Recent reviews by Liru

I got this for €10 on sale, and even that was a little too high for what this is. It's a tough situation, as the devs don't really have the resources to work on this game too well, so I don't want to be too harsh with my criticism. But it's a €5 game maximum, the base price of €20 is 100% not worth it.

Others have already mentioned, but the main thing with this game is missed potential and bugs. It was sorta hard to even wrap my head around what a lot of the other reviews were saying when it came to the lost potential, so I'll try to make it clear for anyone in the same boat. I'll talk about bugs at the bottom.

You might see this game and have an idea where you'll be struggling your way through your first house, doing odd jobs and selling scrap to break even. You might think that once you have your first house up and running with a tenant, that the passive income will allow you to survive easier and take on a bigger job. You may have this vision of an end-game where you own multiple properties and make lods of emone and can afford to make luxury flats. It's not that. Not at all. You get a caravan and a plot of land with a run down house on it. You also start with a sizeable loan with a 9% monthly interest fee, which is around £450 a month. The intro of the game sees you restoring and renovating the house to rent it out for a small amount of money, so far so good. The intro is full of possible softlocks which can easily triple the time it takes to do simple tasks, and the first time you do a job for anyone else you'll be given a mixtape instead of actual money, so the start is quite frustrating.

If you make it through all that, you've probably spent £300-£500 renovating this place, hours of your life sunk into it, probably a decent amount of effort put into troubleshooting why the game isn't doing a certain thing, and almost certainly running into some arcane game mechanic that sets you back a bunch. You start with no tools, so you sell scrap and do odd jobs for small amounts to be able to afford the absolute basics, which also drain your energy when you use them. But whatever, the house is done and you have a full set of tools and even some leftover materials, you'd expect the game to pick up from there right?

Remember that the interest is £450 a month. The first tenant I got gave me £16 a day, so £480 a month. So after all of that work, you're rewarded with £30 a month (in theory). The low income tenants also trash the place, so you'll never be seeing that £30, you need to go in there every other day and replace a few things, that £30 is gone after the first week. Okay so whatever, you can sell the place and make a good £8k profit from it, so you do that. You figure that you'll just buy the place back once you're established, and it'll be fine. So that's what I personally did, and I spent the money on a new property straight away. Now, I had around £4k in my pocket, which was an absurd amount compared to the £3 a day I was making usually, and even more absurd compared to the £30 a month I was making from being a tenant. I was excited to start on a new place though, but I realised I didn't even know where it was. So I took a walk around down for a while and couldn't find the place at all, then gave up and went home. When I got home, I realised that the entire house I had worked on was removed from the plot, and my new house was placed there instead.

I then realised that you don't get to have multiple houses at once, you get one plot, just one, that's all you get, one entire plot of land. Now, if you rent a property out, you can't just freely work on it anymore, you need to tell the tenant and they'll go to the pub while you're doing it, and you'll have to manually tell them when you're done. This adds a lot of faff to the whole process, so I never bothered. Whatever, I do up the next house as nicely as I can, I buy all the upgraded tools, a bunch of paint, and the nicest furniture and materials I can get. I finish the house with £900 left in my pocket and a whole load of spare materials. Then what? If I rent the house out, I have passive income (although I'm already flush with cash) but have nothing to do in the game anymore, I just sleep until the tentant's gone so I can collect the money. If I sell the house, then I'm just starting a new one, which is pretty boring. So really that's the endgame, you either work on the house or you rent it out, no inbetween. The only thing the game really has to offer is the building system, the rest is super barebones (there's 3 repeating jobs that each pay £30, and are insanely buggy), so renting it out robs you of gameplay, but then what's the point? At its core, this game is just a cute and janky building simulator, which is fine for €5 but not €20.

