What a weird and wonderful game! Seriously, there's nothing quite like it out there. I put more than 22 hours into it past the last week and I will definitely come back and put some more into it. Since we are talking about Kenshi, a game that is impossibly expansive and the narrative is unique to each player (since you create the story via gameplay) and 22 hours are rookie numbers when it comes to this game I looked at some other reviews on Steam and Backloggd and compared notes to write this one.
===The Start===
First things first: SsethTzeentach convinced me to buy this game with his amazing review, from a distance it looked impossible to get into. Bad graphics, the seemingly incredible depth, the controls, the memes surrounding this game, it was all enough to put me off at first. I just assumed it would be complicated enough not to be fun (like that one time I tried Space Station 13).
This is completely unfounded, and if you are anything like me please give this game a shot, it goes for so incredibly cheap and it's NOT all of those things. You pick a starting scenario, which honestly only affects how much time you have to invest into getting on your own two feet. I started with the wanderer, the recommended basic scenario, but would recommend the trader or any of the "easy" ones, not because they make the entire game easier but because they really speed up the early game stage once you get your bearings. Despite their names, there is no true difficulty select, the scenario affects your starting gear, spawn point, and condition of your character, the world of Kenshi will always run on the same rules no matter which one you pick.
After this the game starts feeding you pop-ups explaining basic mechanics, despite knowing nothing about how you actually play Kenshi these were enough to explain next to everything I needed to play and "progress", everything else you just pick up organically or if you really stuck, just google! Shockingly enough I only had to resort to this sporadically. I literally had to whip out Google more often for games like Elden Ring for example.
===The Gameplay===
This game is basically Runescape, or Skyrim if you don't know how Runescape plays. When you do something, you gain exp and eventually a level for that thing, stealing, sneaking, attacking (bundled with mastery of different weapon types), doing labor, crafting armor, farming, etc.
This is the interesting part. I don't know how the start of your gameplay will look! I started immediately gathering copper ore to sell as it earned me food and some labor exp for example. A pretty common thing to do as a new player from the reviews I have seen. After not even an hour in I saw a dude running across the dunes, I approached him to find out he was an escaped slave, and he decided to team up with me. We literally became blood brothers by the end of my playthrough, the dude was my right-hand man for the job, any job!
Shortly after I tried to settle down with my copper mining money and start my own lil settlement. This is where that lack of difficulty setting came back to worsen my time with Kenshi for the first (and probably only time). You see, as soon as you put down a building you start an outpost, and the game will start generating random events for that outpost, and the ONLY thing that influences those events is the place where you settled. This means that no matter if you have a single building or already set up fort knox, the same things will happen to it, which I find extremely fucking stupid. Anyways, this caused my base to get raided within 5 minutes of it being built by Black Dragon Ninjas that wiped my guys in seconds. I reloaded a save and decided to hand over my single building to them, which they took over and left around 10 minutes later. I did not expect to get raided so quickly, otherwise, I would waited to set up my base, and I did not know most raids essentially do not do anything (they don't break buildings unless something is locked behind a door or a gate, they don't touch crops, valuables, weapons, no raid in the starting area ever tried to take my guys as slaves). I wish the game actually told me some of that via those pop-up tutorials tbh. Once you have your base for some time you will realize how extremely fucking annoying raids are for a new player, I spent 90% of my time building in Kenshi simply fighting off another wave of raiders which got real old real fast. A couple of hours in I dialed raids down to their minimum frequency in the game options despite being able to deal with them because of this, and it's weird that it isn't the default and then scales up with how old your base is? As in the longer you have it the harder the raids become.
After some farming, building, and character development (healing and fighting the bandits that attacked me over and over to raise skills) I got a little bored and set out to explore, I bought the service of some bodyguards and we went to the swamp, deleting bandit camps along the way which quickly lined my pockets with money. Any money I earned felt a little worthless since my character was an excellent thief by that point and I could have anything the shop had for free. Then I bought some animals and realized just how useless they are, goats and bonedogs, in particular, have no gameplay mechanics you can interact with other than skinning them and telling them to fight, they get folded in any significant fight, and... why would I buy an animal to immediately skin it for less money? And I think that's kinda how every aspect of Kenshi breaks down at the end. Someone described this game "as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle" which is apt. There is always less to a mechanic than you imagine, there's probably way less variety in the things there tan you imagine, but there's still A TON of stuff to see and do in the game.
Man, I didn't even say anything about the combat and that could fill out another 1000 words easily, so I won't do all that. Just know that like the rest of the game it is unique, despite controlling like a real-time strategy where your units will simply attack units you click on, there are in-depth animations for each weapon type and every attack has to physically connect with your character, that's fucking nuts for this combat type and it allows you to mico-manage each fight to weave between attacks and attack from places your enemy is less likely to defend themselves from.
