#THE RIFTBREAKER REVIEWS PATCH#
Even turn based tactical strategy land, home to your XCOMs and Jagged Alliances, is full of games with both feet on the accelerator (although interestingly, the original UFO had occasional months where the aliens would do almost nothing, giving the player a rare reprieve in which to research and patch up the wounded, and the impression that an interplanetary invasion takes some actual planning and co-ordination much like a real war). Or the 4X, with its all-or-nothing demands for exponential growth and upgrades just to stay competitive. Take the RTS with its slow and tedious start, ramping up to an overwhelming onslaught of a hundred notifications. All too often their pacing is mathematical. Strategy games could do more in general to let players set our own pace. Hell, perhaps it'll even be a good chance to redesign your base. As long as your HQ building is intact, you can scale back your operation and rebuild. It's a bit unfair to directly compare such different designs, but Riftbreaker demonstrates a principle more RTS games could learn from: you can come back. Suffer a big enough villager massacre in AoE and you'll never catch up. Lose your army in a Starcraft and the enemy will almost certainly lay waste to everything, with even a rapidly spawned backup Zerg just delaying the inevitable. In particular, it's got me thinking about how most traditional RTSeses like Age Of Empires 4 tend to be over long before they tell you. If you're less confident, or plain enjoying the base parts, you can instead concentrate on those until you're ready to push out, unlocking more research goodies, perfecting defences, and tidying up after attackers. Riftbreaker isn't particularly hard, and if you're feeling brave or plain enjoying it, you can run off and fight in the wilderness at any time, teleporting back to base if there's trouble. Not with a menu at the start (which often necessitates knowing the game somewhat anyway), but by your own behaviour. There are nuances, and complications, and things I didn't understand, but the things I did understand were engaging and accessible and effective enough to keep me afloat until I was ready to learn the rest. You're a mech, you can build stuff, you need to protect this building and gather things, now shoot anything that looks at you funny and we'll figure the rest out when we get there. Where just recently I've complained about the deposit, here's Riftbreaker practically paying it for you. It's a compelling hybrid of a looter-shooter action RPG with a wave defence base building game. Supplying and researching this is your base, which is where the strategy side comes in. To enable this, your mech can be outfitted with three weapons on each arm, a heap of abilities and armours and special moves (mines, repair buzzes, shockwaves, even a game-changing cloak).
Where Factorio made it difficult, but possible to minimise your impact on the aliens, your goal is to supply a teleporter big enough to get you home, and that requires liquifying enough biomass that you could probably build a bridge out of the bodies and spacewalk there. Embedded in a powerful mech, your real job is to travel the planet gunning down hundreds of thousands of living things, ostensibly because they keep attacking your base, but eventually because they're in the way of your insatiable thirst for resources.
"The planet is teeming with life, which you repeatedly insist must be protected (aaaahahahaha dieee you nest bastard! Laser drone! Fire!), lest we repeat the mistakes of Earth."
#THE RIFTBREAKER REVIEWS UPGRADE#
Said planet is teeming with life, which you repeatedly insist to your thankfully non-wacky AI companion must be protected (aaaahahahaha dieee you nest bastard! Laser drone! Fire!), lest we repeat the mistakes of Earth (acid gun! Upgrade the furnace that burns alien corpses for fuel! FIRE). You're a "scientist" (fire! More grenades! Rocket towers GO!) who's teleported to a distant planet in an explorative attempt to find a new home for humanity (Cryo mines! Build more storage on top of those grasslands! Fire!). It sort of is a different interpretation of Factorio's premise, though.
With the exception of liquids and electricity, everything magically appears wherever it's needed, even across the many continents you'll eventually be zapping back and forth across. Factorio is all about logistics and complex gathering and delivery chains that don't appear in Riftbreaker at all. If you're looking for another machine-building paradise, this will disappoint you. Comparisons are sometimes made to Factorio, which are perhaps unwise.
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