And to end things out, here's a few of the bugs you'll experience:
You put a piece of furniture too close to a wall, it clips through it and rips through plasterboard and the no-fines, requiring a 15 minute repair job.
Your wheelbarrow clipped a chair and sent the whole room flying.
The delivery driver threw the entire delivery everywhere, some of which went into the skip or got too damaged to use.
You got in legal trouble for being on benefits while working, even though you never signed up for benefits.
You stopped pouring concrete for a split second, meaning the hole in the floor can never be filled.
You dropped a plank in the wrong way, causing it to spin around and smash a new pallet of bricks, ruining them.
You saved the game, causing certain objects to reset weirdly.
You painted a wall, causing it to paint the wall in the adjacent room.
You placed plasterboard wrong somehow, causing it to be slightly offset.
You picked up a bed, causing the mattress to fly through the ceiling, breaking multiple tiles.
The delivery driver crashed, meaning you need to reset the game if you want deliveries.
You didn't put your tool away properly, meaning you need to reset the game.
You can't put flooring and walls in certain tiles for no reason.
You can't mortar bricks sometimes.
Buckets exist to hold mixes of concrete and stuff, but almost never work.
You ate a chicken pie, causing you to max out your calories and become obese.
You fell into the loft, meaning you have to reset the game.

It's taken me a while to really decide on how I feel about Rimworld. I have over 100 hours in it and will probably log some more, but most of the time I can't really tell if I'm even having fun. It sells itself as a story generator, but none of the stories are all that interesting. For starters, I love games like Gnomoria and Dwarf Fortress, it's exactly my type of thing. I like managing things and creating a setting in which an interesting story can take place. But RimWorld is not that.

So RimWorld has a so-called "Story teller AI", which is a fancy term for event script. This AI determines when events like raids, disease, breakdowns, drones, etc. happen. There are 3 AI by default, only 2 of them worth mentioning. One is just an RNG, it does things regardless of the gamestate. The other tries to be "interesting" and make events happen based on what your colony is like.

The issue with the "interesting" AI is that it's very predictable. You have a lot of food stocked up, so your freezer will fail in some way and it will rot. You have a lot of components stocked up, so expect every device to repeatedly break down. It's more or less "if the player is doing well in this regard, make them not do well". This leads to you just gaming the system and living on the edge of ruin at all times to avoid these events. If this were a story, it would be a terrible fanfic where the writer's OC is just ruthlessly abused for no reason. Hence, I use the random AI.

Now there are many events in RimWorld, but few really give you many options, which is its main failing as a story generator. If there is a raid, you must fight them. If one of your colonists goes on a rampage, your options are to attack them or let them attack you. If there is radiation, you stay inside. If there is a cold snap, you hunt for food. If there is a physic drone, you just endure it. The game is asking you a question, and both of you know what the answer is. If you do not know the answer, you fail. This barely creates a story, simply a list of events that happened independently of each other.

Now to the next thing; fights are utterly boring and unbalanced. Most bullets will spray wildly off to the side of their target, even if the gun is of an excellent quality and the shooter is of a high level. Firefights are just bullets wizzing around randomly, and sometimes a bullet hitting something is the end of the fight. Your heavily armoured sniper can be instantly killed by a bandit with an old pistol, meanwhile the sniper shot and missed 6 times. The reverse can also happen, of course, but the point is that the fights are quite unsatisfying, they take ages yet are over in a second.

This brings me to my final point; animals. It feels like a majority of the events I ever see are manhunting animals, or animals who otherwise decide to attack my colonists despite better options. Many times the game will spawn a pack of small manhunting animals, and I have to decide there if I risk fighting them or just accept that I can't leave my walls for a few days. Even 2 manhunting rats can get someone killed due to the lack of gun accuracy. If you have turrets, you must also turn these off so they don't wildly spray at the animals and get targeted, as even a single manhunting monkey can cause a turret to explode. This isn't fun and doesn't make for an interesting story, I mean maybe it's funny the first time, but the game wears this joke out very fast.

