Rimworld Honest Review

Rimworld is an older game that was released in 2018. It is a colony sim, base builder game and I have to say it is one of my all time favorite games.

I have personally put more time into Rimworld than any other game I have ever played, with the exception of WoW.

Rimworld Honest Review, What is Rimworld?

Every gamer has their own personal favorite relaxing game. You know the game I mean, when you are tired or a bit bored or just generally stressed, you will have a game to play and chill out. A game where there is no stress or worrying, just relaxing and enjoyment.
Rimworld is that game for me it has been since I first played it in beta years ago. Rimworld is a colony builder game where you manage and control pawns to build and defend a colony of your design and choice. You must feed your colony and pawns, keep the temperature at the correct levels, rescue your people and much more. 

When you begin your colony you have the choice of multiple starting scenarios and locations. Each location will add different factors to think about as you develop your colony and each starting scenario will dramatically change how you play. 

The expansions have added several new starting scenarios as well each with a unique play style, as well as fun new game play. 

The main premise of Rimworld could be pointed to survival. You are on a hostile world with many hostile factions, creatures and machines. Most of who’s sole intent is to kill your people or steal everything they can carry from your colony.  Creating a functioning successful colony while defending against raids, disasters and random events can be a real struggle but the amazing thing about Rimworld is that every play through feels different. Each time you start again and choose a different starting biome, (location) or starting scenario it feels like a very different game to your last play through. 

The Simple and Easy to Understand Gameplay of Rimworld

While playing Rimworld you do not actually control the pawns. You control their motives and jobs. You design the colony and place the blueprints down for the pawns to then deliver the resources and build. 

Similar to when you begin producing manufactured items or food in the form of meals. You assign a pawn or multiple pawns to that job, create bills on the correct work table. Your pawns will go to the work table and do the work when they can.

In an emergency or simply when you need something done quickly you can direct a pawn to do a job quickly by right clicking on said job and telling them to do it right away. In an emergency you control as many of your pawns as you wish by putting them into “Draft” mode where they will take direct orders from you on where to go. This is used to defend your colony if under attack generally. 

I greatly enjoy the endgame. When you have fully researched and created an advanced power system to sustain your colony.

Create automated defense and then you begin to fabricate advanced armor and weapons for your people. Artificial body parts for those that lost limbs during one of the ill fated attacks. Creating a beautiful colony with fine carpets, royal bedrooms, a glorious throne room and awe inspiring church. 

Getting to that point can take days of work and then when you are finally there you will have to decide on how to continue. There are multiple ways to “Win” the game. Each requiring a different  approach and each being unique to each other.

Rimworld Honest Reviews, Review of the Quests and World

Throughout your playthrough of Rimworld you will be offered a multitude of quests as you go along. Each quest is different and seems to be random, some quests offering you rewards to be attacked or have your weather forcibly changed for a certain amount of time. Others are requesting certain items or resources to be delivered to another colony on the world map.  

What is important is that each quest is unique. You will get the same type of quests repeated over time but there is enough variation that it is not regular. Each quest has multiple rewards to it as well you can usually choose one reward out of three. 

The world is massive. You will have your colony which is on a world. Your colony size will vary depending on the player as will the world size. However, when you are in the world it does not seem that big or intimidating until you actually begin to create caravans to trade with other colonies or raid outposts and so on. 

When you begin to set up caravans and it takes four days for your caravan to reach a neighboring colony you realize that the world is actually enormous. Then taking into consideration that each square on the world map can be visited and random events can happen on any one of them as you travel the scope can blow you away.

Rimworlds, Random events

As your colony develops you will get random events occurring every few days or so. These events can be anything from a raid to a crop blight to a crash landing of mechanoids that poison the land.

It can even be a toxic fallout that will kill off anything that is outdoors for too long. Meaning you need to keep all your people and animals inside for a long period of time or they will develop dementia and eventually die if not treated. 

These events can range from easy to tedious or “damn everyone in my colony just died”. The randomness and gradually increasing  difficulty as time progresses means the game never becomes easy or boring. It also means you need to try and prepare for every eventuality. 

Graphics run speed

Rimworld runs really well on most machines, it does not have much in the way of requirements. However there is the issue of large colonies. As the game progresses and you add more people, animals and robots to your colony the game will begin to slow down.

If you make your colony too big and have created it on a large map the game will eventually become completely unplayable. 

When ranching and robots were added to the game through DLC this became a bit more of a problem if you wanted to use bots and ranch animals. With those additions though you do not need to have as many pawns, any way near as many. So there are positives and negatives to it.

With the small graphics requirements of the game it is difficult to understand why but I imagine it has something to do with the CPU. 

Rimworlds DLC

Throughout my reviews you will often see me raging about extra paid content. Either with DLC’s, cosmetics, in game shops or so on. However there are some games that do it right and I personally do not mind paying for the extra content. Rimworld is one of these. 

Rimworld on its own is an amazing game. You do not need to get the  DLC to fully enjoy the game.

It is an amazing base game and the DLC simply adds to it instead of finishing it giving you what was already promised. Each DLC adds unique added gameplay options and new tactics for your colony development. Each is responsibly priced for the content as well adding a good amount of content for the money.

Rimworld Honest Review Conclusion

Overall Rimworld is hands down one of my all time favorite games. It is created by an Indian company, Ludeon Studios, that has done a truly excellent job and created a truly phenomenal game that will keep you absorbed for hours if you let it. 

It is my most played game by a long way and will always be my go to game for relaxing and just chilling out for a bit. 

The only gripe I have about the game in all my play time is that you cannot create massive colonies without the game becoming more or less unplayable due to lag and slowdown. 

Mods will add hours and hours of game play to any Rimworld player as well. There are literally 1000’s of mods for Rimworld, each changing aspects of the game you may wish to change, add or remove depending on your personal preferences. 

I cannot give Rimworld enough credit, its price tag is responsible for the amount of time you will pour into it, the DLC expansions truly add a lot to the game and are worth it.

Each play through is different enough and unique enough that your 100th colony feels different and unique to your first colony.