RimWorld

The reason for my prolongened absence from any reviews is because I finally got around to playing RimWorld. As any sandbox game worth its salt, it took a long long time to experience it fully. I could estimate up to 200 hours went into trying it, but at least I can finally feel like I can give an informed opinion on it.

RimWorld is a Sandbox Colony Sim with a randomly generated map, world, and events. You control up to a few dozen characters who make up your colony, harvest resources, build buildings, defend from raids, natural disasters, trade with other colonies, accept quests from them, or be the one raiding them. The end goal is to research and launch a rocket (or acquire one by some other method), and get off the hellhole of a planet you crashed on. The various described events serve to hinder you and reign your colony from prospering too much, as simply farming and weathering the climate is generally not a difficult thing to do.

I can tell right off the bat that RimWorld has taken heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, more so than many other colony sims, and that makes my job easier, as I compare any such game to Dwarf Fortress anyways. From the tile-based building, to a fully generated world with biomes, mountains, rivers, temperature physics, to each entity having relatives, emotions, individual body parts being able to be damaged, to a lot more similarities, RimWorld really wanted to be Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible, I feel. Considering the enormous success on Steam, I would say it succeeded in its own right, but I am not going to be as lenient on it. If it wants to copy Dwarf Fortress, it is going to have to beat it.
Despite having an actual team behind the game, RimWorld is surprisingly lacking in content in comparison. There is less variety in jobs, fewer animal and plant types, fewer items, less combat depth, and most importantly, as a massive shortcoming - no 3rd dimension. Without a way to expand into the skies or delve into the depths, RimWorld is fatally lacking in the sandbox building aspect. The "endgame" of Dwarf Fortress is building crazy structures, which are only limited by one's imagination, but RimWorld lacks this long-term depth. One playthrough of it exposes you to most of what you would care to experience.

To compensate, RimWorld has put in more effort into the random event and quest system, offering the player a supposedly balanced challenge, culminating in escaping the planet. It's an intriguing system, sure, and for a while made me think of actually giving this game a positive recommendation, but as the time went on, it got tedious. See, the AI is well made, never throwing challenges at you that would exterminate your colony. However, you need many people to have the game not progress at a snail's pace, yet as soon as you get enough to feel like the colony really picks up, the AI hits you with a harder challenge. Some colonists may die, many get injured, some permanently. Morale is low for weeks as people mourn, suffer in agony from their wounds, and even throw tantrums, possibly wounding or killing more colonists. The game regresses back to a snail's pace, and just as people are finally recovering from it all, the loop begins anew. Sure, the big challenges are exciting and really make you fight for your life, but they do not outweigh this tedious back-and-forth. Another strength of Dwarf Fortress was really managing hundreds of units, and the scales in which events could unfold then. The same scales are simply never reached in RimWorld, because it sacrifices some player freedom for a forced challenge and an attempt to feed fun down your throat.

Despite the negative tone of this all, I don't think RimWorld is a bad game. Few games can say they've held my interest for over a hundred hours, and RimWorld is one of them. However, I would ultimately still not recommend the game. There is not enough room for many games as time-consuming as this, and in my eyes, the price RimWorld must pay for copying Dwarf Fortress, yet not ambitiously surpassing it, is that it is eclipsed by it. It has not managed to carve out a separate enough identity for itself, and I believe you could just have a superior experience with Dwarf Fortress, and for more hours than nigh anyone would care to play it. Thus, even if you need a UI, go get yourself a copy of Dwarf Fortress when it comes out, probably next year.