RUST – a review of a three-year-old game

Everyone knows, if you have listened to the podcast, radio show, any of our live shows, or just paid attention to the station, that I like games where I get to build things, farm materials and survive in a world where I have a chance.  If you are like me, RUST is not the game for you.  I played for 40 hours. I had a lot of fun, on a private server.  I played 20 hours on a public server and never got as far as being able to even set up a campfire. 

Spawn in, stand up naked, harvest wood, find mushrooms, get shot by someone who has a giant base and just wanted to see what you got.  Rinse and repeat.  Or if you’re lucky, wake up naked, turn around and get shot by another naked person with a bow, die, rinse, repeat.

If you can find it, log into a low to no population server, and then you can have time to build your own space and gather the food and materials you need to survive. Then log out and come back later to find that your base has been destroyed because you weren’t in their group and had the audacity to find a small space away from everyone to place your base.

That is all after waiting an exorbitant amount of time just waiting for servers to load, even official servers. I tend to die faster than it takes to load into a server.

But, is it really that bad, or am I just bad at it?  Well, Yeah I guess I am new but being chased across a map by gun-wielding people while I have just a stone and a torch and naked is not my idea of fun. It strikes one more as lord of the flies than a game. It could be that if I had a team of people with me, and we all made an effort to build out a giant base and all worked on it, it could be a fun game.  For me, it was a waste of forty dollars. Unless I want to play on a private server, which costs more.

So to sum up, unless you really enjoy a hard PVP game, where unless you bring people with you the start is really difficult, and everyone is hunting the people that can’t hunt them, I would pass on RUST. It can be fun, but like most games that don’t have some kind of throttle on PVP it will end up being a run from one safe zone to the next until you can luck into the parts to defend yourself or even worse just clothe yourself.

Topher’s rating

5/10 (only for the time I could get by myself on there.)