Recent reviews by Cogito

Definitely still in Early Access, every single player session I get numerous crashes. At this point its just a "save regularly and pray". Not sure if the crash reporter is even working. Fun to see how beautiful the world is in Unreal Engine 5, it looks fantastic. The building changes are a welcome upgrade from ASE as well. Just need to get it stabilized.

I can't honestly recommend the game, even though it does offer a fair amount of short term entertainment. Late game is pretty much just terrible micro management.

Things that need to be fixed:
- UI inconsistencies. Buttons vary from screen to screen, often causing you to click the wrong thing. Things like the recycler don't have the ability to sort by junk. Its just a mess.
- Complex bases just light on fire all the time because you can't keep things in running order. Even if your survivors have the perk to automatically repair, they simply don't do the task. Either you have to spend all your time manually sending people around to repair stuff (super boring) or things break and light on fire.
- Fires happen so quickly, that you often don't have time to even respond, or it takes to long to get there in large bases.
- Crafting higher level materials is just a gamble. Even in late game, its nearly impossible to get the required materials to craft top tier things. After 40 hours I still hadn't been able to construct any T4 base stuff.
- There are mechanics in the game that seem to be impossible to trigger. Such as the top int tree skill that supposedly gives the ability to raise another survivors max stat, I never found a way to actually access it.
- Certain points in the game you can't get to the menu. For instance, if you start a combat that you know you're going to loose, you cant open the menu. I resorted to force quitting the game and reloading so I didn't waste my time in the slow combat.
- Tons of arbitrary waits and button clicks in the UI. Takes way to many clicks to do basic things like having an exploration party try and flee combat.

Rimword is by far my favorite game that I've played in the past few years. It's an amazing balance of depth and big picture thinking, combined with engrossing story and bits of humor. Its simple enough to get started, but grows in complexity so well over time that its just completely engrossing. The sheer number of scenarios that can unfold keep me coming back for game after game.

Thoughts that could improve the game at the current beta:
- I wish the maps were bigger, or better yet nearly infinite scrolling. Late game after a map has been effectively stripped of anything useful, trade and the newer exploration bits don't quite seem enough to sustain growth of the colony.
- More powerful forms of power production would be great, large bases spend so much real estate on just generating power, its feels silly. Also, simple lights take up too much juice.
- More mechanisms for base defense, or upgrades to the ones that are there. For instance an advanced turret that takes less power and doesnt explode would be a wonderful addition.

Really solid defense game. I love the ability to pause and think mid chaos. Graphics are well done, and gameplay is exciting. Some small bugs persist around unit selection, most notabily the shift modifier doesn't always work property when adding units to an existing group. The lack of a tutorial makes it a little rough starting out. One ask would be to have the ability to destroy mining and tree resources on the map to make the base a little easier to expand.

The sheer number of zombies that appear is simply amazing and oddly beautiful. Really gives the feeling of being in the middle of a flood. They did an amazing job on the engine that runs this, ran fluidly even though ... they are billions.

The 0.9 patch greatly improved gameplay. Really loving the latest updates and Castle Story in general. The game runs much faster and more stable than ever before and the ability to unequip arms when there is no theat makes it much more engaging.

Very well executed 4X game. Amazing depth and strategy without tedious micromanagement. Wonderful diversity of terrain and units. A must play for anyone who is a fan of the Civilization series.