Kenshi

What to add to what's already said by the others? The game has this 2000 aura. The RPG part reminds me of Fallout, the squad - Fallout Tactics. The economy model is what I enjoy the most but couldn't find until now. Make or buy resources, create food, weapons, armor, medkits, drinks. The quality depending on character's skill that grows. It's like the best taken from 3 huge niches: TES's skill growth, Swords and Potions 2's (RIP) town growth with more resources provided and MMORPG's crafting of better items that can be used, not just sold. Like ships in Eve, like equipment in WoW or LA2... And all this in a cruel world that puts you on the edge but gives a chance. I'm often irritated by how modern games copy one another. This one is a good example of using the ideas and staying self. Since I couldn't imagine replacing this experience with any other. The game is truly unique. It's so good its fans forgive it all the glitches and poor engine. It hooks you and holds you, giving the right balance of drama, opportunity and difficulty. It's a diamond. And it makes the impression of an old game, from the times when games were made with much love and attention. This game has a heart. It has a pride. Like X3, like Factorio, like Fallout 1-2. No hand-holding, no playing itself, no being a fancy movie. A world where you're not a hero, just an ant, but you can make your own ant-hill. Through hard work, survival and union.

Let me first say this: Thank you developers for making this great game, it really excites me and I love every hour I spend playing it. I really appreciate your work and I'm very thankful that this game exists! Summary about the content first: Creative freedom, you can build everywhere except close to towns. Character creation is very nice, every character can look very different and unique. Lots of factions. No overpowered, shiny RPG-weapons, rather realistic. You can do whatever you want! No quests. You can attack everybody and anything. And much more! I first saw this game on Steam and was very sceptical, because it's in Early Access and because it's a very large project for an indie game developer team. But I decided to stop relying only on reviews and was suprised that there is a free demo on their website, which is basically fully functional, it just limits the level cap and the size of the map you can explore. It only took me two hours and I decided to buy it on GOG, because I want to be able to install and play it without online activation. I didn't encounter many bugs yet. The pathfinding works 8 out of 10 times flawlessly and 2 out of 10 times it takes a bit illogical route, very few times the character runs forth and back until he gets the right route, but that's rare. Think about it, it's a huge open world, not the type of map size that's easy to do pathfinding on. I'm glad it even exists and the developers did a great job even implementing it. I have lots of fps drops, I think it's because of processing, not because of graphics. Changing the graphics settings doesn't change anything. I believe it's because of the processing of all AI's, physics etc. Loading times are relatively good, because I have an SSD. I mostly have to wait 10-20 seconds between areas, but loading doesn't happen very often. Only when you enter a new large chunk. I didn't have any crash yet, the game works fine. I have enough RAM, maybe people get crashes, because of memory limits.

In Kenshi you aren't some budding superhero who will soon beat single-handedly the snot out of 3-story high monsters, you are just a weak nobody in a world full of other weak nobodies... Also there is no hand-holding, actual or moral, in Kenshi you can really do whatever your want, but you'll have to discover everything about it yourself and make your very own choices. Now for those who might worry if it isn't too hard, please note the game's editor can edit savegames, which means your greed is your only limit: Do you want to be incredibly rich and carry all the best gear? Your choice. Just note the game will stay challenging nevertheless, since there are no overpowered items to be found. Speaking of realistic, enemy mobs won't attack you politely one at a time, they can and will swamp you. Some times enemies will outnumber you 1:10 or more, and even when you've started to be well-trained and well-equipped, some times your only chance is to run away and hope to somehow get rid (outrun, distract) of your pursuers. The world is huge and interesting, in my first playthrough I spent (game) weeks just exploring the continent... The game is rock solid on my laptop, there are some very minor issues (1.0.59b), but nothing game breaking: Once (after a long game session) doors started to visually disappear (but you could still go through them), and sometimes after opening and closing a door many times, my guys couldn't cross it anymore. In both cases saving my game and restarting Kenshi fixed everything. Well, there are some infuriating (to me) things, like not being able to take over ownership of abandoned ruins, but I hope they will be "fixed" eventually, since apparently the game is still under active development. (I sure hope they'll release a DLC...)

I love this thing, I got it back in 2013 and it was truly bare-bones, didn't even have sound system, the map was very limited, I didn't manage to do much and just forgot about it. Fast forward to 2018, I see a a notice on steam's home page about an update to Kenshi, and I think to myself "eh, might be worth to give it another shot real quick" *8 hours later* "...Huh, is that the sun coming up?", it came a long way, sounds for everything, moody music, the map is huge and quite fun to explore. It's like a cross between Dwarf Fortress, RTS games and a healthy dosage of RPG trappings, it's hard to explain. You start with a single character, with crap stats, no equipment and little money, from there you can do whatever; Steal, pick fights, mine, buy a house, start recruiting or go solo, find a nice place and build your settlement, research tech, farm, weapon and armor smithing, build a trade empire, go to war with other factions, liberate slaves, buy slaves, sell people as slaves, bounty-hunt, be a drug lord, among other things. Combat is very hands off, you tell them who to attack but from there they do their own thing, but it's fun to watch, very well animated, and the aftermath of huge battles is great, people crawling away(because they can have limbs amputated or broken), huge pools of blood, wild animals eating the carcasses. And lastly no one should be afraid of the difficulty, the level of challenge is 100% customizable, be with ingame options or with the many mods available, or just mod it yourself, it's very easy; Also because of the way the health works, losing a fight does not mean game over by any means, you'll get knocked out, will come to a few mins later, patch yourself up and next time you'll be, literally, tougher(toughness is a stat that increases by you getting the living hell beaten out of you). So yeah, highly recommended, there's nothing quite like it, I sincerely hope the devs can finish it, but what's there is already worth it.

18 hours of play. I bought a building in a town. I went out in search of materials to repair the building. I could no longer return; every time I entered the area around the town, the game would freeze during loading. The rest of the saves corrupted, because I spent a lot of time in the area of that town before leaving. I used the import function and restored the save, but the building was completely gone forever in tha town. Broken saves are unforgivable.