Kenshi
BANGER · RPG · 2018
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $29.99.
- Length
- 81.4h
- Value
- $0.37/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Windows only.
A free-roaming squad based RPG. Focusing on open-ended sandbox gameplay features rather than a linear story. Be a trader, a thief, a rebel, a warlord, an adventurer, a farmer, a slave, or just food for the cannibals. Train your men up from puny victims to master warriors.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
May 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $8.39. 80 discounts in the 13 years on record. They run about 55 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 96 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. The nearest things to it, Dig or Die ($11.99, scores 79) and Craft The World ($18.99, scores 77), are both worse buys on this math.
75 from critics against 96 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 25 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written October 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 63 percent of the 3,054 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 81.4 hours. Doing everything runs 274, 3.4 times as long.
It came out 8 years ago and 5.4K were still playing it at the last check.
Players
5,412 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
just try the game man, it's actually so hard to explain this game. Just ♥♥♥ buy it and see for yourself
Kenshi is an amazing game, I have a strong connection to this game and a big part of it is because ever since i was little i always wanted a game that felt like this, a world where you are plopped into and are left to make your own choices And the brutality and harshness is such a great part of it. I havent felt such a strong bond towards a game for a really long time and being excited to play it everytime i launch...
Genuine Masterpiece, greatest game I have ever played. From the story to the characters to the gameplay to the visuals and to the music, it is perfect.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Kenshi scores 95/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/233860/kenshiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.