Review: Rust: Console Edition – PS5, PS4

Rust: Console Edition challenges players to survive by any means, even if that means being mean. Know what I mean?

Rust: Console Edition is brutal and if you don’t have the patience, it can be downright frustrating. In fact, that’s my experience in a nutshell – frustrating. My time with Rust: Console Edition was spent running around, collecting stuff so that my character wasn’t feeble, naked, and completely defenceless, and then getting killed by some cunt, losing my stuff, and starting over again. Other times, I’d be killed by the roaming scientists or, on a few occasions, a massive bear. Frustration is a big part of the game and I imagine that once you finally break free from that frustration, the game opens up. I wouldn’t know, though, because in over 10 hours of play across multiple servers, I never got past knocking together a bow and arrow.

Rust: Console Edition is based on the popular PC game which has been around since 2013. The game is slightly different than the PC version, of course, but the core remains the same: survive by any means necessary.
You start the game almost naked and armed only with a rock and fire torch. You need to gather supplies to craft better equipment, so that means knocking down trees with your rock, collecting hemp to make clothes, and mining metal to make tools. The simplest comparison I can give for the game is Minecraft, but swap out the blocky graphics for realistic environments; swap out the mobs for roaming scientists and human players; swap out the block-by-block construction for something a bit more complicated.

Gradually fleshing out your inventory with more capable gear seems to be the way forward in Rust: Console Edition, and while I didn’t manage to kit myself out with a full armoury of machine guns and grenades, I did see some who had put in the work and survived long enough to become the villains of the game. Make no mistake – this game is full of wankers. Most of my deaths were from players who were obviously better equipped, so it felt a bit like bullying. I came across a couple of Russian fellas (the game has voice chat that activates as you get close to other players) and while I didn’t understand what they were saying, I knew not to stick around. For me, Rust: Console Edition is a game to kill a few hours. For them, it’s a way of life…
I did my best to avoid other players, then, because interactions with others is what will determine how much fun you can have. If you come across nice guys, as I did during my preview, it’s all good. But if you come across some prick with nothing better to do than ruin a reviewer’s day, it’s a pain in the arse and you risk losing hours of progress.

Building a base and putting a lock on the front door is a very popular option and not something I fully explored. I didn’t have the resources to create an elaborate hideout, and when I did, I lost them when I died. Instead, I went door to door hoping that somebody would have forgotten to lock up, or maybe let me in when I knocked. Neither happened and I resigned myself to running around,
I played mostly on PS5, but I did give the game on PS4 Pro, too, and I definitely found it to play better on PS5 despite not being officially optimised for the next-gen consoles. On PS5, Rust feels much more responsive as it aims for that sweet 60fps refresh, while on PS4 it’s variable and often judders around. This makes Rust on PS4 feel not so great, though even on PS5 the game doesn’t feel all that great in the hand. The controls are fine, for the most part, but there’s definitely something up with the aiming. There are options to tweak the look speeds, though they’re a little complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing – these aren’t options that console gamers normally have to worry about.

Rust: Console Edition is a hard game to review. My experience with the game may not be the same for you, but I imagine that for many, it will be very similar. Like anything in life, there are winners and losers, and if you’re not winning at Rust: Console Edition, you’re a loser whose only job is to populate the servers for the high-level players.