Kenshi is not a game for the light of heart the grinding will try your patience, and the music, while atmospheric, is ambient and tends to get grating after a while. Get knocked Unconscious Repeatedly by the SwordĪll of this is earned through hours, upon hours of grinding. The grind is rewarding, since she came from a fairly humble beginning.

She has constructed the entirety of her base by hand, after mining for the materials herself (And with the help of about 10 others), and has manufactured everything she has worn personally. Not that she has need to do so, as she is capable of taking on entire squads of Dust Bandits by herself. After days of time investment and grinding, she is capable of carrying 87 kg as a light load, able to move nearly half a ton (1200 lbs!!!) on her own, has crafted a fragment axe that is capable of killing three men with a single blow, is fast enough to block the attacks of nearly a dozen attackers, and is able to outrun all but the most trained of opponents. My character started out as an old soldier, having served for years for the United Cities as a captain of the guard. Strength requires either using a heavier weapon in combat (I switched to a fragment axe after grinding out Dexterity with a katana stolen off the corpse of a dead sand jounin), or dragging hundreds of kilo of materials across the sandy wastelands to become stronger. On the same hand, each use of an attack does the same for one’s mêlée attack. Each failed defense makes your character’s mêlée defense grow higher. Unlike the eponymous football team, losing makes the character better. Her win:loss ratio would make the Raiders feel better about themselves. Mainly, failure that you seek out in the game I am presently playing, my character has been beaten up and left for dead in over one hundred battles. Kenshi is a game of overcoming failure. It is developed by Lo-Fi Games, by a six person team at present, with the music by Kole Audio Solutions. This is using the current stable (mostly) version of 0.69.2, with an option to jump to the experimental (And unstable) 0.70.x, or 0.71.x, or 0.72.x. Anything featured in this article may change with new updates. Kenshi is available on Steam, for $20 USD and is presently in an alpha state. Preface Note: Game was purchased by the reviewer, not provided by the developer. We Been Spending Most Our Lives Living in A Grinder’s Paradise… Score: 84/100 - Work through the presentational ugliness and technical awkwardness, and you'll find an experience of frightening depth.An early access review of the game Kenshi, available for $20 USD on Steam. Kenshi is huge, amoral, and opaque enough that I'll be deciphering it it for a very long time. I've still got to expand from a dustbowl community to a fortress to send an expedition of battle-hardened warriors out into distant wilds while back at the township artisans and workers rake in profits thanks to the clockwork-like regimen I created. Even though Kenshi is capable of conjuring great scenarios to break up these anaemic stretches, it doesn't lessen the slog.īut after around 30 hours, I still feel like I've so much to uncover. It can all get a bit grindy too it takes a long time before you can handle yourself in a fight, a long time to grow food, and a long time to get around. The early going can be cruel basic survival plans can be easily derailed by a city guard who plants drugs on you then demands money you don't have, or by finding yourself deep in a region inhabited by vicious alien giraffes. But there is a cold order to Kenshi too, a formidable degree of depth that's as impressive as it is stubborn. There's no such regimentation in Kenshi, no tangible sense of scripted behaviour, just a ragged web of vicious systems so myriad that they sometimes tangle and fumble and descend into absurdity.

None of these events were part of questlines. I've been a shopkeeper and a thief, a lone wanderer and a slave, and I've been an entire community of people working together to-one day-erect our own city in the wasteland. I've been beaten shitless by a pack of goats that were intended to feed my rabble of listless nomads. In my time with Kenshi, I've crossed swamps so vast that I haven't dared return.

Kenshi review 2019