on a laptop using a Core i3 and Intel UHD graphics, but it was pretty hellish. You'll want a decent discrete card and processor for a pleasant experience.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☑Medium
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

If you've got a developed brain, it's pretty easy to follow along and learn the mechanics, but you've still got to think occasionally.

---{Grind}---
☐ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

Open world survival crafting. Again, what do you expect? Better than it was at launch, but still.

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☐ Text or Audio floating around
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

Semi-engaging story, you don't have to follow it. No spoilers here.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ Infinite

There's a lot to do and a lot to see, and more stuff is being added semi-regularly with no end in sight.

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

Back when I ran this on a potato, I had issues with memory leaks. Outside of that, there are some annoying things - like terrain deformation not saving, causing your base(s) to randomly get buried.

---{Graphics}---
☐ Perfect
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

The 16-bit pixel art style works fine, but I think the game would have benefited if the developers upped it to 32-bit (still kinda pixely but with a lot more detail)

---{Gameplay}---
☐ Perfect
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☑ Meh
☐ Questionable
☐ Terrible

Vanilla gameplay is boring. The main game loop is like Terraria, but you can beam up to your ship and ♥♥♥♥ off to another single-biome planet if you so choose.

I would ***highly*** recommend playing vanilla until you get bored, and then install the mod Frackin Universe (and it's ancillaries.) FU VASTLY expands the game and makes the core loop much more interesting. It adds tons of new resources, miles of new crafting and tech trees, an inventory's worth of new items... definetely a must have.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

Soundtrack is nice. SFX not so much.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☐ Adults
☑ Anyone

Almost certainly enjoyable to anyone over the age of 10.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

IMPORTANT - IF YOU WANT THIS TO RUN ON A POTATO, YOU NEED THESE MODS:
More Threads - Lag Reducer -4-thread Edition
Parallax Compression (FPS Improvement)
Optimizebound (Performance Improvement)

They do a bunch of optimization work that Chucklefish was too lazy to do themselves. The first one makes it so the game runs on all 4 cores (normally its locked to one, for some reason), the second one compresses the lag-inducing parallax planet backgrounds (no noticeable quality drop with vast frame improvement) and the third one does a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of miscellaneous performance enhancements.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☑Easy
☐ Medium
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

Vanilla Starbound is pretty easy for the most part. If you install Frackin' Universe I would up this to Easy to learn / Hard to master.

---{Grind}---
☐ N/A
☐ For ranking
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average
☐ High
☐ Intolerable

It IS a survival sandbox game, so there is a decent amount of grind. If you get really impatient and/or sick of running out of simple resources, there's always mods and cheats to ease the grind.

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

GARBAGE. The game forces you into the cliched story in which you are the hero who can do no wrong, and pits you against a "pure evil" type enemy that has zero depth to it. You can't even ignore the story without installing mods - later upgrades to the Outpost (sort of a store hub) can only happen via completing story quests.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ Infinite

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

Nominated for 2021 Labor of Love reward!

---{Graphics}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Garbage

At first glance, Rimworld's graphics seem remarkably primitive. In reality, the simplistic visuals are a feature rather than a deficit; they are expertly designed to prevent informational overload (no mean feat, considering how information dense Rimworld can be) by highlighting important things while allowing your eyes to skim over simple stuff.

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Perfect
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Meh
☐ Questionable
☐ Terrible

Take charge of three shmucks crashlanded on an uncivilized world at the edge of known space, decades from any form of help thanks to the insurmountable speed of light.

Plant crops, build a rudimentary settlement, and survive. Research new technologies, negotiate deadly raids from neolithic tribals and genocidal robots alike, construct luxurious utilities and accommodations for your colonists, and thrive against all odds.

Start an alpaca ranch, or maybe run a sprawling cocaine operation. Treat your prisoners like humans, or harvest their organs to replace the ones they shot off of Clyde. Turn your colonists into supersoldiers with bionics and power armor... even the body purists and nudists. Wall yourself in behind labyrinthine defenses, or engage in brutal close quarters urban combat.

Set your sights on a ticket off this dirtball. Construct an interstellar sleeper ship and take to the stars, rise through the ranks of the Empire and become honored nobility in their ultratech fleet, or ascend through the mind of an incomprehensible machine god.

Or you may do none of that and fail horribly, watching as your colony spirals into oblivion at the hands of your selected AI storyteller. Win or lose, Rimworld is about drama, consequence and story.

There's probably hundreds of hours of gameplay value in just vanilla. Mods don't just improve the vanilla experience, but can also augment, extend or even replace it to tack on hundreds more hours of entertainment value.

I cannot stress this enough: $35 is a killer deal for what you get. There's a reason this game never goes below 10% off - the dev knows what he has. Both DLCs are also well worth it once you have a grip on the base game.

---{Audio}---
☐ Perfect
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Alright
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

Actual SFX are decent. The soundtrack especially shines however - I recommend you buy it separately if you like it as much as I do.

---{Audience}---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Anyone

Rimworld has a not-insignificant learning curve, even with the tutorial and the cleverly designed "intelligent tutor" system baked into the game. It also has non-negligible time commitment requirements - the average colony takes at least 20 hours of real time to go from zero to victory.

Furthermore, many elements aren't exactly family friendly. The Rim is not a nice place; people can and will die horribly. The player can choose to harvest organs or grow cocaine for profit, and the game does little to nothing to discourage such behavior.

Based on the above, I'd say teens and up.

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Barebones
☑ Potato
☐ Mid-end
☐ High-end
☐ Supercomputer

For the most part, you can get away with a potato. There are a variety of performance enhancing mods on the workshop as well.

However, as time goes on and the amount of potential pathfinding entities on the map increases, you may begin to suffer slowdown. This is inevitable, especially considering the game is single-threaded w/o mods. This is probably negligible in vanilla, but with mods (esp. ones like Android Tiers) it can become a serious problem for potatoes.

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Press X to win
☐ Easy
☐ Medium
☑Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Hard
☐ Punishing

Rimworld is the epitome of this. The tutorial and adaptive tutor give you a basic grasp on the mechanics - enough for you to eke out a crappy existence on the Rim. It'll likely be a dozen hours and several failed colonies before you really even hit intermediate mastery.

---{Story}---
☐ Nonexistent
☑ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Great
☐ Perfect

There's a lore primer available online that gives you an introduction to the universe. What little there is is very well crafted - accurately describing a universe in which humans have colonized other stars WITHOUT faster than light travel.

---{Game Time}---
☐ Tiny
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ Infinite

Mods are your bread and butter for game time extension. The Vanilla Expanded series gives you a lot of, well, vanilla expansion options for the virgin mod installer. More adventurous individuals can try mods that add hygiene and other challenging needs to the game, oil extraction and refining, nuclear power and more. There are also many total overhaul mods that change the game in new and interesting ways, for players looking to really shake things up. Zombie apocalypse? Sure. Mages and magic around every corner? Yup. Ultratechnology beyond your wildest dreams? Definitely.

There are also many small mods that are great for QoL and generally refining your preferred playstyle to an atom-thick level of precision.

Making your own mods is also quite easy - I've made a few. Check them out on my profile!

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ Wait for a sale
☐ Don't.

---{Bugs}---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ Pretty bad
☐ Intolerable

There are exploits in some areas, like temperature mechanics, but I've yet to come across a bug in the vanilla game in my 160+ hours of playtime. Errors and bugs only show up if you install poorly coded or conflicting mods.