Survival Games 1. - Rust (PC, MacOSX - 2013)

I'm a big fan of survival games. They give you freedom and the illusion of free will. The illusion, because you still have to play within the borders created by the game programmers, still the illusion could work really well and suck you in for countless hours.

I already wrote about Stranded II and Starbound, both great survival games but since then I've realized that there are many more out there. I think there must be a connection between the revival of zombie movies and tv series, and the popularity of survival video games.

So let me write about a few more survival games I had the chance to try out in last couple of month. I plan to write about DayZ, The Stomping Land, The Forest, but first let me share a few words about RUST.

Rust is an fps survival game where you have to gather stuff, hunt animals, craft, study, explore. The world of Rust is huge, there's no map or compass, so you have to find your own way, check the sun and mountains for directions, this gives an extra level of realism to it because even if you know the map well it's still pretty easy to get lost.

You can farm rocks for ore, chop wood, hunt animals for fat, cloth, meat, leather. You can build your own shack or house, if you have enough material you can build a fortress. On the map you can find little cities, factories, abandoned buildings - most of these places have spawn points where you can find important loot, bullets, blueprints, guns even, but most of these places have radiation, so you will need protective clothing or rad pills to spend enough time there. Oh blueprints, you need them to be able to craft the more advanced stuff, but you can also research with research kits and learn how to craft something that way. 

Basically the world of Rust is not really dangerous if you watch out for animals (bears, wolves) and the heavily radiated zones. The fun comes in with multiplayer and you want multiplayer, because gathering can be fun for a while, but what's gonna happen when you have the biggest fortress and no one to protect it from? Boredom.

There are around 4-5000 servers at the moment, some of them are heavily populated ( up to 200 players per map ), others are almost empty. In Rust if you join a server you will have a character on that server, you can build stuff, gather resources, study blueprints but you can't take your stuff / knowledge to a different server, if you choose a different one you will have to start from zero.

If you are new to Rust I suggest you to start on a less populated server, preferably a friendly or noob server, so you won't get killed in the first 5 minutes. What am I talking about? You will probably get killed in the first few minutes, but that's Rust for you. The best is to find some buddies to play the game with, alone it's really hard, especially if you have to stand up against 3-4 bandits raiding your house and loosing all your stuff after gathering it four hours can be really painful trust me.

After many hours of gameplay I have finally found a server where most of the people are friendly, we have a village and events from time to time, and the best times are when there are bandits on the server and everybody works together to protect our land. The game itself is not very complicated, the basic gameplay can be exhausted after 15-20 hours but the fun starts when you find a good community with cool people.

The game is still in early access so a lot of things will change. I keep checking the developer's blog and they are basically rebuilding the game, so the next Rust is coming and it's going to be ever better. Can't wait.

Rust Devblog:
http://playrust.com/