RimWorld: Biotech Review (sly~<3)
I've got about 2,000 hours in Rimworld, mostly from 2016-2019. I loved it, obsessed over it, built a superpowered base with randy random on the hardest difficulty on permadeath with a glacier start (20+ restarts until I had the luck to fight a Thrumbo early on and survived). Then I got frustrated and quit.
My main gripe: the ideas I wanted to express or things I wanted to do just didn't work out. Every run ended about the same way: I domesticate a bunch of animals, spend a ton of time training them, and it's just not what I expected. I did a run with a dozen bears (pretty fun), did dogs, wolves, snakes until the graphics card crashes, but the bottom line is that it just wasn't what I hoped. The "minions" are just too stupid, and I played a Necro in Diablo 2 so I know a thing or two about stupid minions.
This expansion pack and the mechanitor perk makes the game behave exactly like I hoped it would behave when I tamed my first dog.
Controlling a bot swarm is fun beyond my ability to describe. I love minions. I played a drone operator in the Shadowrun reboot (I played both the SNES and Sega Shadowrun on console ages ago), and the drone operator just didn't scratch the itch. I bred wolves like crazy in Valheim. I WANT CAPABLE MINIONS. It's my goto in every game, and I'm ALWAYS DISAPPOINTED BY THE MINIONS.
I am not disappointed by these minions. The bots in Rimworld not only make this a totally new game, but they do what so many other games have failed to do: Minions are valuable individuals, I love each and every one of them, and they are a massive swarm.
When I play Starcraft 2 on co-op and Stettmann goes on one of his rants about how he loves each and every one of his robotic drones, "Except you, TIMOTHY, next time i want to see more heart"... or when I watch Despicable Me and Gru starts addressing minions by name... I suddenly get it.
I am the botlord.
(and I haven't even started messing with genetic manipulation).
This expansion pack is a deal at any price. This is "stole my grandma's TV and pawned it for drugs" good.
If you've ever played a video game in the last 35 years, or have heard of Rimworld, you need to buy this and try this.
It's that good.