Review: Kenshi

Kenshi is a sandbox game. It has similarities mostly with The Guild 2: Renaissance rather than Mount & Blade: Warband. In this game, you can do everything you want. It will bring you to the world full of weird creatures and bad people like bandits who are ready to kill and rob you. You have so many options which you can do in this 870 square kilometres size map.


COMPLEXITY
Basically, there is no objective in this game except for just staying alive. The objective is determined by yourself. But, I'll give you the picture of how the game is:

• Create your own character. The first thing you have to do before starting the game is to create your first character. You can modify your character's body appearance, its clothes, its name, the place that it will spawn, its race, its background, etc. The background of your character is important because it will determine how your life will be. You can be a slave, a wandering trader, cannibal hunter, a guy with a sword, a citizen, etc. The more difficult your situation is, like as a slave, the harder your start will be.

• Determine your fate. After you chose your background and customized your character, it is up to you to do what next because it is just simply a sandbox game. You can go to a city to sell goods if you determined to be a merchant, or you can just travel somewhere to discover a new thing. You can search for material like copper and sell it to a trade goods shop or you can also build a farm and become a farmer. If you have a high combat skill, you can choose to become a bounty hunter. If you have a high thievery skill, then you can choose to become a burglar or simply just a thief. But just keep yourself alive, because there are so many things that could kill you, such as bandits, city guards, or even animals.

• Build something. If you choose to be a merchant, you can buy an on-sale building in a city. After that, you can build things like a cooking bowl, clothing bench, furnace, etc. Then, you can create clothes or weapon which you can sell in the trade goods shop or on the shop counter in your own building. If you are rich and strong enough, you can think to create an outpost for yourself, build walls and houses to start your own city. Sometimes, a merchant will come to your city to offer you goods. But sometimes, bandits would also come to raid your city. Unless you have enough people in your squad, it is not recommended if you choose to start a new city while you haven't had much money and men.

• Recruit and manage your squad. You can recruit your squad and manage them as you like. Commonly, you can recruit your squad in a bar and you have to pay some money to hire them. Then, you can differentiate them based on what you think. As an example, you want soldier squad, farmer squad, and industrial worker squad. In total, you have already 30 people which you have hired on your single squad. If so, then you just have to split it to be 3 squads in the squads tab.

• Research new technology. There are so many technologies for you to research. It will unlock new buildings or tools that you can construct. There are 8 types of technology that you can research, they are core technology (buildings or houses), crafting technology (tools which you can use to craft things like food, medicine, fabric, etc), defence (walls, gates, and defence systems), electrics technology (generator, lamp, etc), farming technology (farm fields), industry (related with tools to create materials you need in order to construct a building or another tool), smithing technology (related with tools to construct armour and weapon), and training technology (dummies to train your skill in combat). To research technology, you have to build a research bench. The higher the level of the research bench, the more technology you can research.

• Hunt, steal, research and trade. Enhance your skill. Any activity you do will enhance your skills. More often you do your activity, like cooking as an example, the higher your cooking skill and you could master it someday. If you already mastered a skill, any product you create will have better quality than when you are still a novice. I ever encountered a guy, his skill in combat is about 100 and he was facing 20 bandits on his road to somewhere. But he could win and defeat all those bandits although he was wounded. Any guy with a high lockpicking skill can almost lockpick any door, any guy with a high armour smithing will create armour with the greatest quality, etc. You can choose what speciality you want for your character.

• Beware dangerous animals. If you travel to some places, you will encounter some animals that they are attacking people, such as giant spiders or weird creatures. You have to be careful or you will be killed by them. I ever encountered giantlike-dinosaur creatures when I was travelling. The dinosaurs then were trying to chase and eat me. Fortunately, there was a village nearby. When I ran to that village, the dinosaurs then switch their attention to the villagers and I could manage to escape.

• Stay alive and intact, because you can lose your arms and legs. If you lose so much blood, you will become unconscious. If you are fatally wounded, you will become unconscious and possibly dying. And if there is nobody cure you, you will be dead. But if you cured and lost your arms or legs or both of them, you can replace them with robotic arms or legs. You also have a hunger level. So you have to eat food or you will die.

GRAPHIC
The graphic of this game is enjoyable. If you are in the top of a mountain, you can see a beautiful view of the map's relief. It brings a vibe that the map is so huge. And you can also see a mountain in front of you when you are in a lower ground, of course when you are zooming in.

The city in this game is not big enough. Not many activities you can see outside or inside a building in the city except guards that just pass by. It is different from the game like The Guild 2: Renaissance which has many people outside doing something like pickpocketing or preaching. But it is reasonable because the map of The Guild game is not as big as this game. When you enter a building, there will be no loading and you can see inside the building directly.

The combat animation is enjoyable because you can see them dodging, parrying, and strike an attack. Also, see your enemies crippled and crawling because their leg is damaged is also enjoyable and seems realistic. But the ragdoll animation when your enemies are dead or unconscious on the ground is still not smooth enough. Well, hard to explain but sometimes you can see the arms/legs are colliding with the body.

ADDITIONAL

• In the shop counter, you can only sell goods. You can't sell armour or weapon because you will have no buyer. And you can't sell expensive goods if the majority of the people in your village are poor. As an example, when I opened a shop in a village called Squin, all my customers can't buy a bread that I sell 150 cats (the game money currency).
• It takes a very long time if you want to discover all things in the game because of its huge map and hard difficulty to become rich.
• When you created an outpost, you can't have citizens inside your outpost to work for you. So obviously, you must fill your squad as many as you can if you intend to create a city.

COMMENT
This game is a new thing but I think it still needs some improvements. It has bugs and minor issues, at least that is what I encountered in the version 1.0.10. Things like you can have AI citizens in your new city, sell buildings that you have bought before in a city, and you can sell weapons & armours in the shop counter are what makes the game can be more interesting. Although you can have them with mods, I think it is far better if the developer can add it as parts of the original game without needing some additional mods though. In the end, I can say that this game has a lot of potentials and can become popular someday, like Minecraft or No Man's Sky. It because this game is realistic enough and you have so many options which you can choose to do in this game. As long as the developer keeps in touch with the game and adds a multiplayer feature. Not only multiplayer, if the developer can create such a kingdom system which they could declare war at each other and take over cities in the process it could be interesting and you can collect taxes from cities you control. I think they are things which could make the game feels more alive.