Intended for those looking to buy.
I'm sure you can find a review of the conventional positives and negatives of this game, so I'm going to talk about how mods make this game much more than just an amazing game by itself. Feel free to reply with constructive thoughts.

Like many of the most popular games to hit steam, RimWorld is extremely moddable, which in my opinion, is its saving grace. By saving grace I mean the difference between it being 8-9/10 to a 9-10/10 game. This is because it lacks content. Some may say it has infinite replayability, but as much as it succeeds well in this area, the story generating design runs out of drive eventually. When you step into vanilla RimWorld you can happily play a hundred hours on the content it provides, for some people, much more: respectable. But to continue coming back for hundreds of hours and eventually thousands (as I predict to have by the time I stop playing), I need more, and as much as the Royalty DLC is nice, it isn't enough.

Mods come in here to fill the void with a stream of content you literally could not fit in one playthrough. There is simply too much mod content to play all at once, keep in mind, these aren't basic changes, these mods are expansive and can totally rework RimWorld's functioning, or bring you to a seemingly new world altogether.

I believe it is more an engine than a game (though it is very much a game), so you can modify the game to play how you wish to play it. Even if you are conservative and only wish to play a certain way, you will find yourself continually restarting to tweak minor things or add in a bunch of mods you had found and kept note of since you started the playthrough. In this way, the incompatibility of adding most mods post playthrough start is the reason it is so easy to rack up hours. If you are willing to try new things, you will be left to sort though thousands of mods that could modify your game with perhaps a maximum of 200 mods you can realistically play with at any one time. At least, this was my experience.

Herein lies the biggest weakness ironically sitting upon the biggest strength which fixes the other biggest but now void weakness. These mods are a way to make a game (YOUR game even) atop an engine, so compatibility issues and limitations of the engine will sometimes keep you from playing exactly how you want. For me, this is most clear with the incompatibilities of the Vanilla Expanded (VE) series and the Combat Extended (CE) mod. Getting them to run together requires patches and is sometimes impossible regardless. This leaves what I consider a must-have mod in CE and the beautiful things Oskar has been doing with VE at odds. This specific incompatibility seems to have been fixed for now, but the concept of the issue still remains, keeping this compatible isn't a simple task. You may not experience the same issue at all, or it may be another two mods/series, but this is one of mine. I would say CE should be a part of the engine, a claim I'm sure many would hate me for. Can I expect vanilla RimWorld to bend to my view of the best version of the game? No, just like any other game (for the most-part).

This is the void mods cannot fill. If you create a RimWorld experience with mods that is not easy to recreate, or even an idea for a RimWorld experience, it can leave you feeling like you have to change what you enjoy. You can sometimes get around this. I managed to when I first started: I was terribly weirded out that storage system consisted of each item taking up a single square meter for itself, sometimes stackable, sometimes not. Why do clothes not form a pile of clothes or something? Now I consider it normal and although I would like a proper storage system, I have no issues playing it how it is.

I would love a better inventory/storage system and combat/health overhaul + more general system realism, but I understand that is a huge ask. So if you generate wants of a similar scale for RimWorld, you have discovered RimWorld's largest weakness. Mods are a bigger part of Rimworld than other games, so in the small ways they fail, it hurts the entire game a lot more than it would in other games. After spending that many words on explaining its big weakness, I'm also going to tell you it's tiny compared to real common issues in games...So it's a 10/10 from me.

Randy once sent me 28 Corgi dogs as a hostile event, I had to murder 28 Corgis... Here's the Corgi graveyard:

Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi
Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi

2022 Update: For some reason I got another manhunter event with corgis, 17 this time, so I added that to the graveyard

[b] Intended for those looking to buy. [/b] I'm sure you can find a review of the conventional positives and negatives of this game, so I'm going to talk about how mods make this game much more than just an amazing game by itself. Feel free to reply with constructive thoughts. Like many of the most popular games to hit steam, RimWorld is extremely moddable, which in my opinion, is its saving grace. By saving grace I mean the difference between it being 8-9/10 to a 9-10/10 game. This is because it lacks content. Some may say it has infinite replayability, but as much as it succeeds well in this area, the story generating design runs out of drive eventually. When you step into vanilla RimWorld you can happily play a hundred hours on the content it provides, for some people, much more: respectable. But to continue coming back for hundreds of hours and eventually thousands (as I predict to have by the time I stop playing), I need more, and as much as the Royalty DLC is nice, it isn't enough. Mods come in here to fill the void with a stream of content you literally could not fit in one playthrough. There is simply too much mod content to play all at once, keep in mind, these aren't basic changes, these mods are expansive and can totally rework RimWorld's functioning, or bring you to a seemingly new world altogether. I believe it is more an engine than a game (though it is very much a game), so you can modify the game to play how you wish to play it. Even if you are conservative and only wish to play a certain way, you will find yourself continually restarting to tweak minor things or add in a bunch of mods you had found and kept note of since you started the playthrough. In this way, the incompatibility of adding most mods post playthrough start is the reason it is so easy to rack up hours. If you are willing to try new things, you will be left to sort though thousands of mods that could modify your game with perhaps a maximum of 200 mods you can realistically play with at any one time. At least, this was my experience. Herein lies the biggest weakness ironically sitting upon the biggest strength which fixes the other biggest but now void weakness. These mods are a way to make a game (YOUR game even) atop an engine, so compatibility issues and limitations of the engine will sometimes keep you from playing exactly how you want. [strike]For me, this is most clear with the incompatibilities of the Vanilla Expanded (VE) series and the Combat Extended (CE) mod. Getting them to run together requires patches and is sometimes impossible regardless. This leaves what I consider a must-have mod in CE and the beautiful things Oskar has been doing with VE at odds.[/strike] [b] This specific incompatibility seems to have been fixed for now, but the concept of the issue still remains, keeping this compatible isn't a simple task. [/b]You may not experience the same issue at all, or it may be another two mods/series, but this is one of mine. I would say CE should be a part of the engine, a claim I'm sure many would hate me for. Can I expect vanilla RimWorld to bend to my view of the best version of the game? No, just like any other game (for the most-part). This is the void mods cannot fill. If you create a RimWorld experience with mods that is not easy to recreate, or even an idea for a RimWorld experience, it can leave you feeling like you have to change what you enjoy. You can sometimes get around this. I managed to when I first started: I was terribly weirded out that storage system consisted of each item taking up a single square meter for itself, sometimes stackable, sometimes not. Why do clothes not form a pile of clothes or something? Now I consider it normal and although I would like a proper storage system, I have no issues playing it how it is. I would love a better inventory/storage system and combat/health overhaul + more general system realism, but I understand that is a huge ask. So if you generate wants of a similar scale for RimWorld, you have discovered RimWorld's largest weakness. [b][i]Mods are a bigger part of Rimworld than other games, so in the small ways they fail, it hurts the entire game a lot more than it would in other games. [/i][/b]After spending that many words on explaining its big weakness, I'm also going to tell you it's tiny compared to real common issues in games...So it's a 10/10 from me. Randy once sent me 28 Corgi dogs as a hostile event, I had to murder 28 Corgis... Here's the Corgi graveyard: Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi [b]Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi Corgi[/b] 2022 Update: For some reason I got another manhunter event with corgis, 17 this time, so I added that to the graveyard