Rokh Preview

Rokh Preview

- Marcello Perricone

The past few years have been plentiful hunting grounds for survival fans, from the atrocious design decisions of Rust to the terrible optimization of Ark Survival Evolved, all the way to the well-meaning but misguided efforts of Osiris and the magical submarine brilliance of Subnautica. Nowadays, space survival games seem fixated on the idea of Mars and its colonisation, and the latest contender is Assembly Required’s Rokh, now in Early Access.

Made by an experienced team of developers who worked on high-profile titles such as Dishonored, Half-Life 2, and the Assassin’s Creed series, this latest sci-fi survival drops players in the aftermath of a failed colonisation effort on the Red Planet, and tasks them with surviving the unforgiving climate of the arid world. With its claims to be deeply rooted in science, the title’s premise and its developers pedigree sound enticing, yet Rokh’s problems start when the game does. There is no tutorial or single player option, nor an easy way to create your own server meaning the lack of an internet connection utterly prevents you from playing the game.

With going multiplayer as the only option, things quickly go downhill. The server browser takes ridiculously long to give you a list of available games, clocking an average of 2 minutes where nothing happens on the screen. After the wait is over and you find a suitable world, you get to pick one square on the map out of ten to land, with the remaining 80% of the map closed off due to “hazardous conditions”. The game loads you in, and you spawn on the surface of the Red Planet.