Overwhelmingly Positive
Total: 40.6 ThousandPositive: 38.6 ThousandNegative: 2.01 Thousand
Kenshi is a free-roaming, squad-based RPG that blends action, strategy, and simulation into a unique sandbox experience. Set in a sprawling 870-square-kilometer world, the game offers unparalleled freedom to play as a trader, thief, warlord, farmer, or even a slave. With no linear story, Kenshi thrives on open-ended gameplay, allowing you to build bases, craft gear, and train your squad from weaklings to warriors. The community loves its freedom and rewarding progression, earning it an impressive AI Community Rating of 87.57%. However, some players note its unforgiving difficulty, outdated graphics, and occasional bugs. If you crave a challenging, non-linear RPG with deep mechanics and endless possibilities, Kenshi is a must-try. Just be prepared for a steep learning curve and a world that doesn’t hold your hand.
I woke up in a desert missing an arm, being chased by a giant beetle-looking monster. I tried to run to the nearest town but was assaulted and robbed by local bandits, then enslaved and forced to mine iron for the nobility. After nearly a month of captivity I slipped my shackles and escaped into the night. A bounty was declared on my head so I could not enter the towns in the region, so I escaped north, where I was promptly eaten alive by some sort of giraffe dinosaur. 10/10 experience.
In just 22 hours, this has been my experience: Started with 1000c at the Hub, a run-down criminal dump with only a working bar. I bought a little food and got to mining. I went through the "get beat down, toughen up, build skills, and acquire gear" grind with the character I forgot to rename before hitting confirm in the editor, "Feck." Feck was a loner for a long time. Built a shack, a storm house, stone quarry, stone processing, and a few other production facilities by himself. After awhile I found an NPC who wanted to be free of his master and I paid his contract. Voth joined me and we built a walled camp worth being proud of. We faced countless bandits and wildlife along the way, but we did it. No rest for the wicked, though. We set to making steel and crafting weapons, and probably managed 15 swords and had 8 in the chest to sell when 20 black dragon ninjas showed up to beat us bloody and toss us out of our camp. Feck and Voth recovered and launched a two-man counter attack after some rest, but were beaten again. We recruited mercs and the lot of us managed to whittle their numbers, but now there's "hungry bandits" trying to edge in and our heroes were ousted again. I have spent the last several hours recruiting a handful of new characters to train and arm as elite warriors. Feck and Voth are hardened killers who outmatch any 2 black dragon ninjas. I don't care if we can recover our base, as long as we can make them regret taking what we worked for, I don't care if it burns. So yeah, you could say I'm deeply invested.
To this day kenshi really shows up modern development studios, and demonstrates that a game can be great if it isnt infected with the business investor CEO parasites demanding modern audience appeal and in game transactions
As I labored away mining copper, I saw a gang of bandits run into a pack of goats. I expected the goats to be murdered. The goats killed all the bandits taking a single loss. As I watched in awe, still mining my copper, suddenly the one fallen goat got up: He was only unconscious. The goats won with no losses.
I will admit, I have at least an additional hundred hours in this game from a pirated copy before I came back and bought it for myself Kenshi is really good at: - giving you a large open environment to play in and achieve goals you've made for yourself - immersing you in an imaginative, dangerous, post-apocalyptic world - providing countless opportunities for self-guided roleplaying - letting you build a squad of survivors, tailored to your liking - giving you a very memorable "first playthrough experience" as you learn what the rules are for this strange, hostile moon - sucking away hours of your life as you wait for your dudes to wake up from their recovery coma Kenshi is not so good at: - having interesting and memorable characters - playing out a scripted narrative with quests and choice - looking especially beautiful all the time (the game has moments of relative beauty but the whole thing kinda looks like runescape all the time) Overall, Kenshi is a fun and grindy game to play out fantasies of low-tech post-apocalypse in a harsh and hostile world. It is more akin to a simulational sandbox than a traditional narrative RPG. There is a ton of mechanical depth and interlocking systems that you can use to achieve your goals but if you are here for a good story then you have to bring it yourself because the game will not hand you one. The game is most impactful if you don't know too much going in and explore the world and mechanics naturally as you play. My two pieces of advice are these: - If you've been mining copper for three hours and not having any fun then try doing something else because I promise you this is like the most boring way to play the game - losing fights is actually an integral aspect of the early game so don't get too discouraged and feel like getting beat up is a "game over". Getting beat up is a "game begins".
