Recent reviews by Soviet Jesus

Right now Helldivers 2 is a fun experience with friends, and running more carefully with a solo experience. The server issues at launch have been rectified seemingly entirely; and while the Devs are at current trying to dial in a good feel for how the Galactic War should be as players are at a definite high, it's still a fun and addictive experience.

While I've only really just stepped into the game, at just a few hours in an actual save.. I have to admit already the writing is intriguing and the story has me very much engaged and curious. It for me hearkens back to days of Classic CRPGs where things were about the story being proffered and the world around you, with everything else there to build off that and I for one wholly approve of it.

I'm not usually one to review games I enjoy, hate, love, or anywhere inbetween. Rimworld however is a game that I keep finding myself dropping back into for a good many reasons. On the surface without really digging Rimworld is your rather basic Colony Simulator game that harkens to others in the genre with the standards of a few settlers, enough resources to build enough to get started and the world is your oyster from there, the setting is in itself nothing ground breaking it's randomly named Rimworld (hence the name of the game) your plucky, or downright depressive, survivor settlers are stranded on. What at the more basic level sticks out is the story the game weaves, upon creating a new colony you're presented in Vanilla with three choices, Cassandra Classic, Phoebe Chillax, and Randy Random, each a storyteller with a different twist to the story itself. Cassandra will slowly increase the difficulty and add challenge over time and as her name suggests is the more standard game type for the full Rimworld experience, Phoebe tends to be more laid back in the situations she throws at you but with sufficient difficulty or time can pile on the situations as much as Cassandra can, and then Randy oh this guy. Randy is unpredictable to the extreme, he doesn't follow a rule of any narrator with peaks and troughs he throws whatever he fancies at you because it's all a story in the end. This is of course what the true meat of Rimworld is, a story of your making with twists thrown at you in such a fashion that you can't possibly prepare for every single one because it's out of your control. This of course is only at the most basic level of the game, not accounting for mechanics indepth elements, or gameplay itself. It is also worth noting that to add flavor to the story at the generation of each world a relationship 'tree' so to speak is generated, at any time a random wanderer, survivor, tribal, or trader could have a previous relationship with one of your colonists; be it an ex-lover, a brother, even a significant other who crash landed on the other side of the planet or remained in your old tribe.

Now to get to the nitty gritty. As of this review Rimworld is currently version Alpha, yes that's right Alpha, 14. This game makes no mystery over the fact it is not currently and utterly feature complete and just requires bug testing and polish. That is however not to say that the game is a buggy mess, personally I've not run into anything that was broken or acted wholly incorrect from it's intention and design. While the game itself doesn't have a traditional tutorial ala a pre-generated level or a hand holding amount of gameplay time, it does however have an intutive 'teacher' which picks up on what you have and have not done and tries it's best to nudge you towards what you need to learn. But don't worry if more then a couple colonies come and go while you learn, they've had their story it's on to the next story! The interface itself is easy to follow and while minimalistic it's to the benefit of the player over detriment from it's minamalistic simplicity. The game itself also offers a scenario editor that allows you to disable, add, or remove specific elements of your start. Don't like fighting raids at all? You can disable them. Want to create your own cloisted Militarized Utopia with no random wanderers? Done and done. Doing so disables those elements from being thrown at you by any storyteller as events even if you meet the threshold for them. In the same vein you can begin with pre-defined technologies, added supplies. Whatever scenario you wish or even let the game cook up a random scenario with limiters or an imposed time deadline to get off the planet before everything's destroyed. Of course if all this gets boring for you Rimworld has a pretty robust modding community that adds a pretty vast array of new elements to gameplay over at the forums as well as the steamworkshop.

After watching Alchestbreach do a 2 Part play for his Indie Sunday special I decided to give this game a buy, and after playing it for a day and a half I have to say this is definietly worth the buy before it fully comes out. Just remember If you buy it right now you get a second copy so your paying 5.50 a piece.