Recent reviews by Nixxen

It's a nice atmospheric adventure. It's a chill exploration game with mostly serene set pieces for backdrops that float past as you traverse the landscape in your Okomotive. I quite enjoyed the experience. A time-out from more action-packed games.

Quaint tower-defense game. Feels simple and easy to understand, yet interactive and engaging enough to not be boring.
It becomes hard after a while, and you will probably lose a few games while learning.

I like the little objectives you get for the different maps, where you can play challenge modes.

I would love to have some simple coop elements like healing, backup, and just synergies between two people and having someone to share the experience with. That said, the game is enjoyable alone as well.

It seems like a nice concept, but when you try to get into the game and learn the ropes, only to have everything torn apart by a single zombie attacking one of your houses, turning your entire city into a horde, it just becomes frustrating.
Perhaps I will learn to get better, but for now this game is just annoying to play.

Disclaimer: I love the base game. It has things it is missing, but it also has a lot to give.

TLDR: I like it. It has some things I really like, some things I find ok, and some things that could be better.

This DLC creates a progression-like map (sort of like the story in the base game, but not really) where you fight for control of the world map. You do one move and action, and the enemy does one move and action. The action might involve fighting enemies or building defenses in your local area.

The enemy adapts to your tactics and will change a "world mutator" based on your most used tactics. This means they will try to counter your most effective tactics in a rock-paper-scissors-like ability mutation game. You will need to adapt your tactics to overcome the new mutation.

I wish there were a bigger universe connecting the worlds, giving them a bit more meaning. It would be your own personal universe-war.

All in all, I like this. It is well worth the asking price if you like the base game. I honestly wish there were more games like this. Perhaps even one with less strategy and more 1 player = 1 unit multiplayer kind of thing with RPG elements. But that is just me seeing interesting twists on what is already here.

The game you love to hate, and hate to love.

Great sandbox game where you can do anything you want to, but set to a military setting.
The content is up to which missions you are able to get your hands on.
The community has tons of missions and mods available.

I play with a community where we have enough mission makers to pump out new custom missions every week, which brings a never ending stream of new content.
The people you play the game with also makes a lot of the experience.
You might shoot some baddies and get some objectives, but in the end you romp around and talk junk with your friends.

10/10 experience if you look past the Arma jank.

Requires an account to play. Unable to log in, since the password entry does not register all character inputs. Bethesda support (while friendly) has been unable to help since 26th of February. That's two weeks ago.
For now I've mostly given up. If they eventually figure out the login screen problem I'll update (if I ever decide to try playing it again).
For now it is a hard pass: Literally unplayable.

Horrible graphics aside, the game has a fantastic game play loop. It just feels very satisfying to play.
Some "builds" are much better than others, some are mediocre, and some I would not even call viable.
You'll quickly learn what works and what does not work.
Dying is par for the course as you're learning the game.

I found this game quite endearing. It reminds me a lot of the same feelings I had playing the Creeper World series, but this game has some features that I feel make it slightly better. Fight back the alien invasion, bit by bit. There is a story behind the chaos, though the gameplay is where I feel this game has the most to give.

Some levels are quite easy, and once you get a foothold you have total control of the action, and can clean out the rest of the level. This is a problem also faced in Creeper World. Increase the difficulty or do some challenge missions and things take a turn though.

Game mutators make it so that areas you thought were safe, no longer are safe, since alien spawners can appear at (seemingly) random locations on the map. This is where the game shines. It takes the action from "5 minutes of chaos to gain control, then 10 minutes of chores to clean up", to "5 minutes of chaos to gain control, then 20 minutes of resource management trying to maintain a foothold while still making progress".

Some maps will make you think you have control, until suddenly a spawner of some sort appear in a location you have no defenses in. It might be frustrating, but it sure keeps you on your toes, and if you manage to beat it, it makes the little victory feel so much better.

This game is very close to the "perfect game" I envisioned in my head after reading very early hype material for the "Tabula Rasa" mmo way back when.

Ever since then, faction warfare and the chance of factions taking over areas they are fighting over has been a gaming kink for me.
Kenshi has this and more. It also has its flaws (a lot of them), but the core concept is there and it makes the less functional bits easier to gloss over.

Much like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, this game is built on losses. Or rather, the story for your playthrough is built on losses. You are not expected to play perfectly. Instead, you are expected to get by, by the skin of your teeth.

In my first game I spent my starting money on food (I started as a Wanderer) and was forced to exit the safe haven of my starting settlement to look for ways to survive and get food or money, I got jumped by a band of starving bandits the very first day on the outside of the walls. They beat me to a pulp and stole my food.
I reloaded, and avoided them. This was my reaction after playing a whole lot of other games, where any small defeat is considered "wrong" and you load your previous save. This is also NOT the way I would approach Kenshi any more. I am not going to tell YOU how to play the game, but I would at least recommend going in mostly blind (perhaps look up some of the crafting stuff once you get to that point, since they're not explained intuitively in the ingame tutorials) and try to save-scum as little as possible.


You get beat up, but if it doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger (well, tougher, but yeah).
The thing is, you want to get beat up, but just safely and without getting eaten or killed afterwards. You want to get some combat experience. Your character grows and learns every time they are doing any kind of action in the game. If they get beat up, then the next time they will be able to take more punishment (as long as they survive this fight).

Sometimes a character dies. That is ok. It is a major loss, especially if this was an important character to your party - BUT - this also makes the game so much more fun to play.

I don't think I've had this much fun playing an emergent RPG in years.
I've had an entire scouting party knocked out and robbed. I've had my pack animals butchered and eaten by bandits. I've had my upstart settlement sacked by 3 bandit factions at the same time, and then on top of it all they arrested my faction leader (my start character) and strapped her up on my own prisoner pole...
This last one was a real pickle to solve, but it's incredible what you can do with some lone survivors, a few thousand Cats and some mercenary groups. The stories you get from a loss is much more enjoyable than the stories you get from "smooth-sailing".

TLDR:
Anyway, point being, I absolutely love this game, despite its flaws (which I intentionally haven't mentioned here. If I mention the flaws now, you will look for them when playing and get a confirmation bias. If I don't mention them, you might not even think about it).
The emergent gameplay here is something very few games get right, and Kenshi is very close to getting it right.

Preface: I'm a fanboy.
I've played creeper world since the first flash game demo online.
The story is so-so. It's there but doesn't add anything to the gameplay.
Graphics is close to non-existent.

The gameplay can be varied, from fast paced to turtle crawl. Depends on your playstyle.
There is leaderboards for every map, encouraging speed running them.

Once you get past "the point" in each map where it is evident that the creeper can do you no harm the game becomes trivial and more of a chore. I still play it though, but mostly for the time leading up to "the point". After that it's just cleanup.
Would I still recommend this game in 2020, this many years after it was first released? Definitely!
The graphics is just as bad now as they were back then, but this game is not focused on graphics. The challenge of beating a level up to "the point" is what I seek when I play these types games.