Kenshi. What can you say about a game like Kenshi? Once in a blue moon, no, a lifetime, a game may come out that completely changes your world. It changes the way you think of gaming, the way you think of innovation and what could be done within the gaming medium and think of all the possibilities that could happen because of it. To me, that game is Kenshi.
This is a once in a lifetime game. I've never played anything like it in my life before, and I've been playing RPGs both on console and PC for roughly 30 years. Let me start by saying this is not a feature-complete review; according to Steam I have played 57 hours in the past *several days* and that is barely enough to even scratch the surface of this behemoth of a game. So please keep in mind that I haven't really gotten that far, but I've gotten far enough to know that this game is a huge breath of fresh air for the gaming industry.
First, you get to choose your background and starting options. You get several choices, each deeply impacting how you start off the game and the situation you are in. The name of the game is survival, this is not your typical or traditional CRPG nor is it a typical survival or strategy game. It blends elements from several genres; survival, real-time strategy, RPGs, and even borrows from games like Total War. The idea is that *you* create the story. You won't find many prewritten quests here. You won't find NPCs who tell you long, drawn out stories about what enemy to slay or what item to go gather for them from a local cave. Instead, you make the story. The game is so rich with "toys" and gameplay mechanics that yourself coupled with your imagination leads to a more intriguing story than any author can pen. You not only write the story, you ARE the story.
In Kenshi, you'll want to try and survive by any means necessary. This could mean mining iron or copper ore to start, selling it at the local town and affording enough to feed yourself and maybe hire a companion or two on board. Or, you could go the less savory route of thievery, complete with lockpicking, sneaking ability and even the option to KO a victim so you can move about freely while they are laying on the ground unconscious. You could also decide to become a trader; take some goods from one town, hire some mercenaries and make a trip to a faraway land to sell and make a profit. There are so many options to choose from that you can literally do anything you want in the game - if you can get away with it. The world is your playground and Kenshi gives you every imaginable tool at your disposal to play with.
Recruiting companions is an important part of Kenshi, as you'll want to create a squad of warriors, tech specialists, armor smiths, field medics and more that can not only withstand the punishment of bandit ambushes, bonedog attacks or blood spiders trying to eat you alive, but that can also hold up an outpost if you choose to build one. Yes, you can build bases in Kenshi, and not only that - whole cities. You can create your own faction in a world that is already littered with a few dozen factions as it stands. These factions also have reactivity within them. The Holy Nation, for example, will attack Starving Bandits on sight, and also give trouble to any non-human character as they are extremely xenophobic religious zealots. If you build an outpost expect bandits to test you, demanding sums of money in return for not razing the place, or the occasional raid by hungry Garrus who want to eat your hard-worked on crops. The game is very dynamic and there is always something surprising around every corner.
It should be noted that the map is the largest handcrafted map since Daggerfall, sizing up at an incredibly impressive 870km squared. And yes, you heard it right, it is handcrafted. There is no procedural generation in terms of the landmass, it is all there for you to explore as you wish - if you can survive. The game features dozens of unique areas and many biomes to go along with the plethora of factions and monsters to slay. You could be traveling for days, which in most cases is always a tricky situation as you must feed your group but also stay alive if you get into a scuffle, or worst, lose a scuffle. A great feature of Kenshi is that if you lose a fight and your characters don't outright die, you can regain your health with first aid skills and you actually gain points in the Toughness stat for taking such a beating. Now *that* is innovation, when even losing a fight results in a huge gain.
Beyond all of that, you can smuggle illegal narcotics, grow crops, craft armor, weapons and more, from leather to steel and all in between. You can create your own power generators to power your workshops and even create biofuel generators that run off plants. You can research a ton of new tech, find many blueprints of items to craft, and best of all is that all of your skills increase by usage, so nothing is wasted. Even if you start off as a terrible weaponsmith, keep forging blades and eventually you could become the best in the land. There are ruins to plunder, some guarded by dangerous beasts and others free to take what you like. You can buy pack animals to carry a lot of your accumulated goods, as well as help fight for you. You can find rare items, monsters of lore that are extremely dangerous and obscure, gain reputation with factions by collecting bounties and delivering them to the local prisons and so much more. This is really just the beginning of what Kenshi offers as a game.
I'm not sure what else I can say. I can talk about how blood on the ground will attract predators, so it would be wise not to build a camp near a recent battlefield. Or how you can clear out nests of enemies so they don't respawn, lose a limb fighting and get a robotic replacement, or even how you'll be traveling at night and get ambushed, only to wipe out the enemy and become stronger with a real sense of satisfaction in the meantime, but words are not really going to do this game justice. At 57 hours I feel I am just beginning my journey into the world of Kenshi, a journey that I am extremely grateful I discovered. I would go as far to say that this game will definitely be a cult classic in the near future, and heralded as one of the best games of all-time once the dust settles on the recent release. It truly is a unique and creative masterpiece, and although not perfect (the game engine runs on one CPU core), it was extremely ambitious and they delivered more than most games of this type combined. I highly recommend this game with my highest recommendation possible. This game is very close to dethroning Pathfinder: Kingmaker as my GOTY 2018 and I still see I have hundreds of kilometers to go.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, please pick this game up at full price and support these wonderfully creative developers. Who knows, they may change their mind if the game sells well enough and implement even more features, possibly as a free DLC (even if I would throw oodles of cash at them regardless if it was free or not!) Right now they say it's feature complete, but if enough people continue to buy it, well, who knows. Stop what you're doing and buy this game, but give it quite a few hours before you start to learn the ropes. This is not an easy pick-up-and-play, it requires some determination, some learning, trial and error and some luck. But once it starts rolling, boy does it roll hard.
Thank you for reading. - Fluent aka J Dumont
