The Riftbreaker is what I would call the lovechild of a tower defense game and something like Satisfactory or Factorio, and it’s surprisingly frantic for what I initially assumed to be a relatively chill game. I’ve been playing it over my free time in the past few days, and here are my thoughts!
NOTE: Full disclosure, I received a review copy from the developers.
An Addicting Blend of ARPG & RTS
The game’s campaign plops you right in the middle of an alien planet, and your goal is to build a portal back to Earth while fending off the deadly local fauna. It’s a simple enough premise; All you have to do is establish a foothold in this distant planet and prep it for colonization.
Well, it’s a campaign that’ll take you quite a lot of hours to complete, and I’m not even done with it yet as I write this. It’s a game that ramps up in complexity as you progress further, but compared to its peers, it’s actually surprisingly easy to learn and has little to no downtime (eventually) if you aren’t sitting still and just waiting for things to finish.
A Solid Foundation
It’s easy to get lost in the game’s base building aspect, as you’ll find yourself trying to fit everything important in one huge defensible block of land. Efficiency isn’t really something you learn until you’re already hours in, so your first story playthrough is probably gonna feature a gigantic mishmash of buildings at the center.
… And I think that’s beautiful.
While the game’s campaign does kind of tell you what you should be focusing on, it doesn’t really hold your hand at all. You’re free to do whatever you want, as the “story” is basically just a list of milestones that provide a bit of structure, at least based on what I’ve seen so far.
I started a new save shortly after my first attempt just to have a cleaner HQ, but it’s still a glorious and inefficient mess that I cherish dearly. It makes me feel like I’m playing an RTS, but with a lot of ARPG-style combat sprinkled in healthy doses.
Exploring Parts Unknown
Once you’ve built a rift station, the game will start pushing you towards exploring other biomes on this planet, and that’s when it truly starts ramping up. Around this time, you discover that other regions have extremely harsh conditions, and you’ll need to start upgrading your mech to adapt to these areas.
To progress further into the game, you’ll have to build outposts in increasingly more dangerous zones to gather rarer materials. Over time, you’ll have to start dismantling old mining stations and building new ones around each map, and this part is really giving “old school RTS” with how resource nodes eventually run out.
The tower defense aspect of the game starts also earing its head with how much the game will start battering your bases with hordes of alien creatures that get progressively more powerful. Funnily enough, this is how I learned that you shouldn’t be trying too hard to defend literally everything.
The lack of handholding in the game made me initially think that I should be plopping down defenses on every little mining spot that I claim. Big mistake, but I oddly don’t feel any regret.
The way the game just throws you into the field and quietly says “go nuts” is such a fun trial by fire that I thankfully experienced with only the normal difficulty, where the pacing is slow enough that you won’t get obliterated in an instant if you aren’t playing “correctly”.
A Fun (But Slow) Time
The Riftbreaker is a fantastic ARPG, tower defense, management… thing that I am thoroughly enjoying, though I will admit that it starts off a bit too slow for my tastes. It’s engaging enough that I played through the slow start and have been chipping away at the research tree.
That’s the thing though, the game does start becoming a bit grindy later on once you’re exposed to the huge research tree. It’s not as overwhelming as a Path of Exiles build, but it’s definitely something that’ll throw you off when you first see it.
It also doesn’t help that each node takes several minutes to research. While there are ways to speed it up, it does get a bit jarring at the beginning when you kind of just have to twiddle your thumbs until you unlock new stuff, since there’s not much else you can do early on.
You do eventually get opportunities to keep yourself busy, but I did find it painfully boring before the game opened up more. It’s also more of a knowledge issue, since the lack of handholding also means that a new player might be too hesitant to expand or build too much in the early game. When I reset my campaign, I managed to catch up to my first attempt’s progress in just a fraction of the time I spent on that save, so yeah.
Overall, I’d say that the game is absolutely worth it in its current state, though I can’t speak for the DLCs as I have barely touched them as of this writing (I’ve started exploring their locations though). The Riftbreaker is available on Steam, and if you’ve got friends who might be into it, you can even have fun with its chaotic co-op!