RimWorld: Odyssey review – There’s a whole world out there

RimWorld calls itself a story generator, similar to its inspiration, Dwarf Fortress, and there can be no doubt that the colony sim has always been that. The tales of my colonies rising and falling might fill an entire book, were they bundled together. But there’s always been a slight issue with these stories: They happened in isolation. Sure, some might have involved raids from other factions or mechanoid invasions, but history was pretty much confined to taking place on the small scrap of land you built your base on. That there was a whole planet out there mattered little — until now.

RimWorld: Odyssey finally bridges this gap between the player and the horizon. It puts the world squarely into your reach and makes it more interesting than ever before.

From the ruins of ancient cities you can take over to serve as your own colony to scorching hot areas with rivers of lava, Odyssey adds so many new biomes and landmarks to the game that there’s something to discover in every direction. But motivation to get out there was never the issue — getting out there was.

Here’s where Odyssey’s real triumph lies: transportation. The DLC brought with it an overhaul of the caravan system to make it much easier to travel, which is available to everyone for free, and introduced the ability to build a gravship — a flying vessel that allows your colonists to take to the skies and beyond. No, it’s more: It’s a vessel that can be built up into a moving base, freeing your colony – and its history – from that small scrap of land we used to call home and on which entire playthroughs centered.

To say it in other words: Odyssey finally puts the titular rimworld into RimWorld. Now, you can experience an entire planet’s worth of stories. What’s more, you can even leave the confines of the planet behind and live your dreams of being a space pirate or orbital scavenger. Space is exceptionally dangerous, so expect to die in ridiculous ways, but it’s so much fun to be up there and strike it rich. No DLC the game has received up to this point has changed it so fundamentally and expanded its playstyles so much.

Building up my gravship is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had in RimWorld, because it puts the horizon at my fingertips. Expanding your vessel over a certain point requires taking on special quests to gain the parts you need, giving you a natural reason to keep looking outwards instead of inwards, and rescue missions that might have been a major pain previously are turned into quick, enjoyable adventures. You don’t have to get sick looking at the same terrain for hours without end anymore. Fancy seeing some elephants after living in the far north for a while? No problem, you’re there in a couple of minutes.

Where many of RimWorld’s previous expansions felt like they added systems on top of the core gameplay layer, somewhat cluttering it, Odyssey expands that core gameplay at a foundational level and transforms it.

You might think that it only makes things easier. Yes, you can’t really run out of resources now, since you can simply pick up and leave for areas with fresh veins or steel or components. But there are new challenges, too. Think of commodities like devilstrand clothing. Maintenance of that requires a steady supply of devilstrand, but growing it requires a somewhat lengthy stay at some location, during which you’ll be vulnerable to attacks and weather without the luxury of defenses and preparatory measures carefully put into place over a dozen hours. 

And that’s just the changes to transportation and biomes. Odyssey has so much more cool stuff to offer, like the ability to build water-based colonies on lakes or the coast, fishing and bathing, carving statues that look like your colonists (which is amazing for flavor reasons), new weapons, new animals to see, and more. The rimworld feels a lot more alive and diverse now — there is so much to see and discover, and it’s no longer a pain to do so.

I’d go so far as to call Odyssey RimWorld’s best and most essential expansion — it widens the scope of this already fantastic story generator to a truly planetary scale and even beyond.