I wake up stark-naked at the coast. Where am I? What am I doing here? With a rock in a hand and one makeshift torch I venture to explore this uknown land to find out what the hell is going on.

Rust is one of the number of survival games which have emerged on the market after the success of the original DayZ mod for Arma II. It has been in development since the late 2013 and is made by Facepunch studios lead by the well-known creator of Garry's Mod, Garry Newman. It is still advertised as alpha although the game is already pretty well fleshed out. Similar to other survival games, players are pitted against each other in harsh enviroment to fend for themselves and do their best to survive.

First things first, single rock just cannot do. I need to eat and beating something to death with a rock is a harsh ordeal. Good thing there are so many trees around. Few minutes of hitting are enough to grant me enough wood to make a spear. Next on the list is filling my belly. I heard some rustling in the bushes and soon enough, as if called by my hunger, a pig appears. One mighty throw and the poor piggy is lying face down on the ground. Filled by its grilled meat I am ready to head out.

To survive in Rust you ought to fulfill your basic needs. If you do not eat or drink you will die really quickly. Finding food on a densily populated server may be hard for a new player but as in all survival games you are much less likely to die of hunger than by getting killed by other players. Indeed it is the fellow men you ought to be afraid of most. In Rust this is emphasized even further by the sparsity of other threats. There are no NPC zombies that would eat you like in DayZ, at least not anymore. You can ocasionally run into a wolf which you can easily beat with basic weapons. Be wary of bears though which are deadly to even well equipped players.

While sneaking through the bushes I hear a familiar sound. It is a human voice. How happy I am to find a fellow human, I was beginning to worry that I am stranded here by myself. Immediately stepping out of the bush I catch the man unprepared. He visibly flinches after seeing me and his hand clutches his own wooden spear. Seeing my smiling face and after hearing my friendly voice makes him relax a little. That is his downfall and stabs him to death while I watch in fear. I immediately rush to my newfound friend and help him up. He is hurt but lives. Now is the time to deal with the assailant. We circle each other carefully and both of us throw our spears at once and hit. Urgh, lying on the ground in pain I look up to my friend but instead of helping me, he rummages through my stuff with a smirk on his face and leaves both me and the guy who has attacked us to die...

That should do for the introduction. Now the real question is what exactly do you do? Right now I would sum up the game with the words "Survive, gather, build and prosper, just to have everything taken from you by raiders." While you can just run around in the beautiful world of Rust, explore and die, the real fun lies in building your own sweet home. To do that though, you need to gather enough materials first. For starters you can work with wood and stones which are quite easy to get. From the very beginning you can craft a stone hatchet and pickaxe which will make gathering much easier. Once you have got enough materials you can get to building.

Rust has a pretty intuitive building system. First of all you create a a base for you new house. You do that by stacking square or triangular pieces together until you get a desired shape and size. After you have your base ready you can add walls, windows, doors and even a roof. The system is open to creativity, which is encouraged, because your house is going to be under the constant threat of being ransacked by other players.

Once again I wake up at the coast, yeah, you heard right, once again. Since my first encounter with other people everything just got worse and worse. I got as far as building my own house, oh how beautiful it was. Three stories high with its own large furnace. I felt really high and mighty until I came across the wrong people. You see, my neighbour was spying on me so as cautious as I was, I shot a warning arrow to let him know I do not tolerate such behaviour. Half an hour later he was back with his friends with GUNS and EXPLOSIVES and in a couple of minutes my walls were breached and my house was in ruins...

So far we have gone through gathering and building part of the game but that is just a half of it. Second half is all about fighting. For your encounters with other players the game has a whole arsenal of weapons to have fun with ranging from basic weapons like swords and bows to semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles. The combat itself is pretty satisfying. There are no crosshairs but with guns one can look through the iron sights to aim precisely. Shots are affected by physics so arrows and even bullets lose velocity and drop down as they travel into distance. Everything in game is designed to look like a makeshift weapons, even the most advanced rifles and it does look awesome! Compared to ranged weapons, melee combat is very basic. Basically you just swing your weapon, eventually throw it at your foe but there is no blocking or alternative moves. Bringing a melee weapon into a ranged fight usually ends badly.

When you feel like you have already done everything you could, have a nice place of your own, plenty of weapons and resources you can always join other players (after making sure you can trust them) and go out raiding - attack other players bases and steal their stuff. This is basically Rust's end game content and requires one to be quite knowledgable about the game as it is necessary to know different base designs and their weaknesses as well as to be proficient in combat since blowing up walls makes a lot of noise which is sure to lure in other groups. This is probably the reason why most of the raids happen during the night (in the real world) since the owners of the base are likely to sleep and there is much less players lurking around waiting for their opportunity to rob you which is kind of a shame since I believe that base defense and fights tied with raiding are when the real fun starts.

As I have mentioned before, from a technical standpoint Rust looks pretty good and not at all like an Alpha. Running on a Unity engine the game looks pretty slick, I would even go as far as to compliment the looks as amazing when you set the settings on high; However it is important to say that it is insanely demanding on hardware. If you are looking for a fluid experience with stable 60 fps on decent settings you will need a high end machine so optimalization definitely still leaves a room for improvement. Apart from that the game looks finished although Facepunch is still working on improvevements with regular updates to the game.

In its current state I would certainly recommend Rust to everyone who likes survival games as well as to people who would like to find out what is all the surival ruckus about. Not only does everything work properly despite it still being an early access but devs also keep bringing in new content into the game quite often which keeps the game interesting in a long run. Rust is definitely worth the asked price!

After four months I am finally getting the hang of things and the future looks bright. Despite having to start over and over I am always learning. With each breach of my house I find out what mistakes I made when designing it and my next is a step closer to perfection. While I might never build an unbreachable house, the experience taught me that it is impossible, it is getting harder and harder for people to get in and I keep enjoying myself more and more. Being stranded on this strange island slowly went from an ordeal to an enjoyment and I simply LOVE IT!