RUST

Rust is a game that delivers as a true survival experience. In Rust you may choose to play alone or with others to survive, build, and loot. The game is at its best on its community servers as the official ones tend to be overly crowded and very intense for a beginner. In Rust you spawn in a random area of the very large map with nothing at your disposal but a rock, a torch, and bandages (Depending on the Server). With that rock you begin your seemingly overwhelming journey of gathering supplies, supplies allow you to create tools, and buildings. From there most players choose to explore their surroundings and upgrade their defenses.

This game while enthralling is a time consumer and requires a lot of your attention, other players can kill you and loot your corpse. I've spent hours upon my intitial spawn working in a community of players building a small city and upgrading to metal walls. We traded supplies, hunted together, looted nearby rad towns, and even slowly accepted new players into our ranks. Our small group had become a society, we aided those who needed help and defended our small city from other players masked as bandits. We had come to know each other by first names and trusted that our things be safe while not ingame, as there was always another player on watching over your city.

This game is perhaps the first game to create a challenging but engaging true to life experience. Things I had never experienced in a game before such as trying to decide amongst your fellow founding members if the lone newbie could be trusted behind our walls? Do we let him in? Should we make him bunk in the Newbie quarters overnight until he pulls his own weight? Are our walls truly safe? Who should be allowed to carry rifles? How can we expand our society and truly be able to keep our loot safe? All of these questions come into play at any given point.

Play with the right people, on the right server, and you too can have this experience. As for that society? What led to our unavoidable demise? One lone player trusted behind our walls was able to level everything in just a few hours. That is part of the game though, that experience, is what defined for me what games should be aiming to deliver a one of a kind experience I can experience nowhere else.

Rust is not a good game to make friends

Rust is a game for clans. Solo playing is either not possible or not fun. If you try to play solo, you'll be out numbered by a clan of trolls within a week. It takes forever just to get the basics, especially solo. Server wipes are a joke, because hard-core Rust players will dump 12 hours non-stop on the day of the wipe. I personally cannot justify doing that & having to dump insane hours daily just to stay relevant in the game is more a chore than fun. The amount of time and effort required when solo is just not worth it. Success in this game is purely down to how much time you invest in it, so it will be dominated by either large clans, or people who have no job & just play games all day.

So you're probably saying, "well, just form a clan".

Rust is not a good game to make friends. You CAN make friends, but its long punishing trials to do it. A typical rust conversation in-game is "Hello, hows it going?" and then taking a bullet to the head. The average players are immature trolls & only seem interested in communicating to be abusive rather than friendly competition or teamwork. You would have to be willing to die & be trolled over a dozen times, just to meet half decent human beings in this game. That was definitely my experience. With that said, the best way to form a group, is to form one outside of the game ahead of time.

But if your group is not covering your base in shifts so that it is protected 24/7, then either a larger clan that has the man-power to patrol in 24 hour shifts, will out-perform you; or a tiny band of losers with no jobs will. Games should be fun, not chores.

But this leads me to the final issue. Even playing this with a group & managing a few bases, it honestly got rather boring because you just run out of things to do, presumably because it's still "early access".

State of the Game

When you invest a little into this game physically and emotionally.. you will run into people referring to "Legacy" being the best state of the game, I disagree.
The current version of Rust is a combination of two previously tested systems of the game.
These are named: The Blueprint system + The component system.
Most Rust players will tell you that the blueprint system was the best system this game has ever seen. Over the last few years them tried different systems which generally didn't get any love.

The future isn't set in stone.

Well, sorta. If you take a look at the face punch website you will be able to see a road map. On this road map you will be able to find features and fixes they lined up for the game. Some will be added shortly and some will probably never see the light of day. Keep in mind the game is currently still early access and might change drastically in a year. I've seen the game go through 3-4 different systems now. And all of them had fun aspects and negative ones.

The Pros:

Great Maps -

Each server has it's own procedural map (which you can see here[playrust.io]) and it is pretty huge. Plenty of nice landscapes, biomes and landmarks to explore. With different spreading of resources and rare goods spots.

Powerful Crafting -

Crafting is intuitive, takes time to do, and offers many items to choose from, and even more to risk your life gathering ingredients for. Brings the balance between a sandbox builder and shooter. Building your base is also a pleasant experience once you've gathered the resources.

The Social Aspect -

If you don't have friends that play rust, you're pretty much doomed if you can't join a clan or small group. Rust is ruthless, with players jumping at each-others' necks for survival. You will be hunted, harassed, and you are expected to do the same, lest you risk being killed yourself. Teamwork and lack of trust in strangers are emphasized and crucially important here.

Intense fights! -

When people get greedy, they tend to rely on others to do the hard work for them. Enter raiding bases, and defending your own. If you happen to be online when you are attacked, raids are blood-pumping, scary, but also tons of fun, no matter on which side of the wall you are. Guns, crossbows and explosives everywhere!

Strategy Based -

Rust rewards brain over brawn. If you can make a good base design, place your home somewhere strategic, kill enemies from cover, or even deceive them, trap them etc. brings a whole world of rewards and will keep you alive for longer than flailing your assault rifle.

Bi-weekly Updates -

Even though this game has been in Alpha for 2 years now, updates are rolling in about two times a week, and it's nice to see a steady development flow. Still, it may be unfinished for a long time, but definitely playable nonetheless.

Modded Servers -

Want to free build? Want to get all resources and just focus on killing? There are a lot of community hosted servers with mods just for that!

The Cons:

Ruthless! -

Every one will try to kill you on sight, no questions asked. Everyone will try to raid your base, even though you just started. You will end up entering the game only to find everything you had stolen and your based turned to ruins. I myself with a group of 3 other friends just lost 50 hours of playtime each to an overnight raid, which brings me to my next point:

Raiding is too easy! -

Once you get your hands on a few C4 and / or rockets, raiding becomes too easy to perform and too hard to defend against. In order to have a well defended base, you will need to sacrifice actual inside room, if you want to actually be able to build it. Offline raiding (attacking once the players are offline) is also sadly available. You may have lookout towers and a lot of guns. But with no one to operate them, you will lose 100%.

Building Sucks! -

I said it's fun, and it is, but in order to combat abuse, you are only allowed to remove structures you placed 10 minutes after you place them. If you notice a mistake, or if you want to expand the building and say, replace a wall with a door, then tough luck, buddy! You'll have to raid your own base. So, start small, think in advance, stack resources and only build once you know what you want!

Here's a few tips I hope will help fellow explorers starting out.

• Harvest enough wood and stone for a hatchet (you will double your wood income per hit)
• Make a map from paper (Useful when exploring, so you can see places you've already been) [optional]
• Craft a pickaxe (double your loot from mining rocks)
• If I've found no cloth I make a wooden spear to launch at animals. If I have cloth, I'll make a bow instead. Basically I want to make sure I've always got some kind of ranged weapon on me because those animals can run fast, and you want to kill them before they run through a wall, or scale a mountain you can't access.
  

Final Verdict

75/100

The basic meaning of Rust is to survive no matter the price. You spawn naked on a Island, you gather materials to build a base, kill animals and fight other players and get you. The game is really fun to play when you got a buddy to play with you, or... you can play solo. Solo is really fun though, you get to do everything yourself and stuff, but can be really hard and frustrating sometimes. The game itself is in great shape and if you give it time, it will only get better!

Thanks for Reading my Review!

If you enjoyed it, don't forget to drop an Upvote, Follow and Resteem!
If you have any Questions or Thoughts, leave me a Comment too!
Lots of Time and Effort goes into these Reviews, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoy writing these!