===Conclusion===
Kenshi's great! For the price it often drops to on sales, it's absolutely worth your money, a passion project of a single man that will be developed and iterated on for years to come. It's got some bugs and you will kinda wish there was more to it but you will never regret spending your money on it. And the modding community goes absolutely crazy so a lot of things can be adjusted with mods.
===The Start===
First things first: SsethTzeentach convinced me to buy this game with his amazing review, from a distance it looked impossible to get into. Bad graphics, the seemingly incredible depth, the controls, the memes surrounding this game, it was all enough to put me off at first. I just assumed it would be complicated enough not to be fun (like that one time I tried Space Station 13).
This is completely unfounded, and if you are anything like me please give this game a shot, it goes for so incredibly cheap and it's NOT all of those things. You pick a starting scenario, which honestly only affects how much time you have to invest into getting on your own two feet. I started with the wanderer, the recommended basic scenario, but would recommend the trader or any of the "easy" ones, not because they make the entire game easier but because they really speed up the early game stage once you get your bearings. Despite their names, there is no true difficulty select, the scenario affects your starting gear, spawn point, and condition of your character, the world of Kenshi will always run on the same rules no matter which one you pick.
After this the game starts feeding you pop-ups explaining basic mechanics, despite knowing nothing about how you actually play Kenshi these were enough to explain next to everything I needed to play and "progress", everything else you just pick up organically or if you really stuck, just google! Shockingly enough I only had to resort to this sporadically. I literally had to whip out Google more often for games like Elden Ring for example.
===The Gameplay===
This game is basically Runescape, or Skyrim if you don't know how Runescape plays. When you do something, you gain exp and eventually a level for that thing, stealing, sneaking, attacking (bundled with mastery of different weapon types), doing labor, crafting armor, farming, etc.
This is the interesting part. I don't know how the start of your gameplay will look! I started immediately gathering copper ore to sell as it earned me food and some labor exp for example. A pretty common thing to do as a new player from the reviews I have seen. After not even an hour in I saw a dude running across the dunes, I approached him to find out he was an escaped slave, and he decided to team up with me. We literally became blood brothers by the end of my playthrough, the dude was my right-hand man for the job, any job!
Shortly after I tried to settle down with my copper mining money and start my own lil settlement. This is where that lack of difficulty setting came back to worsen my time with Kenshi for the first (and probably only time). You see, as soon as you put down a building you start an outpost, and the game will start generating random events for that outpost, and the ONLY thing that influences those events is the place where you settled. This means that no matter if you have a single building or already set up fort knox, the same things will happen to it, which I find extremely fucking stupid. Anyways, this caused my base to get raided within 5 minutes of it being built by Black Dragon Ninjas that wiped my guys in seconds. I reloaded a save and decided to hand over my single building to them, which they took over and left around 10 minutes later. I did not expect to get raided so quickly, otherwise, I would waited to set up my base, and I did not know most raids essentially do not do anything (they don't break buildings unless something is locked behind a door or a gate, they don't touch crops, valuables, weapons, no raid in the starting area ever tried to take my guys as slaves). I wish the game actually told me some of that via those pop-up tutorials tbh. Once you have your base for some time you will realize how extremely fucking annoying raids are for a new player, I spent 90% of my time building in Kenshi simply fighting off another wave of raiders which got real old real fast. A couple of hours in I dialed raids down to their minimum frequency in the game options despite being able to deal with them because of this, and it's weird that it isn't the default and then scales up with how old your base is? As in the longer you have it the harder the raids become.
After some farming, building, and character development (healing and fighting the bandits that attacked me over and over to raise skills) I got a little bored and set out to explore, I bought the service of some bodyguards and we went to the swamp, deleting bandit camps along the way which quickly lined my pockets with money. Any money I earned felt a little worthless since my character was an excellent thief by that point and I could have anything the shop had for free. Then I bought some animals and realized just how useless they are, goats and bonedogs, in particular, have no gameplay mechanics you can interact with other than skinning them and telling them to fight, they get folded in any significant fight, and... why would I buy an animal to immediately skin it for less money? And I think that's kinda how every aspect of Kenshi breaks down at the end. Someone described this game "as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle" which is apt. There is always less to a mechanic than you imagine, there's probably way less variety in the things there tan you imagine, but there's still A TON of stuff to see and do in the game.
Man, I didn't even say anything about the combat and that could fill out another 1000 words easily, so I won't do all that. Just know that like the rest of the game it is unique, despite controlling like a real-time strategy where your units will simply attack units you click on, there are in-depth animations for each weapon type and every attack has to physically connect with your character, that's fucking nuts for this combat type and it allows you to mico-manage each fight to weave between attacks and attack from places your enemy is less likely to defend themselves from.
===Conclusion===
Kenshi's great! For the price it often drops to on sales, it's absolutely worth your money, a passion project of a single man that will be developed and iterated on for years to come. It's got some bugs and you will kinda wish there was more to it but you will never regret spending your money on it. And the modding community goes absolutely crazy so a lot of things can be adjusted with mods.