The son she'd left behind was now approaching his fifties. In my first game, I had a colonist who, chronologically, was 114 years old, but, thanks to the weird complications of space travel, was really only 24. There's a lot of promise in the ideas these characters bring to the table. Old wounds, traumatic upbringings and bad attitudes… specific qualities to make sure your colonists are far from perfect little worker bees. Some are helpful skills, like hunting or teaching, and some of which are simply there to inject personality-flaws and all. When you begin a scenario you have to select your team (or individual, if you're going for the harder challenge) and they'll be generated with a load of traits and backgrounds. It's your colonists that are the main drive behind the game. Accept the game's penchant for disaster and you'll have a much better time. Go in wanting to build a perfect little colony and you'll likely be frustrated. They're given drives and needs, ones that are often extremely unhelpful to the mission but which are intended to make them more complex and rounded.
This means things going wrong, that the unexpected has to occur and that your characters have complicated motivations. This isn't about creating the perfect colony, this is about creating drama.
It's a story generator, promising to co-author all manner of wild tales for players. RimWorld sits somewhere between The Sims and Dungeon Keeper, though its presentation and style are reminiscent of games like Prison Architect. It's a life simulator, a genre about a more hand-off approach to strategy and management, where you manipulate AI behaviour instead of controlling it directly. There's a whole Western vibe, resulting in a sort of Firefly-esque setting. RimWorld is a game about establishing a colony on a remote planet sometime in the distant future. RimWorld aims to create complex drama from its systems, but as close as it sometimes gets, the illusion never quite takes hold. Even a game that's explicitly driven by values and numbers, abstract in its presentation, has to convince you that what you're watching unfold is an organic ecosystem.
RIMWORLD REVIEW 2019 CODE
The best games are masters of illusion, making you believe a bunch of code and scripted behaviours are somehow real worlds or great stories.
RIMWORLD REVIEW 2019 PC
This review originally ran in PC Gamer UK issue 326 in December 2018.
0 kommentar(er)
