Rimworld is a colony simulator, where you manage a colony on an alien planet. In fact, it is arguably the best colony simulator. What makes it great is how detailed the simulation is. Your colonists spontaneously form relationships and become friends, lovers, or enemies. They become happy or unhappy depending on several factors, including comfort, recreation, the beauty or ugliness of your colony, their relationships to other colonists, etc. Temperature changes in a realistic way, with higher temperatures at day vs. night, different seasons as well as random variation in temperature from day to day, and these changes matter for growing crops, keeping farm animals healthy, keeping food refrigerated, etc. I could go on, but I think I made my point, the simulation is quite detailed. Fighting is an important element in the game, and you can find, buy or craft different firearms and melee weapons and train your colonists to get better at using them. Raiders from other colonies frequently invade your colony and many quests also involve fighting. However, this is far from the only challenge in the game, and not necessarily the most interesting one. Some of the other random events that keep the game challenging include fires, outbreaks of infectious diseases, colonists having mental breakdowns or simply getting into fights with each other, and more. You can choose different settings to determine whether challenging events will be frequent or rare, to match your own play style. There are some minor issues, e.g. the endgame somehow felt a little bit anticlimactic, finding individual items is sometimes unnecessarily difficult, and a few other minor issues. However, none of those minor issues changes the fact that this is one of the most engaging and enjoyable games I have played in recent years. Highly recommended!
Hard West is a bit of a mixed bag. The turn-based combats are quite good, even though it lacks a few features that I am used to from other similar games (for example there is no overwatch for your characters, only for enemy characters). However, there are also unique features, such as the richochet skill which lets you bounce a bullet of one or more object when there is no direct path to an enemy (a skill which I must admit I never made use of) and the luck mechanic which makes you less likely to be hit if you were hit recently. There are three difficulty levels, so it should be possible to adapt the difficulty to your skill level. The game is of a decent length, consisting of eight different scenarios, each consisting of a few battles and a kind of choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) gameplay in between battles. Instead of leveling up characters there is a system where you can add new abilities to the characters and boost existing abilities by equipping different cards that you find. I would have preferred a more traditional system of leveling up characters, e.g. like in XCOM, but the card system has some things to be said for it (e.g. you can rearrange the cards between battles to optimize your team for the next battle). The story was alright, but it felt a bit like it was trying too hard to be dark. and consequently there are few if any really likeable characters. The weakest aspect of the game is the CYOA gameplay between battles, which consists of travelling to different locations on the map and choosing between a few different possible actions at each location, where the choices made can affect e.g. how much money you make and whether you receive some injuries or not. This was handled more creatively in some of the scenarios than in others but on average this aspect of the game was not all that fun. Overall, I think the game is worth playing for fans of turn based tactical strategy games, although there are much better games in the genre (e.g. the XCOM games).
