How many of you guys and gals have at least heard of the book “Lord of the Flies”? I never read the book myself, although I did pick up the basic plot strokes on sparknote.

If you’d rather just read ahead then click on the link, I’ll break it down for you quick and dirty; its about kids who get stranded on a deserted island and in the process of trying to survive kill each other. Grim stuff. What’s even grimmer is that there were actual experiments done with 12 year olds where limited resources were competed over by two separate teams from two sides of a wooded area. The two teams ended up attacking members of the other team savagely, and if they didn’t end the experiment then and there, someone would have gotten seriously hurt. Rust is a lot like that experiment, only instead of twelve year olds hunting pigs, you got the same guys you’d meet on Battlefield 4 running around naked trying to hit you with a rock. Not kidding.

The basic premise is that you start out literally stripped bare, armed with nothing more then a torch, some bandages, and a really big rock. The rock is a decent melee weapon, but slow as molasses. You can, however, use it to kill animals and chip away the wood off of trees and break down huge boulders. With enough wood you can make a fire, and with some stone in the mix you can make a stone hatchet. Animals produce food in the form of “chicken” items (tastes like chicken!) and also provide animal fat and cloth. You can turn cloth into much needed pants and other clothes, mix it with animal fat to make fuel for your torch, and mix it with wood from your bow. You can construct a number of things like this with the resources you collect, ranging from hatchets and wooden shacks to towers, workbenches, ammo, and even guns. If you want to really expand your arsenal, you’ll have to venture into the abandoned military camps near the roads and irradiate yourself in the process.

Your not the only one who does this, and unless your on a strict non-pvp server, there is nothing stopping the other guy from killing you and taking your stuff. Alliances are strictly voluntary, and you can be betrayed at any time. So naturally, your bound to meet a few nice people.

Or not.

In either case, it certainly makes for an interesting experience. Kinda like Unreal Tournament in “survival” mode. This kind of experience isn’t for everyone, and should be approached delicately by those with weak stomachs, nosy parents, or sensitive children who might wanna play this game. Here is my review.

As always, we’ll start with the good.

Dynamically Expansive

To be clear, the game is still in alpha. Judging by how well that alpha is selling on Steam, and how little has been added so far, it might be a long time until it breaks out of alpha. Nonetheless, the dev team seem to be updating regularly about it, and if they aren’t lying on their blog, it does appear they are coding new things. Still, there is only one map, and even if you wiki the map and learn its ins and outs, your going to do a whole lot of exploring in this game before you put it away. Like a hiker who forget his camping gear and unmentionables, you will see a world almost barren of life, save for the few sociopaths who settled near you and the wildlife that wanders through the woods. It is very easy to get lost in this game, and is not for those of you who get simulation sickness from first person games. But if you can handle the cursing tween and the wide open world, you will be wandering through the woods like Lewis trying to find Clark after the fallout. What’s interesting is that the mechanics of building and finding new recipes to build with encourages you to explore every nook and cranny rather then just “settle in”. That picture above is of a city built entirely from other players, and I gotta feeling you can stack them higher then that. If any of you are starting to get a minecraft vibe from this game, keep in mind that unless you get a mod for said game, you will not be able to compare it to rust. Like I said earlier, you can make guns in this game. You can build a revolver, a bow and arrow, a pipe shotgun, or a hand cannon at the beginning of the game. you need to find metal and cloth and whatnot, but that’s only a matter of time and effort. Both of which you will have plenty of. If your the kind of gamer who likes to delve deep into the rabbit hole of a game’s intricate details, you need to play this game, and keep playing up until they finally finish the beta. If that kind of thing bores or intimidates you, see my review of Reaper of Souls.

That was some of the good, now for the bad.

Anarchic, Unbalanced.

I do believe you saw what the screen up above said. You know, the one saying I AM DEAD. That was from a guy who pistol whipped me with a gun I didn’t even know existed in the game. I was camping with nothing more then a bow and arrow. This is all too common in a game where you start off with a rock and can move on to make automatic weapons. You get noob hunters. Merciless, pwn hungry noob hunters. If you do not know what the words noob and pwn mean, you are not going to have a happy time with this game unless you pick a server that is mostly abandoned. Even then, survival is not guaranteed.

While many of these issues range outside of both the anarchy and unbalance this game has to offer, they are worth noting. To start, the animation is not perfect by even a substandard stretch of the imagination. Even for an online computer game, the movements of characters are laggy, the people sometimes act like robots, and the A I seems to get confused for no reason at all. I was able to kill a wolf naked with nothing more then a stone hatchet. You normally can’t do that without some kind of armor, but this wolf seemed to forget how to bite once it passed through me. These are bugs that need to be addressed before the beta to be sure, but there is no point in ignoring them now. The lack of an aiming reticle makes starting off the game without a gun even MORE frustrating then it already is, and it seems like hacking is a national pastime in the land of Rust. I will be launching another review when and if a Beta or Gold version is released, and hope to find them address these issues then.

Lets wrap things up here

Sandbox Survival Shooter

Three words that rarely appear in the same sentence. Yes, this game seems to appeal to try for the GTA crowd, the Minecraft crowd, and the old fashioned Quake Arena Types all in one move. I’m not sure they succeeded the way they wanted to. We got cyberbullies and hackers in the same level as people who want to build stuff. We got players who stockpiled ammo, armor, and weapons out the wazoo hanging out in the same server that newcomers are just starting in. This is less of an Alpha and more like a free for all. If you ever wondered what it was like to live in an unmanaged zoo made for people as well as radioactive animals, Rust is the perfect simulator. Pray you don’t run into any hackers who can run at 65mph with a shotgun in their hands. And if your a newcomer, try for the less populated servers and look for one that says “NoPvP”. Trust me on this one.