Before launching into all the reasons RimWorld disappointed me, I do want to say that it isn't a terrible game. It really deserves a neutral review, maybe a 6/10. I enjoyed certain parts of the game, and I've put more than enough hours into it to get my money's worth. At the very least, the soundtrack is great. However, RimWorld suffers from way too many missed opportunities and shortcomings to give a positive review.


First off, I could not bring myself to care about my colonists, because player influence over long term pawn development is extremely limited. I think this can be broken down in to 3 main areas.

Traits: The system with the biggest effect on pawn behavior is Traits. Unfortunately, traits can never change, and they're decided entirely at character development. Even in places where it seems obvious that you would be able to influence pawn traits, you can't. For example, one possible background is Glitterworld Surgeon, and the description suggests that this character has done a lot of plastic surgery. Why can't I have that pawn fix another pawn with the Ugly trait?

Sprites: The biggest way pawns change is through injury or body part replacement. But this only manifests through numbers since pawn sprites are static. Get your jaw blown off? Doesn't matter, same sprite. Get a bionic eye replacement? Nope, same sprite, same eyes. As a means of conveying important information to the player, the UI and overall graphic design of this game SUCKS.

Skills: Leveling skills isn’t fun or engaging due to 3 problems. 1) The pawn has to be at least "interested" in the skill for it to be worth the effort to level. Interest is random, and decided entirely at pawn generation. 2) Their skills will always regress down to level 10, so the game is always dragging your pawns down to the same baseline. 3), There's no choice or input, it just happens whenever they use that skill.

For a game about managing people and influencing their fortunes, RimWorld does a terrible job of acknowledging the player's lasting influences on the characters.


Most of the engaging (i.e. not fast forwarding) gameplay comes from random events generated by the “storyteller”, an A.I. director. Most of these events fall into the category of "minor inconvenience", so they're not even things that a player can meaningfully react to. E.g. : Someone got the flu. Good thing health care is completely automated and requires no input to resolve. The only time these issues are critical is when game systems interact in unintuitive and frustrating ways, like your doctor deciding that eating and sleeping is more important than treating illnesses and people end up dying, unless you tediously micromanage the situation (more on this later).

The flipside of this is that once your colony accrues a bit of wealth or exceeds a pawn count, it ramps up the difficulty and gives you events that far outclass your ability to handle them, e.g. a robot ship coming to kill you or two dozen man eating muffaloes rampaging through your base.
In order to beat these events, you either have to
A: accept the RNG and let some pawns die,
B: save scum, or
C: Construct your base in an extremely “gamey” and immersion breaking way to trick the enemy AI into getting itself killed.


So there's a neat feature where every major landmark in the world gets a name and a unique climate. This is a legitimately cool feature, but badly misplaced. The problem is that once you choose your starting location, you could cut 75% of the map away and it wouldn't matter. The game doesn't give you any real reason to experience the other 75% of the map. World events always spawn close to your settlement, and you can trade locally for everything you need. Packing up and rebuilding somewhere else is a huge, tedious ordeal, and isn't worth it.

The reason for the huge map (as far as I can tell) is that the game’s win condition, escaping on a downed spaceship, is always located far away from your home base. To be fair, that journey can be fun, as finding clever ways to manage settler's moods, always wondering when the next ambush is, and building minimalist bases along the way gives a solid sense of progress, and is generally engaging. However, the game deliberately lets you circumvent that by building your own space ship anywhere, which requires an absurd amount of resources, which increases your wealth, which leads to absurdly hard events, as discussed above.



All of these complaints would be forgiven if the actual gameplay was fun and engaging, but it’s not. The solution to most of the game’s shortcomings is either A: install a mod to fix the problem or B: tediously micromanage the problem away. Some examples:

Hauling: Pawns are awful at logistics. Every pawn has the efficiency of hearses in Cities: Skylines, which is NOT a compliment. If anything needs to be moved quickly, the player must manually select a pawn, and order them to haul that specific item. Oh, and some pawns have traits that prevent you from doing that. So if that pawn goes hunting, they will usually carry their kill back. But if anything interrupts that action, you can’t force them to go back and bring their kill to the base. As I've said before, sometimes game systems interact in frustrating, unintuitive ways.

Crafting: When crafting items that take several ingredients, if you don’t construct your base in a specific way to minimize travel time, pawns will waste 75% of their time just transporting ingredients in the least efficient way possible. In other games, solving logistics problems can be fun and engaging. I love Factorio and Cities: Skylines but in those games, I feel like I'm solving an interesting puzzle. In Rimworld, I'm babysitting idiots that have no personality.

Decison Making: Pawns will very often neglect life or death situations to do something like eat or sleep. After a big raid, you might have some injuries. But rather than rescue a dying friend 2 feet from them, pawns might decide that they have to walk halfway across the map to eat, leaving their friend to die.

Uncontrollable Mood Modifiers: Hungry pawns will walk across the map to get a meal, but not the extra 3 tiles to eat at a table. This can’t even be manually controlled, so you’re forced to accept the penalty to mood. There are a lot of examples of mood modifiers being outside of player control, this is just the most obvious one I've found. What makes this even more stupid is that there's literally a random modifier that will give a mood bonus or penalty, this is just extra.

Cooking: They’ve even added features since beta that only serve to give the player more to micromanage. As of beta 18, colonists get food poisoning if meals are cooked in a dirty kitchen. Yay realism! But apparently no one considered the gameplay ramifications. There is no way to assign individual cleaning locations so players wind up constantly micromanaging pawns to clean the kitchen. Boo tedium.



A lot of fans will tell you that mods fix a lot of these problems. That's only partially true. Things like trait interaction and pawn development don't have mods that I'm currently aware of. Regardless, if a game's quality can be judged after other people put work into it, then Unreal Engine would be the best game of all time.


While Rimworld is fun at times, it's generally too tedious, and too limiting in player choice to get a recommendation from me.