It would be a perfect game if it was playable I Spent hours building a base then walls vanish then I cant build the walls anymore because sections are red in the build menu . Also huge lag when selecting chars in different zones causing them to die. All this brokeness makes the game too frustrating to play. Which is too bad as it is at its core great.
Kenshi is a game that I wanted to like. It's a game I imagined myself giving a high score before playing it, writing a glowing review and what-not. There's really a lot about Kenshi that appeals to me; the open-ended nature, the brutal difficulty, the art direction that seems to take inspiration from Mad Max and Morrowind alike, which, hey, is one cool combination (did I mention you can also become a samurai?). I like all these things yet I don't like Kenshi -- not really, at least. I wouldn't recommend Kenshi and it makes me a little bit sad. So what's the problem? We have a very ambitious game here -- comparisons to Mount & Blade spring to mind, which is another game that offers players the journey from absolute nobody to a warlord. It's a satisfying arc, an epic one even. Where Kenshi loses me is the absolute lack of embellishment of any sort; the lack of any meaningful dialogue, the lack of any meaningful goal except one of building your base and defending it. Okay, I've got my base built, now what? Nothing, Kenshi says. You can just defend it from oncoming attacks. You can't even take over other settlements. There's no story hook, and nothing technically gets accomplished with you pulling off this feat. You're just a guy with a base and bunch of underlings. It almost feels like a demo for a really good game. Or a very early Early Access version of a very good game. But it isn't a good game. I applaud Kenshi for the vision and the ambition but the praise stops at that. P.S. I know my hours look low -- that's because I initially played a pirated version and decided to support the effort by buying it here.
Everyone said this game was "full of struggle, but the struggle makes the experience". However, in my experience, there was no struggle. By design, no direction either, but the game and its enormous would feel impossibly bleak without a single thread to follow. The scope of the setting quickly becomes a detriment, since your first few hours will likely consist of venturing through an empty landscape with no animals, clickables, characters or enjoyment.
Game is shit and requires *huge* amounts of micromanagement to avoid the bugs. Don't get me wrong, the concept itself is amazing. The scope of this game is huge. And for the first couple dozen hours, you'll believe this game truly delivers an open world sandbox unlike any other. For its ambition and the scope it attempts to deliver: There is no fault. It's incredible. However, it fails to implement what it wants to be due to the incredible number of bugs. Once you start to progress beyond wearing some rag pants, you'll be sorely disappointed. I could write several volumes of books listing the bugs. Assigning workers to turrets and hoping they auto-fire on enemies? Doesn't work, even with an option in settings called "Shoot On Sight, Ask Questions Later" or whatever it's called: broken. Assigning jobs? Erratically works. Any form of AI? I'm going to stop here, again, I could write a book about it. TL;DR version: The game is hugely ambitious, but fails in execution due to an incredibly high number of bugs. If you want to buy it and see for yourself, go ahead, otherwise you can take my word for it. The bugs ruin an otherwise grand idea. Don't think you can work around them. The bugs are *HUGE* in number. Huge. The only way to avoid them is via micromanagement, which defeats the purpose to begin with of managing a larger squad. You will be constantly pausing, dealing with bugs, and unpausing. Is that an idea of fun to you? Avoid. Buggy, buggy, buggy. I think, this is the most buggy game I've played in my entire life. I've gamed for 30+ years and never made such a statement. Congratulations Kenshi, you are the shittiest and most buggy game I have ever played.
Games fine, but its a buggy mess, both with mods and without. I went through several phases of enjoying the game till that particular play through bugged out too much. I did the import thing, I did with mods without mods. I cant make myself start a new game after either, the load times become too long, or the bars are always empty, or all the traders are gone... etc etc the list goes on and on. Please dont misunderstand me... This game is great for what it is, and I dont regret giving money to play it, but Id say just wait till Kenshi 2 comes out.
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