Who doesn't love a good survival game? If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself in the occasional daydream, wondering how you'd fare on a stranded island or what you'd actually do in the post-apocalypse. Well, maybe we don't wonder about the second so much anymore...
However, the survival genre negates the need to focus on those what-if scenarios, giving us the satisfying feeling of being stripped of everything and surviving off the land.
Now console gamers will add another survival experience to their line-up with Rust Console Edition. Anyone who's even tried Ark: Survival Evolved or The Forest will immediately recognize the game's gathering, building, and survival structure. However, like a tired Walking Dead trope, it's the people who are the real monsters here. And they are both the game's biggest problem and its greatest saving grace.
While this console port may have some issues, it manages to capture the essence of tension-agonized survival, and bringing it to life will take wit, courage, perhaps some negotiation skills, and a whole load of patience.
Rust Console Edition Review: An Unequaled Survival Experience
Rust Console Edition is coming to PS4 and Xbox One eight years after its initial PC introduction in 2013. Following this PC release, the game quickly attracted a passionate community that happily felled trees, chopped rocks and killed one. in a barbaric way. another one; and for most of that time I was blissfully unaware of its existence.
When I first awoke in Rust with so little knowledge of the game, I was relatively surprised by the calming sight of a tranquil coastline and the soothing sound of water lapping nearby. A rusty boat lay askew in the distance, and a few half-naked but innocent-looking passers-by jumped excitedly at my approach.
I was greeted via in-game comms and quietly excited about the prospect of this social survival experience. It was almost…nice. Then one of those spectators pulled out a rock and beat me to death with it.
Since that first bludgeon, it's been clear that Rust Console Edition has maintained its ruthless (and popular) approach to survival. While things like food, water, and attacks from external NPCs are relatively easy to deal with - at least in the early hours of the game - these half-naked wanderers increase the tension around the gathering by valuing the resources you hold.
Too often I unknowingly hacked trees when I heard the all too familiar thud of a blood soaked rock. Why gather the resources yourself when you can just kill someone who's already done it for you?
During my first few hours with the game, I found myself in a brutal cycle of gathering wood and crafting essentials, then struck from behind with a hastily formed arrow, impaled with a spear, or even worse, shot. by a gear. player with a real weapon.
Luckily, rather than becoming completely frustrated with this endlessly circular process, I leaned into the simulation aspect of Rust Console Edition as I began hiding in bushes to avoid detection, scouting out open plains before to charge them, and yes, even chase some of them. unhappy souls myself.
I didn't realize how much I liked this approach until I found myself leaning behind a rock, watching a survivor flee from two pursuing bow hunters with obvious hostile intent. As they were looting the corpse, I rushed to get it, and my heart skipped a beat as through the comms I heard, “I think I saw someone on top of that hill! ".
It was an exhilarating experience that culminated as the two surrounded me. I tried to explain that I didn't have much to steal, but of course that didn't deter either party, and I soon found myself full of arrows.
However, while the majority of those you come across will kill you without hesitation for a meager bundle of wood, there have been odd occasions when that experience of social survival I had hoped for has started to kick in.
My first night was spent huddled around a campfire with four other survivors. Later, I ran into another survivor – each of us with drawn spears – and after asking for help, they gave me valuable advice on how to settle down quickly.
While the world of Rust can be incredibly hostile, it also contains moments of levity and community, which capture the feeling of survival far more than any other game in its genre.
Unfortunately, by capturing a sense of real-time survival with growing plants, a day/night cycle, and decaying buildings, Rust Console Edition ignores one of its biggest flaws. Whether you're a half-naked newbie with nothing but a trusty rock and torch, or someone sitting on a mountain of supplies, everything you own is left in the server lobby the second you you log off, just waiting to be looted.
It's not just your supplies that get left behind, though, as Rust also ditches any semblance of a fair experience for those with just a few hours to play on the weekends.
If I decided I wanted to play something else for the week, I'd first have to make sure my hut had the supplies it needed to stay supported - which requires daily resource costs for the materials your building is made of. And if I didn't have time to mine hundreds of rocks and woods, I would be left with nothing but this torch and this stone once more.
Quite often, if I found myself homeless, I wondered whether to continue or not, knowing that I only had time to build a hut that would be overrun only the second I logged off. Then there were the times when I prepared a sturdy shack, with upgraded locks and stone walls, only to find it completely missing the next time I logged into that server.
A lot of server issues could be overlooked if the gameplay translated well from PC to console, but as many will surely expect, that's just not the case. The race is slow and the extraction of materials is tedious. Jump into a match against an enemy, and tossing a coin might as well decide the outcome due to the imprecise, boring, and weightless attacks.
The base build, on the other hand, is accessible, quick, and simple. Upgrading and fortifying your shelter is simply limited by the supplies you have, so when my gears started spinning on what kinds of bases I could build, it was easy to imagine exactly how to do that.
The gameplay as a whole, however, leaves a lot to be desired and requires the player to do too much work - whether through role-playing or relying on Rust's social features - to create an immersive experience.
Rust Console Edition Review – The Bottom Line
Benefits
- Excellent social chat implementation
- Robust survival experience
- Ruthless online gamers
The inconvenients
- Gameplay lent
- Ruthless online gamers
- Penalizes players who can't play all the time
Ultimately, there's a great game somewhere in Rust Console Edition. Mixing its social aspects, which let you approach and talk to anyone, with such a terrific survival experience is a neat inclusion that makes for some of my most memorable moments in a genre game. I don't think meeting a fellow Scot and chasing down a pumpkin-headed individual together will ever get old, and spotting the ominous glow of a survivor nearby at night continues to give me the creeps.
However, with an unforgiving offline state and other players constantly murdering and looting you, it seems impossible to imagine having a fully equipped save for any real duration - at least not in the tens or even hundreds of hours in the game.
While the console port doesn't have any immediately noticeable issues for someone like me (who's never played the PC version), there's an almost indescribable sluggishness to Rust Console Edition, whether by menu management, map traversal, or combat.
However, compare it to the console port of something like Ark, and you'll start to see that Rust manages to translate to consoles without ever feeling too much like a PC game. That said, if you're looking for a robust survival sim mixed with sometimes immersive, sometimes hilarious, and often infuriating social aspects, Rust Console Edition may be worth your time.
[Note: Double Eleven provided the copy of Rust Console Edition used for this review.]
