The writing and voice acting in particular are often laughable, and the main character, Ashley, is about as interesting as a sheet of drywall. The Riftbreaker is incredibly ambitious and mixes together the best components of a dozen genres to create something multifaceted and memorable.īut The Riftbreaker succeeds in so many other ways that I found it pretty easy to ignore the awful banter playing in the background. It’s got base building and tower defense components, survival elements like resource gathering and management, an RPG-like crafting and gear system, and top-down bullet hell combat with loot drops.
One moment you’re spending resources to build a power plant to power your ammo factories like in an RTS, and the next moment you’re running around shooting and dodging hundreds of enemy attacks in bullet hell fashion. You also have to find and set up mining operations on resource deposits and build defensive towers to automate some of the responsibilities of protecting your bases from incoming attacks. It can certainly get a little overwhelming at times. That hodgepodge of mechanics inexplicably comes together really well. It can certainly get a little overwhelming at times, but the excellently crafted campaign tutorializes you in small bites so you don’t break down and cry (at least not right away). It continually pushes you to learn new mechanics while you’re thrown up against increasingly hostile creatures and environments. For example, one biome is so hot that building any structures is impossible until you master cryo cooling technology, while another has explosive mines hidden underfoot throughout the entire level which makes exploration incredibly dangerous.Įach area has its own unique set of problems and resources that can be harvested to improve your gear, defenses, and get you one step closer to opening a rift back to Earth.
The desert biome is covered in shifting sands and blazing hot sunlight that can burn your base to the ground, while the volcanic biome obscures your vision with ash clouds and causes massive fireballs to fall from the sky. Who doesn’t want to feel like the ultimate interplanetary survivalist? Some of these areas make it extremely challenging to establish a base, but when you overcome the odds and gain another resource in your toolbelt, it’s incredibly rewarding. Unfortunately, one of these areas is overly ambitious with its enemy design and ends up being relatively broken in practice.
#THE RIFTBREAKER ENDING PC#
The poisonous swamp, which features a deadly plant that slowly takes over the whole map, seems to be too much for even my high-end PC or the current-gen consoles to handle. Visiting it causes tons of crashes and even makes it impossible to save your progress until you complete your objective and teleport back to a different biome. My final hours with the campaign had me standing up and sweating profusely.Īs you explore different biomes and establish bases in each of them, the base-building and resource management becomes exponentially more complex as well. You’ll eventually need to jump between biomes and bases to manage each of their resources, improve their buildings, and confront waves of enemies and environmental catastrophes between each of them. It became so complex by the end of my playthrough that I actually created an Excel spreadsheet and a digital checklist to help me remember which biomes I was drawing resources from and which bases needed improving – that was fun for me, but it does speak to how hard this stuff can be to keep track of in-game.
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