Recent reviews by Beerson

Take your best gear into boss event, get matched into a map that started 15 minutes ago, boss long since dead, die to a spawncamper before you even load in, curse the idiocy of the developers.
And you can get put into trio server while queueing into a solo game. And that's not a bug.
Also cheaters don't get banned, they only get one month timeout, unless they're a big streamer then the ban is overturned.


Core gameplay is kind of fun but progression is completely broken.
To progress you have to spend dozens of hours just running around map looting containers, hoping you get lucky with a blueprint, hoping you don't get matched into a map that is already completely looted. Then you have to pray that the blueprint you get isn't the 15th copy of one of the 7 blueprints you have unlocked.

PVP is fun for full PVP players with their blueprints already unlocked, the passive/friendly players, which is a valid and common gameplay in this game, get screwed by Rats who pretend to be friendly just to shoot them in the back, or camp their spawns, or camp the extraction out of bounds, with no way to counter them, there is no way to track those players to avoid them, no way to ever retaliate, making this a no risk all reward strategy which is a massive no-no in gaming.

The sound design and enemy AI is amazing, map design is cool, boss enemy design and puzzles are great, but all that gets overshadowed by the terrible Blueprint progression and the fake friendly rats ruining passive lobbies while being incentivized to do so.
Also cheaters who can see across the map valuable items in your inventory and hunt you down, only to get back to friendly lobbies few games after to do it again.

Oh and the stash/lobby UI is horrible, typical clunky console UI that has no place in 2025 gaming.

If the devs fix the late matching (or rework blueprint progression) and or rat problems, I will change this review to positive, but with both of these issues the game is more frustrating then enjoyable.
Only thing that keeps me playing is my buddies, which regularly justifies playing even straight up trash games.

Great game ruined by p2w powercreep.

Pros:
Fun and interesting mechanics
Good graphics

Cons:
Atrocious server desync
you often see enemy for fraction of a second on your screen, only too see that they've been shooting you for 4-6 seconds in kill cam, both when peaking and getting peaked, which makes little sense, especially when you both show ~30ms ping.

Terrible hit detection, half of your hits often do 0 damage with hitmarks and without any lag on either side, especially bad with snipers and deagle.

Bad abilty and weapon balancing.

Abilities often don't function properly.

Don't even try on HDD, game is terribly optimized and requires SSD to work.

Very interesting game, also very flawed.

Positives:
No pay to win
Great art direction
Solid story
Open world stuff
Ability to share base with friends
Build variety

Negatives:
Building system that will make even grown men cry
Lackluster PVE
Awful PVP (multiple contributing factors)
Desync
Server performance
Client authoritative
"Did you hear that?"

I spent over 500 hours across multiple accounts and servers, 160 hours on a PVE server to find out that the PVE server exclusive content, "Prime War" is utterly disappointing boss fight where players roll up, place rocket launcher turret, shoot a boss with some explosives, shoot a boss with some weapons and disperse.

Moving on to a PVP server with multiple accounts to minimize unlucky RNG, the PVP is badly structured.
While open world PVP is possible, it relies on both parties opting in to PVP status every 5-10 minutes as it automatically turns off, with no incentive to turn on PVP.

Other then cargo event which is present on both PVP and PVE servers, the only meaningful PVP is territory battles, which is completely broken and barely even playable.

If you happen to be able to even get in in the first place (because bugs), you need to build a defensive structure to protect your terminal, while the enemy clan and anyone else can destroy your building and kill you as you build.

When the battle officially starts, you cannot build and the enemy can just drive their vehicles thru your structure (before it loads on their device) and destroy it from the inside with no counterplay, this isn't a bug btw. it's just how the game is coded. They can also shoot and kill you thru your defensive structures as long as their internet/PC is slow enough not to load these structures.

In all this, there is never an incentive to actually fight, just hold W and throw boom at structure until the territory terminal dies.
Oh and did I mention that after respawning the enemy cars are invisible for long enough to drive up to or inside your fort?


This game had a lot of promise, but it was terribly fumbled, especially after playing Undawn (their previous game) which had both PVE and PVP content many times better, I'd even say the PVE was amazing for what it was, unfortunately that one was p2w and the game died as soon as that created large enough power gap.

The Good:
Core gameplay
Reasonable free vs paid experience

The Bad:
Balancing, classes are completely unbalanced, instead of trying to improve balance, the devs are currently completely nerfing every single build of the only overall balanced class to make it unplayable.
Except for slightly buffing one niche unfun build, forgot about that one as nobody plays it.

Stuttering while players are nearby, resulting in uneven fights.
Stuttering on terrain, dying to mobs cause you can't move out of the way.
Support gaslights players that this is network issue and VPN should fix it. It is not a network issue, it is a netcode issue, it happens with stable 9ms ping and VPN doesn't make any difference, quick googling shows this is a widespread issue.

The balancing pushes this review into firmly negative, I was split about reviewing the game before these unreasonable nerfs as I'd have to rate it neutral.

Microtransactions:
Most microtransactions are earnable ingame, or have a variant earnable, people who complain about these are unhinged.

P2W aspect:
I don't count this as a negative, it's a tradeoff for playing for free, but I include it to give you all the info:

Free users can't sell on the marketplace, resulting in massive earning loss (earning about 1/10 of what could be earned when selling off gear and materials on the marketplace)
Free users can't have multiple characters, losing up on free stash space thus requiring more gold burned.
Due to this they can't utilize looted gear for other classes, making the inability to sell gear even worse.
With these limitations, free users cannot afford to deploy competitive gear as the auction costs are too steep for their income and most of the gear they loot is unusable and must be vendored for pennies.

Edit: Forgot to mention, the point of free vs paid is that paid get access to harder, higher earning, ranked "High Roller" Dungeons, so the p2w aspect still being there is a bit sour.

