Recent reviews by Northrop_

I absolutely despise battle royale games. This one, I like for a few reasons:

• Small player count results in a quicker game. You're not losing 40 minutes when you do not win.
  
• Non circular safe zone. Interesting design choice that results in a different situation every playthrough.
  
• Vampire: The Masquerade is a rich universe.

I like the gunplay and the fact that melee is not an useless disaster like in all other battle royale games. Movement is great, and character customization is cool (short hair shading is kind of weird though)

One issue is that the server stutters every once in a while.

That's it, not much to say.

I do not recommend that you buy Rust, but I do recommend that you buy this DLC.

Rust could be extremely good. Really one of a kind. One of the best.

But it is not. It's just a bullying machine.

In summary: The person or group that gets ahead of the curve earlier has an inherent advantage over others. The objective of the game in it's current state is to assemble an unfair advantage as fast as possible, so you can prevent other players from playing the game optimaly - prevent them from preventing you from playing the game.
This unfair advantage usually comes in the form of: 1) more free time or 2) larger groups. Rarely it comes down to skill. Or, one could say, skill in Rust is about assembling a large group and/or having nothing else to do in your life.

The gameplay loop rewards toxic behavior - KOS, offline raiding, griefing, etc - there's a clear advantage to be gained when you kill a poorly equiped player that just spent 15 minutes gathering resources so you can get those resources the easy way, in 10 seconds or less. And it just compounds from this. Why not raid that poorly defended active base that may have a considerable amount of resources laying inside? Why not offline raid it? Why not offline raid that larger base that probably has even more resources!?
The gameplay loop naturaly leads to griefing and bullying. Weaker or newer players are prey. If you get this game, you'll be playing as literal prey for (someone once said) at least 200 hours. Good luck.

Also, since it's mostly children and teenagers playing it, expect them to act like so. Racism and all kinds of toxic social behavior are present and very visible.

Rust is ideal for you if:

• you buy it with at least two other friends
  
• you and your friends have at least 6 hours a day, six days a week, to spend grinding on it
  
• you don't mind getting bullied by stronger, more numerous and more experienced groups of players
  
• would like to spend hundreds of hours getting good in a glorified griefing mechanism

I think that if these conditions are met, you can enjoy Rust. It is an unique game that has unique possibilities. If you just play a while you'll see so much weird ♥♥♥♥ you wouldn't see anywhere else. But these unique moments are just a very tiny fraction of the gameplay.

The meat of it is a toxic multiplayer gameplay loop that almost seems like it is designed to lead to griefing.

Not recommended.

Bought the game expecting a roguelike: got a clunky adventure rpg in which permadeath shouldn't be implemented instead.

Game has a critical lack of replayability. Your first few characters will all follow the same script: start in starter village, steal from the same chests, deal with merchant, die on the same quests.

When you manage to find a character build that breaks the early game, you'll be able to progress through the main quest and partake in more scripted events of the same kind. Midgame combat in certain situations can be very fun, though.

Character creation and skill systems are fine, though if you do not choose Tinkering from the start you'll be missing out on a good chunk of gameplay and there will be a lot, a lot of useless items clogging your inventory and your carry capacity, which is already clogged by the currency – fresh water – which weighs a lot.

The interface is ok, convoluted, but much like other games of the genre. My only issue is with the log, which is not easily readable. And sometimes it looks like the interface is forcefully made into this convoluted form.

I also bought the game after watching a developer talk about an aspect of map generation that they apply to create local maps, the wave function collapse algorithm. It's an impressive system, but it seems it doesn't generate very interesting maps, not in it's current form at least.

The dynamic cooking system is stupid and plays as a chore. The amusing ingredients you seem to find laying around everywhere on the floor get old fast. And recipe cooking, even though useful, sometimes is not worth the pause to make a camp and etc, etc.

My impression is that the game lacks quality, replayability, and that it's a case of misplaced hype.

The post futuristic atmosphere is intriguing, but the convoluted and lofty language used most of the time makes reading into the lore a very boring task.

With all that said, I will play more and maybe edit this review. I wish the developers a good creation.

I'm a fan of the original Insurgency, but I can't enjoy Insurgency Sandstorm. Maybe if the developers made versions of the original maps, that by the way they've spent so much time developing, it could be a more enjoyable game.

I'm not a big puzzle fan in general, but I do love unique puzzles. As a game, this is a great one.

I usually really like roguelikes, but I hate games that have gimmicky mechanics just for the sake of it. I don't find it entertaining to learn bad game controls because "it's a feature!" or "it's rewarding when you get good at it!". Not recommended.

This game came a long way. In 2013 I couldn't bear playing it. Now, it's one of my favorite games.

ｉｗｉｌｌｄｒｉｎｋｆｒｏｍｙｏｕｒｓｋｕｌｌ
ｉｔ‘ｓａｌｍｏｓｔｈａｒｖｅｓｔｉｎｇｓｅａｓｏｎ
ｏｉ，ｙｏｕｔｈｅｒｅ，ｓｔｏｐ
ｍ‘ｌｏｒｄ
ｔｈａｎｋ．ｙｏｕ

It's Sim City 4, man. The best computer simulation mankind has ever made.