Kenshi

I love Kenshi. It is a horrible game, absolutely bugged up the ass and crazy crash prone despite the hard work and best efforts of the developers. Load times are abysmal and even happen during play with scenery popping in out of nowhere. It is a true open world sandbox with no artificial barriers and with almost nothing in it to play with. The game is build fundamentally flawed because it cannot function without allowing you to teleport your units with "safe scumming" but saving and loading the game also fucks with AI behavior every time. What little game mechanics the game does have are as deep as a puddle of piss, and not even all mechanics that the game says it has are in the game. The combat is flawed to say the least and you have little to no control over it. The thievery mechanics needs a rework in order to be engaging. What little ability you have to influence the state of the game world feels artificial rather then organic. I could go on and on which how shit of a game this is... But, I love it. Kenshi tries to do something new and it sort of half succeeds at it. It is a deeply flawed and even terrible game in so many ways, but when you play it you might just "get it". Because of this, I say to at least give the game a try, odds are you'll hate it, but maybe you too can see what it tries to do and you'll love it, faults and all. Plus, Kenshi 2 is in development, maybe they can get it right the second time? We'll have to wait and see.

Never before in my history of gaming have I been forced to run like hell from a bunch of hobos with my puppy on my shoulder, because they want to eat it

My experience in Kenshi so far : Start out as a wanderer, get mugged within 5mn. Go into a bar, meet some dude who wants to join me. Sure.. why not? Start exploring the island with him ... avoid roaming bandits by sneaking past them by night. fun! .. not much fauna so far .. argh! Spiders! run back to town, get mugged again. Don't have any money left though, so getting a beating. Both guys in my squad are unconcious ... and dying ... slowly bleeding out on the door step of the city! Band of soldiers now start killing the bandits who mugged me! My guys will be saved! I *LOVE* this game!! The bandits are dead or cunconcious, my guys get medical attention! wait .. what? Shackles? NOOOOOOOOO! Those were slavers ... now everybody is a slave ..." I actually reverted back to a previous save game (playing as a slave is *super ahrd*. Can't recomment unless you know what you're doing), but this time I got gang-jumped while mining ore by starved bandits. One of my guys was knocked out, the other one played dead, then grabbed his buddy on his shoulder and limped back to town. By now they have a shack and are in a pretty good place though. This kind of random things just keeps happening in Kenshi and everytime it is purely accidental, not part of a grand scheme centered on You ... Just normal happenstance in the wasteland. It's not easy, it's not super relaxing, but it is incredibly immersive and believable. If you like open world sandboxes with a maximum of freedom, then just buy it. In detail, the grafics are a bit dated (use reshade to fix that) but can run maxxed out on a i5-6600K(16GB)/GTX1070, sound design is barely there with the occasional nice but very short music piece, (writen) dialogues are sparse (but actually quite good) and the UI would fit in the X-Universe. Also don't believe the fear mongers : Mods for the GOG Version are available at nexusmods.com ... only the DRM is Steam Exclusive.

I really really don't get the reviews that not mention the innumerable broken stuff in the game. If you are not gonna be informative, hold yourself from writting a review, ty. It's been 2.5 weeks after I bought Kenshi and 184 hrs of gameplay. What can I say in short, I had some fun along the way, but in the end the taste that remains it's of stopping playing a game because It feels like beta testing, in this case beta testing a game that it is supposed to be completed and the devs are now busy doing a sequel. So would I recommend it getting it? Not unless it has a very big discount, It is a broken toy, never to be fixed. What is broken? On top of my head... Pathfinding: this will be the first unbeatable enemy that you will find in your adventure. Pathfinding is atrocious, reminicent of the most broken RTS games in the videogame young history. Specifics, paths that are unable to be made to begin with when clearly it can, (there is a road in between the two points, that kind of clear) paths that involve swimming through acid lakes, even though again, there's a road in between the two points. roadmeshes badly drawn that cross through walls and buildings, "god bless" that most of the times the pathfinding ignores all roadmeshes x) Environment and objects situation: SO MANY objects, spawns clipping through the environment, my worst example in my experience, in the fog islands, where there's like cannibal bugs that will tie people to poles to eat them, well many many of these poles are inside the big rock riffs, some of them your party can clip through them too, others seem like only howarts mages can, and these bugs and their victims seem to know a couple of tricks. Automation/Job assignment: this was my killer on late game and the nail that told me it's enough, having 1/3-1/4 of my base settlers going aimless randomly every 30 min... settlers not being able to find storage boxes...

Reviewed 5th September 2018 I really wanted to like this game, and considering the release I played was 0.98.55b, I was hoping that being so close to the 1.0 release, development might be at a good stage by now. Unfortunately, Kenshi is riddled with various frustrating bugs, severe pathfinding problems and a wide variety of other issues that detract greatly from gameplay. Worst of all is the poor optimisation and lengthy loading moving between areas of the map, frequent crashing or saves corrupting, which leads to hours of gameplay lost. The UI is functional, but also very unresponsive at times. The biggest problem for me with Kenshi is that it's like a melting pot of ideas, some of which seem really good, but also seemingly without any clear direction from the developers. There's certainly no lack of content and this gives the illusion of depth, but that's what leads to the biggest disappointment. When you start exploring different elements of gameplay and key dynamics of the game, they're all very shallow, not fleshed out, or simply broken. All in all, a great shame. I spent countless hours delving through what Kenshi has to offer, only to realise that in the end, it's unlikely to get any better than it is now. I have read that the developer plans to continue adding content after the 1.0 release finally arrives, which the game will certainly need if the best ideas are to be fully fleshed out. Personally, I won't be holding my breath.