RimWorld is a story generator. It’s designed to co-author tragic, twisted, and triumphant stories about imprisoned pirates, desperate colonists, starvation and survival. It works by controlling the “random” events that the world throws at you.
Every thunderstorm, pirate raid, and traveling salesman is a card dealt into your story by the AI Storyteller. There are several storytellers to choose from. Randy Random does crazy stuff, Cassandra Classic goes for rising tension, and Phoebe Friendly just makes good things happen.
Your colonists are not professional settlers – they’re crash-landed survivors from a passenger liner destroyed in orbit. You can end up with a nobleman, an accountant, and a housewife. You’ll acquire more colonists by capturing them in combat and turning them to your side, buying them from slave traders, or taking in refugees.
So your colony will always be a motley crew. Each person’s background is tracked and affects how they play. A nobleman will be great at social skills (recruiting prisoners, negotiating trade prices), but refuse to do physical work.
A farm oaf knows how to grow food by long experience, but cannot do research. A nerdy scientist is great at research, but cannot do social tasks at all. A genetically engineered assassin can do nothing but kill – but he does that very well.
Colonists develop - and destroy - relationships. Each has an opinion of the others, which determines whether they'll become lovers, marry, cheat, or fight. Perhaps your two best colonists are happily married - until one of them falls for the dashing surgeon who saved her from a gunshot wound.
Stories, stories, stories. RimWorld sets you up for an ever changing game in which only your engagement remains the same, potentially for hundreds of hours. And when you’re done with the vanilla version of RimWorld, there are thousands of mods that enhance or change the game in such a way that it is all fresh again. I am in awe of RimWorld, and it deserves a Big Fat 10 out of 10.
Rimworld is a new standard in survival/strategy sims, and has emerged from early access with grace. Now the REAL fun can begin...
The diversity of environments significantly enriches the game and challenges experienced players in new conditions every time. It’s a hellishly good game – for me an addiction that makes me go back to it and reach for more and more. [13/2018, p.84]
This strategy game offers survival and business simulation in one package. With the player learning from trial and error, numerous unpredictable events bring additional challenges to solve, while enriching the story at the same time.
Successful mixture of strategy, tower defense, survival sandbox and sci-fi story generator with a guaranteed high replay value.
A satisfying colony-building sandbox with a lot of replayability that suffers from a lack of polish in the UI. A great aesthetic and quirky sci-fi take on the genre mean there is a lot to like here, it just takes a little digging to get there.
An imaginative management game but a weak story generator.
October 9, 2018
RimWorld: version 1.0 will be released on October 17. Read more
