I have played about 5 hours of Rust thus far. I have played as of January 7th. These opinions expressed are my own, I am not employed by any developer at the time this was written.

Rust has been a lot of fun for me. I played with a group of three or more people for the entire time I played and I played on a "friendly" server. To give you an idea of how friendly, one of the group members attempted to murder someone who he thought was A.F.K. The man turned and shot him, and then found our camp in order to give him back his stuff. They even gave us supplies.

The game-play is very similar to Minecraft, but the style of player interaction is similar to DayZ. You harvest resources to make it so that you can survive the night and you can place beds which, like Minecraft, are a re-spawn point that will allow you to spawn back in a 'safe' place should you die. Note it is glitched and won't always work, but after a few suicides it is possible to re-spawn in the right place. However, I have found that the map is relatively small which is not a bad thing: meeting up with friends takes minutes not hours. Other considerations for survival however clothing as well as food to be comfortable, you can starve or bleed to death or die of a radiation overdose. These are very "DayZ" ish attributes. There also exists a very strong emphasis on crafting: every useful tool or device in the game can be crafted from raw materials you find out and about in the world.

But Rust is its own thing as well. The art is still lacking as the game is in Alpha, but the developers have effectively captured the feeling of a post apocalyptic waste land. The radiation is immediately noticeable, audio and visual clues let you know when you are in a dangerous land. And while zombies or other hostile critters (bears/wolves) sometimes pop up out of nowhere, there are usually good indicators that these creatures are around (groans, howls, etc.). There is a Day to Night cycle, a cycle that can kill you if you are unprepared. The predatory creatures seem to appear even more suddenly at night, though really its just hard to see well without a torch and that means putting away your weapon (if you don't have a flashlight mod yet). You will get cold and it felt as if you got hungrier more quickly if you were cold, but maybe that was a trick of my imagination.

I think the most important feature of the game is the ability to craft anything. The game allows you to craft anything you can find (or reverse engineer) a recipe for, including shotguns, assault rifles, radiation suits, house components, bullets, and more. These recipes do not go away if your character dies, meaning that it is very easy to start over again, you just have to make the resources required for the weapon, tool, or building you wish to design. The one draw back to crafting is that you move much slower, you cannot always move away from a designated area (you need to be within range of a crafting bench for advanced recipes), and the crafting time can be very long with some parts take a minute or more per unit that you make. Big structures could take over an hour just to make the parts, let alone gathering the vast amount of resources required to construct such a building.

This is where my experience could have been very boring and a turn off. However, I played with a group so that while I was crafting I usually had one or two (and sometimes 3) people off gathering resources or protecting our area from the occasional jerk who wanted to KOS some newer players. Overall, my experience was positive. Finally, this is an overview, not a review, since the game is not in its 'final' form. I feel it would be unfair to rate the game yet, so these are my comments about what I liked. There wasn't much to dislike and most of what really bugged me were glitches which will hopefully be fixed in coming additions. I hope you enjoyed this and if this game intrigues you, check it out on Steam!

I have played about 5 hours of Rust thus far. I have played as of January 7th. These opinions expressed are my own, I am not employed by any developer at the time this was written. Rust has been a lot of fun for me. I played with a group of three or more people for the entire time I played and I played on a "friendly" server. To give you an idea of how friendly, one of the group members attempted to murder someone who he thought was A.F.K. The man turned and shot him, and then found our camp in order to give him back his stuff. They even gave us supplies. The game-play is very similar to Minecraft, but the style of player interaction is similar to DayZ. You harvest resources to make it so that you can survive the night and you can place beds which, like Minecraft, are a re-spawn point that will allow you to spawn back in a 'safe' place should you die. Note it is glitched and won't always work, but after a few suicides it is possible to re-spawn in the right place. However, I have found that the map is relatively small which is not a bad thing: meeting up with friends takes minutes not hours. Other considerations for survival however clothing as well as food to be comfortable, you can starve or bleed to death or die of a radiation overdose. These are very "DayZ" ish attributes. There also exists a very strong emphasis on crafting: every useful tool or device in the game can be crafted from raw materials you find out and about in the world. But Rust is its own thing as well. The art is still lacking as the game is in Alpha, but the developers have effectively captured the feeling of a post apocalyptic waste land. The radiation is immediately noticeable, audio and visual clues let you know when you are in a dangerous land. And while zombies or other hostile critters (bears/wolves) sometimes pop up out of nowhere, there are usually good indicators that these creatures are around (groans, howls, etc.). There is a Day to Night cycle, a cycle that can kill you if you are unprepared. The predatory creatures seem to appear even more suddenly at night, though really its just hard to see well without a torch and that means putting away your weapon (if you don't have a flashlight mod yet). You will get cold and it felt as if you got hungrier more quickly if you were cold, but maybe that was a trick of my imagination. I think the most important feature of the game is the ability to craft anything. The game allows you to craft anything you can find (or reverse engineer) a recipe for, including shotguns, assault rifles, radiation suits, house components, bullets, and more. These recipes do not go away if your character dies, meaning that it is very easy to start over again, you just have to make the resources required for the weapon, tool, or building you wish to design. The one draw back to crafting is that you move much slower, you cannot always move away from a designated area (you need to be within range of a crafting bench for advanced recipes), and the crafting time can be very long with some parts take a minute or more per unit that you make. Big structures could take over an hour just to make the parts, let alone gathering the vast amount of resources required to construct such a building. This is where my experience could have been very boring and a turn off. However, I played with a group so that while I was crafting I usually had one or two (and sometimes 3) people off gathering resources or protecting our area from the occasional jerk who wanted to KOS some newer players. Overall, my experience was positive. Finally, this is an overview, not a review, since the game is not in its 'final' form. I feel it would be unfair to rate the game yet, so these are my comments about what I liked. There wasn't much to dislike and most of what really bugged me were glitches which will hopefully be fixed in coming additions. I hope you enjoyed this and if this game intrigues you, check it out on Steam!