Rust is “technically” an early access game, however, I don’t feel that the developers will ever be satisfied with their product and it seems the game will forever be in an early access state. Don’t get me wrong, it’s playable, but with constant server wipes, frequently added content and changes to craftables, it’s very difficult to become heavily invested in Rust.
Rust is a first person, survival game where you start off naked on a beach, equipped with only a rock and a torch. It’s your job to quickly arm yourself and set up a shelter before the elements or (more likely) other players decide to kill you. You get unlimited respawns, albeit a respawn time limit, so if you do find yourself dying a lot, there isn’t much in the way of consequence. In Rust, your biggest threat is the community. Everyone and anyone will jump at the chance to end your miserable existence the moment the opportunity arises, and its a dog eat dog world in Rust, so the best possible approach I would say is to do the same. In the early game, its beneficial to kill people spawning close by, since you will most likely have similar equipment, and then harvest their corpses for food, fat and other materials you will need to survive.
After spending some time harvesting materials, you need a base of operations, a place to call home. You can do this by crafting a building plan, and then so long as you have the resources, you can make a house as big or small as you desire. The only problem is, you will need to be able to lock down your house, so outsiders can’t get in, so you require a furnace, which costs even more resources, so you leave, gather, come back, craft, place the furnace, now you need to smelt metal ore into metal fragments, so make sure you kept enough wood from building to fire up that furnace. Once the metal is smelted you can use it to create a lock and key, or a code lock for your door. Once you’ve done that, it’s a simple case of maintenance. Keeping your house safe, keeping yourself safe, maybe killing the occasional person that wanders close enough, harvest them for more human meat, which you need to cook using a camp fire…the whole process of surviving in this game comes from being a horrible person. If you aren’t a nasty person that will not hesitate to kill someone on sight, then this game is not for you.
Unfortunately, beyond that, there isn’t a lot else to do, other than collect more resources to upgrade your base, or craft better weapons and armour. A lot of Rust’s appeal comes from raiding player created bases, which can be fun, if you have a group, attempting this game alone is not recommended at all. There is a group that currently raid servers and they are an estimated 20 players, all coordinated with their specific jobs to get their clan up and running in next to no time.
As for the game itself, well, if you have a decent gaming PC, then this game can look visually appealing, however, if you’re running less than 6GB RAM, or have an out of date graphics card, the game will probably not function at all on the higher settings, meaning your game will look similar to that of something you might have played 20 years ago. Night time can be a bitch too, since there is no natural lighting at all when it turns from day to night. If you are not in a safe spot or don’t have a torch handy, then you basically are unable to accomplish anything during night time, since the visuals are PITCH BLACK. I would say that even if you had a torch or a miners helmet, you wouldn’t want to use it since it just highlights your position at night time.
As I mentioned earlier, the biggest problem with this game is progression, because once you’ve built up enough resources and secured yourself a decent base, there isn’t much else to do other than bully your neighbours, which again results in a toxic community. It’s hardly sporting when someone with a fully automatic machine gun starts gunning down naked players who are armed with a rock at the beach, but this is the game the developers have brought into the world and are constantly having to tweak.
One of the most unfair features of the game is that when you start out, you can only build the most basic of tools and weapons, which certainly stack the odds against you. You join a server that has been running for a few weeks, you are LUCKY to survive 20 minutes. You can’t explore because you can’t defend yourself from the army of people with higher grade weapons, who are farming the areas where players can find blueprints, which basically means that after a period of time, new players cannot catch up. It’s unfair to expect a new player to be able to have a chance of playing the game properly if they are ill equipped, and unfortunately this is a trend in most survival games, where new players are essentially target practise for those who have guns.
Rust, as good as the concept originally was, is a breeding ground for trolls. People who have far too much time on their hands are able to blow up the casual players with rocket launchers and C4 because they have spent enough time gathering the blueprints and resources to do so. The biggest flaw in my opinion is that when a player logs off, they sleep exactly where they logged off. Now, a game this demanding is prone to crashes and server shut downs, and trying to log back in is a tedious process, that anyone who has played the game will agree, needs to be optimised.
In short, I don’t like it. Rust had a lot of potential, but its stuck in limbo, with the developers unsure what to do with it.
You can purchase the early access version now on Steam!
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