Rust is the anarchy-hungry teenaged brother to multiplayer Minecraft. It grew up in the broken home of early access, where DayZ stayed as the bedraggled maternal caregiver while H1Z1 opted to go out for the ol' pack of cigarettes. Interestingly enough, it would accurately describe the average user's list of favourite games before they started to mainly play Rust.

It is, like its lineage, another casualty of the survival genre. However, Rust has learned from some of the mistakes its parents had made. Each server map is randomly generated as a large, bountiful, and multi eco-system terrain. Many servers even wipe inventories/bases clean every so often to level the playing field. The inventory/crafting system is mostly a justifiable grind with a promising array of options for weapons and base modifications (even though it is an enormous pain to modify your base after you've set things down). Whether you go out and seek these resources out or engage in its PvP component, it will still take you some time to do it. And it is time better wasted in the company of others, as this game mirrors life in the sense that it is much more difficult and far less enjoyable without a good group of people behind you for this.

I also thought that the art style was painstakingly simple and served as a terrific bleak backdrop to the fact that you wash up somewhere naked and must spend your living life chopping down trees, mining stone, and killing things. The soundtrack was also good until you realise that it hinders your ability to hear footsteps of those people waiting for you to pop out of your base to murder you.

However, there are developments in Rust's early access adolescence that continue to stunt its growth well into its $40 full launch title. It's impatient towards new beginners, as the game's long tail existence has had people playing this since its release in 2013. The grind for late-game loot is largely done to get guns and explosives. Pair that with Rust's late game strategy of just... killing and looting and helping you get more stuff to help you do the previous two things, and you can understand why people who have spent years in this abusive cycle of kill or be killed have trust/anger issues. Be patient with yourself, and watch some videos on how to start out. You'll miss a lot from the game's weak tutorial.

If those are all the growing pains of living in an early 2010s access survival genre, Rust didn't do that bad of a job. Sure, it'll still end up in the psych ward of a prison for all of the slaughter it encourages, but it can still be a fun game if you like the competitive survivalist nature of PvP.

If the initial description sounds like your childhood of games played, you're the target audience for it. You're either already playing it/being begged to play it and checking the reviews to either justify your own opinion, see the insane amounts of hours you or someone else have sunken into this game through relative comparison, or are looking through the negatives of this game because your base just got raided. You may enjoy it as a casual solo player, and it's definitely entertaining to watch as a stream game, but let's see how enthusiastic you get when you've been hunted or had your base ransacked.

Catch it on sale, or a free weekend to see if you can handle the toxicity of the player base or just the cruel nature of the hard-boiled survival game.