RimWorld
BANGER · Strategy · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $34.99.
- Length
- 63.6h
- Value
- $0.55/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when RimWorld is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel HD Graphics 4000 or other shader model 4.0, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.
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
The lowest price on record is $27.99, set in December 2022. It has been discounted 47 times in the 10 years tracked here, typically at 20 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was this month, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and the best reviewed. The nearest things to it, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic ($39.99, scores 85) and Empires of the Undergrowth ($29.99, scores 76), are both worse buys on this math.
The press gave it 87; the people who bought it give it 98 percent. An 11-point gap in the buyer's favour.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 17 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to August 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,443 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 1,987 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 1 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 63.6 hours; clearing it takes 301, which is 4.7 times the campaign.
8 years after release it still had 19.2K people in it at once.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
Players
19.2K 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
I want to start off by saying that I didn't (and still don't to a certain extent) really like 2D games or isometric games because of the obvious limitations that come with them and the usual jank that comes from developers trying to work with them, so buying Rimworld was sort of a choice that I thought I'd end up regretting later. Rimworld managed to make up to this and deliver MUCH more with the amount of depth and...
Rimworld is great because it offers you many ways to run your colony. It can be the most civilized colony to a cannibal colony where each colonists wears their enemy's skin as a shirt. If you start playing with just the base version, it'll still be a fun experience to play the game. If you want more, there's all sorts of mods to add to the game. But not all mods are accessible right away as some may require DLC's...
As of writing this review I have just beaten this game for the first time. After 200 hours of failed attempts and various flawed colonies that have failed, I have finally built a successful colony built upon probably 10 hours worth of guides and all of my previous experience. RimWorld is a game built upon failure and what you can learn from it, the one successful colony I have created is built on the dozen that have...
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.
RimWorld scores 97/100 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/294100/rimworldThe 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 3, 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.