Case in point; my last colony. 3 people, one non-violent, so two gunners. A pistol and a rifle. Literally nothing happened for 90% of the colony except some cargo pods. Then a manhunting monkey. Okay, we got 3 lucky shots and downed it. Then 2 manhunting rabbits, we killed one and the other one bit a finger off the rifle guy, okay great but whatever, we killed both rabbits. At this point I'm really wanting another colonist so I can do more, a quest arrives to rescue someone so I decide I'll do it. My base is well defended, with the only way in going through a nest of insects, so I feel safe sending my two gunners and leaving my pacifist home to tend to the base. One day into the journey, my caravan is attacked by manhunting chinchillas. I try to run, but they are too fast, so I turn to fight. My pistol guy shoots 4 rounds, all miss. My rifle guy shoots 2 rounds, all miss. The chinchillas then slaughter them. Back at base, 2 manhunting rats have spawned and saw my only colonist entering a door. The two rats break down the wooden door and kill him. A man in black arrives and kills the rats. He is incapable of dumb labour so at this point the game is over. A panther decides to hunt him for sport, he had no chance to run, shot and missed with 3 rounds and died. That's more or less this game, the only stories you'll really generate are dumb ones such as the above. I have seen all stages of the game and it seemingly never evolves past these petty events, and it really explains why a majority of the stories people have of this game are either butchering humans or having some wacky animal wipe them out.

If you want to ice-skate around pitch black hallways looking for that obscure barrel or button that blends in perfectly with the scenery while enemies peck away at your health with hit-scan weapons and grenades, this is perfect for you.

I honestly can't see the fun in this, usually games play off their strengths and you can overlook the weaknesses, but in this game it plays completely off its weaknesses. You spend the first few hours walking around hallways looking for buttons that blend in with the scenery perfectly, by the time you learn what the button generally looks like they change it, you don't get the lightsaber in these few hours, you just spray wildly at things right infront of you. There's a decent Doom-like progression of weapons which leads you to believe you'll be using them a lot, you won't. I used the pistol and bowcaster once, the E-11 and sniper are the only blaster-type weapons I needed.

Once you get the lightsaber, you will be pumped, you will want to hack/slash and duel, you will want to master it. Too bad, from this moment on you're against bombers who drop a grenade on death and snipers whose shots can't be deflected by the lightsaber, so you'll be sticking with blasters yet again, but atleast you own the lightsaber now. You will also be doing a lot of jumping puzzles, this is absolute hell because your character is on rollerskates and when you land you slide a bit thus falling off platforms is an easy thing to do. Yet there are a number of jumping puzzles in this game, as I said, they're playing off the weaknesses.

The level design is even worse, I ended up watching a walkthrough where the guy doing the walkthrough had to stop to look up a walkthrough. I managed to get up to the waste disposal part before getting too frustrated, I had to blow up a random barrel that could only be shot via a grate and it made me realise I didn't have the patience. there are a lot of trip mines in random places for no other reason than to kill you for not noticing. My first 5 minutes of this game was walking into a store room to instantly blow up, it forces you to save every 5 minutes (each save seems to go to a new file, so have fun with that).

The game supports 2k resolution, yet not 1080p, it hates multiple monitors and I can't change the brightness to actually see what I'm doing. I installed this on my SSD yet it takes 10 seconds to load a save which gets frustrating when you're constantly loading a save before a stupid jump or an encounter with an oddly placed bomber and if you alt-tab it will constantly put itself infront of everything else making the essential task of looking at a walkthrough that much harder.

I can't say the same for the other games I bought in the bundle, but I'd give this one a miss, I've read that there's a forced stealth segment coming up so my hopes of it getting better were severely misguided.

I've owned this game for 3 days and I already have 22 hours on it, truly addictive and absolutely worth £6. Only found 2 bugs, neither stopped my gameplay in any way. I managed to learn most of the game within a few hours, although there is a wiki if you want to get right into it. Music is catchy, visuals fit the setting perfectly but the UI can be a little fiddly if you're using the right click menu. Massive amounts of detail, furniture will be a different tint based on the materials used to build it, items have different quality levels which means that you want a gnome with high jewel smithing to make good jewelry to sell for a higher price.

Fun for ~100 hours, but you soon get the best gear and find that there's nothing to do but get given something, give it to someone else and complete the quest, there's no challenging quests.