| Our score | 8.1/10 |
| The good | Deep simulation leading to endless rich, weird and hilarious scenarios |
| The bad | Despite the UI being great, it inevitably gets clunky at times |
| Publication date | July 28, 2022 |
| Developed by | Ludeon Studios, Double Eleven |
| Available on | PS4, Xbox One |
| Judged by | PS4 |
If you’re reading this review, chances are you’ve been Rim-curious for years. You may have heard stories from PC gamers of cannibal tribes engaging in mutilation rituals before they erupt until daybreak, of hippie cults espousing humanity’s relationship with nature while not worrying about slavery, or about the time half a colony was wiped out by an enraged wild guinea pig that gnawed settlers in their sleep.
If you’re new to Rimworld, thanks for sticking with this review after that potentially disturbing first paragraph, and understand that the weird shit you’re reading above is the norm here; it’s a testament to how deep this colony survival management sim can go.
Starting with a small group of survivors, each with their own complex past, neuroses, pathologies and needs, you build out your colony on a small corner of a planet populated with other tribes and factions. You expand your compound, prepare the defenses for the inevitable raiders and learn to use the land – be it jungle, tundra or grasslands – to your advantage.
Your research decisions will determine whether your colony becomes a technologically advanced colony using the latest renewable energy sources, a militaristic dictatorship, or perhaps just a gang of bon vivants growing psychoactive plants in the fields, getting high and selling the rest to traders. visits. You build trade routes or rivalries with other factions, send expeditions in search of resources and grow your colony (mainly by capturing people from rival colonies). Eventually, you can even split off part of your tribe to start a new colony elsewhere in the world, while the rest stay with the original.
All of the above is complicated by the fact that you don’t directly monitor your settlers, but rather create queues and priority lists for them. You can intervene at times to get them to do a certain task, and during combat situations you also gain direct control, but for the most part your settlers are their own complex people who generally do the things that appeal to their personalities. Failing to keep them happy is just one of the many ways things can go horribly and miraculously wrong in Rimworld.
For example, in the early stages of a new game, which was essentially a bow-and-knife-armed caveman faction, my naive attempts to tame a panther resulted in the creature ripping through my tribe and killing all five people in it. During another game, I found it useful to slaughter the corpses left over from an attempted raid by a neighboring faction. Not knowing that one of the corpses belonged to the son of someone who was now a member of my tribe, I fed him his own son, which he (somehow) realized, leading to a sort of psychotic breakdown where he killed several members of my tribe. strain before I had to ‘put him to sleep’. On the plus side, all those extra corpses meant more food for the cannibal tribe I was trying to nurture (“Looks like meat is back on the menu, guys!”).
That combination of tightly choreographed management and emerging chaos that threatens to erupt at any moment – be it from natural disasters, human conflict, or a furious boomalope rushing into your Great Hall with a kamikaze and blowing itself up – is what makes Rimworld one of the most beloved, most played games for years on Steam. Taken from 2006’s legendary complex management sim Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld is the kind of terrifyingly deep game unimaginable on console until a few years ago, so the big question is: does it really work on console?
The good news is that on a fundamental level, it really is. Despite talking to the game’s developers about bringing Rimworld to console, I was still unsure how they were going to pull it off, and it turned out that part of the process was such a heavy redesign. of the UI included that it actually uses a different technology stack to the PC game. Instead of using a mouse-like cursor, you have a large circle in the center of the screen that you use to highlight things in the world, while the UI lives in the corners, with each corner assigned to a different shoulder button that you use. hold to display the options in that section.
The idea is that you are never more than three button presses away from the desired screen. That’s very impressive in a game where you can go into such detail that you can manage each settler’s schedule and work priorities, choose what kind of material to store in a particular supply zone, and whether to bury dead bodies in a graveyard, them far away from the colony, or turn them into chunks for your pet wargs.
The UI experience is smooth for the most part and after a few hours I was already getting a few button combinations into my muscle memory (LT, X, X for the all-important work priority list, d-pad down to browse settlers then Square to jump to them) . However, there were still times when my brain would just grind to a halt while I was trying to figure out how to perform certain activities.
When I came to the console version as an experienced PC player, at least I had the basics to know the depth of the activities I could engage in, but I must have spent at least three minutes trying to figure out how to ‘the resistance” from a prisoner to prepare them to join my colony. There’s also something unintuitive about changing building materials for a particular item, as well as navigating some of the build screens, such as “Furniture,” because the little icons don’t really mean much.
Of course, the density of commands in Rimworld means that certain commands ultimately rely on things like analog stick presses, simultaneous keystrokes, and touchpad presses. Despite the developer’s great efforts, you can’t help but feel that it was a chore to get all these things on a gamepad. There is also no option to play with mouse and keyboard, apparently due to the fact that they had to rebuild much of the game to get it to work.
But console play has its perks. Lying back on the couch and watching my perfectly choreographed colony in action on a 50-inch 4K screen is bliss compared to hunched over my desktop. Having also played the PC version of Rimworld on a 4K screen, I can say that the console version’s UI is much bolder and more readable than its PC counterpart.
Sure, there will be some friction playing such a management-heavy game on console, but given the pick of those teething problems and the fact that the game has been toned down and stripped down to make it more “gamepad-friendly,” I’ll always go for the first option. It’s to the credit of Double Eleven (who also brought the eponymous Prison Architect to consoles) that anything I would do in the PC version of Rimworld, I could do here.
Well, aside from the mudding, that’s…
While that point about modding may just sound like typical PC elitism, few games are as mod-friendly and indeed reliant on mods as Rimworld. The base game is a perfect framework for mods, and its simple aesthetics and numbers and systems based play lend it to modding like less other games.
In fact, some mods have become so fundamental to my PC gaming experience that it was shocking to play any version of the game without it. Being able to create your own fledgling settlers, for example, or create a ‘guest’ system that allows you to receive, befriend and even recruit visitors from other factions. Even minor mods like ‘chat bubbles’, which display your settlers’ strange conversations overhead rather than locked in a menu, add a lot of life to the aesthetically stark game. While full mod support is unlikely, it would be great if some of it could be integrated into the base game in some way.
It’s comforting to the above that you can buy the ‘Royalty’ expansion from the get-go, which adds a ton of interesting hierarchical systems (and psychic powers!). The developers have also confirmed that the Ideology expansion will come at some point.
As a Rimworld PC player, I’m returning to the more tailored experience I made of the game on the home platform, but I’m also excited to see games like this come to consoles and with such care and attention. This is one of the best management sims and story generators out there, brought to console in almost all its glory. The quality of this console implementation should guide other games in this traditional PC genre to do the same.
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