RimWorld Colony Sim Alpha 4 Is Available, Our Thoughts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJmYKKzC0uA
I absolutely adore the fact that Linux now has a fair few building simulation games and RimWorld even though it is early days it shows massive promise and is already quite fun. Made in the style of Prison Architect it's one not to be missed. The developers are kind enough to give us access to keep testing it through-out the lifetime of the game, so we will keep showing it off as it goes on.

My thoughts
The game is really easy to get into thanks to many different AI story-tellers which you can pick to suit your style of play from utter baby AI's to being invaded constantly. The experience every time I test it on Linux is flawless with no performance problems of any kind, and it also works perfectly on my multi-monitor set-up, so that's a massive bonus.

For the laptop users amongst our readers you will delighted to know that it also works perfectly for me on an Intel HD4000, so it's not resource hungry at all.

The game will start you off easy by instantly telling you things you need to build by popping little messages to the side of your screen. The interface is minimalistic and that's the way I like it for a building game, as it never feels like it is in the way.

The game does seem to throw a bit of comedy your way too, as those squirrels are quite the menace when they go into a psychotic rage and start attacking civilians. It's best to let those colonist sleep off the squirrel attack so they can heal and get over such a traumatic experience. Also don't be a plonker and put batteries right next to your solar panels outside like I did, as they can and probably will explode in the rain, woops.

It allow you to name your colony once you have spent a little while in the game, so I decided to name mine "Land Of Holy Linux". Not sure why, but it sounded great at the time.

The only thing I think the game currently lacks is the amount of things you can build as the selection is still quite limited, so once you have built most of it to me there doesn't seem to be much else to do. This is why the AI story-tellers are such a great thing as if they keep throwing things at you then the building side of it isn't so boring.

I look forward to watching the game grow, if you are after a full building experience right now it isn't quite there yet, but a good investment for the future I think.

Check it out on the official site. I will warn you though even the basic edition isn't cheap at $30, but for the amount of game-play you can get out of it the game is well worth it. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.