Core gamplay is fun, each faction plays different and has multiple styles of play, progression system is at first very confusing, but fun once you figure it out, you can play whatever faction you want while progressing others, which is a big plus.

It doesn't seem to have strong avenue for pay to win, the amount of cards that can be released for each faction in the future is limited, so buying entire decks worth of boosters each update isn't an option *cough Heartstone cough*, future expansions will most likely be focused on new factions instead.

PC controls are a bit clunky (hopefully they will change from sticky mouse-over to clicks) and take some getting used to.
Still somewhat barebones on technical side (resolution etc.)

Terrible hitreg issues (even grenades suffer from those!), game favors high ping, bad weapon balance (typical russian devs, vss is a magical wondergun just because it's russian etc.) bugs (sometimes you lose the ability to jump, sometimes you can't even spawn)

just play your choice of battlefield, it's much better and I don't even like battlefield

Let's start with the good, cause trust me, there's plenty of bad, you won't probably even bother to read it all
The good:
Graphics look and run great even on old RX470, atmosphere is great, the game world feels real enough for you to get immersed, effects are great, especially wood chopping effects and musket clouds and bullet trails, it's the little things that matter
Action combat feels good, weapons are cool and unique, while some complain there isn't enough weapons, they fail to consider each weapon is essentially a character class, there's just enough weapons to not feel overwhelming and there's more coming
No pay to win (for now) not even exp boosts

Now that we're done with the less important eye candy, let's get into the real gameplay, aka
The bad
Graphical design masks infinitely copypasted content, playing this game, you will get used to the feeling of Deja vu, "wait, have I seen this exact rock formation and attached scaffolding before just without snow?" "I've been in this city before" "I've fought this exact enemy with the exact moves and scripted pattern before, just it wasn't a Lion but a wolf"

Combat, especially pvp, is just broken on different levels, gear isn't doing what it tells you it should do, same for gear perks, abilities and ability perks are typically broken, sometimes near useless, sometimes absolutely overpowered, large part of the game is client authoritative which itself causes massive issues, we'll get back to that later

Crafting, when it works, is just bad, materials require massive amounts of lower tier materials to refine in order to be used (which in turn require exponentially more materials of it's respective lower tier), many materials necessary to craft certain items do not exist in the game, some crafting professions can't craft their respective endgame items

Economy is in the gutter, firstly, the game was dealing with deflation, which is really really bad for an mmo, to the point where the fee for repairing gear is percieved to be too expensive to be worth it, unless the gear is BiS or crafted endgame piece, where you don't really have a choice, furthermore the economy was infused with massive amounts of duped items and gold and despite the developers claiming they removed 80% of it by banning offenders (which is nonsense and most likely a PR lie, not the first one either), dupes are still working, whats more, these dupes are all based on the same mechanics that were "fixed" multiple times already, according to the devs at least

The dev team is oblivious to basic game mechanics and industry practices, for instance making the massively multiplayer pvp game client authoritative (which they lied about in a PR devblog once it became public knowledge), making html based chat without doing anything at all to prevent players to run commands in chat, resulting in infinite amounts of gold and exp summoned from thin air, targeted or public game crash attacks, screen obfuscation and posting of sausage images in chat

Let me repeat that, they made an entire blogpost LYING about the game not being client authoritative after it was proved beyond doubt that integral parts (player health, damage immunity, player gold, inventory and quest rewards) are in fact client authoritative, which is what it means for a game to be defined as such, and to add insult to injury, the blogpost was written by someone who doesn't even understand how the game itself works.

Last but most important, character names are censored in completely stupid way where you can't even use "beer" in a name, despite beer and other alcohol references being present in the game both in name and appearance

Verdict, absolutely not worth 40 EUR, if you can get it for 10 (and you can) you'll get your money's worth just exploring the world for first few levels

Lying pieces of...
Took away ingame currency Battlepass purchase, community retaliated as they should.
Promised to put back ingame currency Battlepass purchase and keep it that way.
Take away ingame currency Battlepass purchase again within a week or two.

core gameplay is good, graphics are good
server quality is tragic, matchmaking is criminally bad to the point where you would genuinely rather have easy bots in your team then randoms, if you even get any teammates in the first place.
due to the matchmaking arenas get nearly unplayable always playing 1v3 (except when the enemy doesn't get a teammate for change).
Better play Warzone, it's not as bad as Apex.

Play with friends, randoms, enemies, watch youtube movies, but don't you dare to ever camp roof.

Rust is fun pvp sandbox game, best enjoyed either with homies or on youtube, don't try to solo, it will change you.

The devs are pouring hours into the development ever expanding the game years after release, the game is unrecognizable from what it was when I bought it almost seven years ago and keeps changing for the better.

You won't find no battle passes, paid characters or other excuses for content, here we add new functionalities instead of new monetizing schemes, you might find that this game has skins, but those are tradable and marketable, so if you want to put on the drip, you buy, you play, and when you move on, you sell

Graphics are great and getting better, there's plenty of scrubs you can sh*t on if you are sigma male on the grind, plenty of bois you can recruit for your cult if you're an alpha, and we accommodate even beta cucks that can't hit your moms thicc booty, we call em farmers, they mine the stone and metal needed to maintain our suspiciously phallic bases. Also there's pve and build server if you play with a trackball.

but beware, just like oxygen corrodes metal, rust melts snowflakes, if you can't handle naked runners screaming the gamer word, tribal bowmen teabagging you and calling you gay or you break down after losing the stone you grinded for past hour, if you often cry yourself to sleep or own a body pillow, avoid this game.

And if you choose to dive into this gem of gamer culture, maybe one day I'll meet you, where everyone in rust begins, naked, on a beach