I find this to be one of the most underrated base builders of recent times, it has amazing traction and weight to the character. The mech simply feels fantastic to move around and has some serious punch to it.

I love how the building part manages to keep the satisfaction of creating an interconnected base where you gather resources and store them, as you build a perimeter filled with automated weapons. It doesn't fall into the Factorio trap, where you can build vast bases for 10 hours, and then end up feeling you built it "wrong" and have to start over again.

But, it does have some serious balance issues, as once you figure out the building process you can just use the same tactics forever. Even though there is plenty to build and do, there is a simplistic nature underneath that hurts long-term play.

Yet, I love this game, and I hope more games use the Factorio basics and expand into different sorts of games.

This is the kind of Frankstein genre mix where everything comes together well and it is just a blast to play it. I finished this game in three days because I literally couldn’t stop playing and thinking about it. There is base building, resource gathering, tower defence, twinstick-shooter, rpg elements, exploring and crafting and none of these things feels underdeveloped or just attached to fill out some checklist game design. Everything is carefully woven into the mix, motivating on its behalf. Expanding your base with newly researched buildings is just as satisfying as crafting new weapons for your exosuit or exploring new biomes to find new types of enemies, plants and resources that allow you to research and build even more. It also plays very well. The shooting feels heavy and deadly while pulling big bases out of thin air is no trouble at all - as long as you have the resources of course. It’s a crazily addictive gameplay loop that - if you are receptive to this kind of progression - won’t let you go until you’ve finished the ~25 hours long campaign. It’s not perfect though. The graphics and sound design are great. But even with the dev still supporting and patching this game there are still some bugs left. I had to restart one map via console command because a mission goal didn’t trigger. So save regularly and in different slots.

Absolutely incredible title with probably some of the worst cover art I've seen. I took a random plunge on Game Pass for this one and I what I got was one of the best base building/ wave defense/ twin stick shooter I've played in a while.

All achievements were earned on PC running a 3800x and RTX 3080. When the game is maxed out pushing hundred of enemies with ray traced shadows and lighting the game is truly a spectacle. Guts, goor, and loot litter the aftermath of a job well done and it never gets old.

Achievements really push you to play all aspects of the game and work yourself deep into the tech tree where you can really turn combat into a trivial thing as you launch radar guided nuke artillery from what feels like across the map.

The character interactions were great and not too intrusive, only complaint is the constant reminder that you're at full resource capacity which will happen plenty as you stop spending as much and are running huge cultivation farms.

A brilliant game from start to end that really keeps excellent pacing.

Noted on PC, there has been discussion of slowdown during major fights or bugs that can soft lock. Im fortunate enough to not have had a single bug during my 30 hour campaign run nor during smaller survival missions. Though that was the experience for me, it may not be the same for everyone.

Very excited for what this team pushes out next in this world. At the time of writing a new expansion is in the works with COOP being a later roadmap goal.

A massively addictive mix of Starcraft, Diablo, No Man's Sky and Tower Defense.

This is a top down game that strikes a great balance of calm, zen like resource gathering, exploration and base building with the insane defense of the relentless alien monsters that want to eradicate every trace of your invasion of their planet.

The game eases you into everything bringing you a good tutorial that teaches you the basics but leaves you hungry to discover combinations of different defenses and offenses. The great UI helps a ton making it clear about what you need,

Sure, it can be tense and frustrating when your creations could be destroyed in less than a minute. But with every defense, comes great growth in the form of a skill tree that upgrades for your mech, guns and your buildings.

This is a hidden gem. It can be grindy and repetitive but the dozens of hours this game gave me were some of the most fun ive had this year.

Demo Only!

I just finished the Steam Demo of the Riftbreaker, and it was a lot of fun! it's a combination of real-time strategy and action RPG, where you're placed right in the action in a mech suit whilst also building defences and managing your power generation and output. The demo already showed a tonne of variety in enemies, gameplay objectives, and the aesthetic of the game itself. Consider me very keen to check this out on launch this year, it felt really slick to play and looks to be very special.

I really liked the general idea (basebuilding+action), and had fun completing the game, but it has shortcomings, thus I can't really say the game is great.

While stuff is really fun while it's new, the whole process gets repetitive, both defending and exploring. Enemies are just a dumb mass who run to the nearest building, and it doesn't require much creativity in terms of basebuilding - place walls, turrets and it just works. The battles are Diablo-like grind without much variety. Just pick the right weapon and pew-pew. Weapons feel nice tho. The balance can be wonky, it's either too easy or too hard. I don't see much replayability here, it's not fun to do everything all over again, after you discover all the stuff.

2023: Прошёл ещё раз с начала до конца, с дополнениями Metal Terror и Into the Dark, интересно, но опять же — на один раз. Ничего глобально они не изменили, просто добавили more of the same.

I'd start this off by saying, expect a 40 hour campaign. It's a 40 hour campaign with constant and meaningful progression, but expect it otherwise.

This game combines base building, tower defense, and action combat elements into one single package. IMO, it works incredibly well.
Base building is simple. You find a spot you like, and within 2 minutes, you have 3 sets of walls, turrets, and energy resources up.
Action combat consists of using a huge plethora of weapons to defeat waves of hundreds to thousands of enemies. All the weapons feel useful in their own unique ways. Certain enemies are resistant to specific types of damage, so you have to keep your weapons varied. Once some waves come in, you're standing in front of a wall of turrets preparing to completely demolish everything, and it's just great.

The story is near nonexistent. The story is essentially "You came here to colonize", and ends with a "Congrats you did it" slide at the end. Most of the other stuff is just dialogue between the main character and her AI partner.

I absolutely love this game, but I'd recommend looking up gameplay to see if it's for you.

Visuals and controls are good, gameplay is very samey and drags out a bit too long. You're trying to build a rift to get back to earth which requires a lot of various resources. Resources are unlocked on other planets through a series of missions. The missions are all very much the same for each major resource you need.

The events that spawn like nearby nests or large enemies only really serve as an annoyance, they basically nag you until you go deal with it.

The game also has a few bugs, including a couple which were basically game breaking. One was an issue with power generation, I had an array of different power production set up (renewable, gas, magma, nuclear etc...) and yet I had no power generation. The only way to fix it was to open the console and type debug_recreate_buildings which fixes it. The other issue was starting up the rift sequence (literally the last thing you need to do to end the game). Had to again run that console command.

Ignoring those bugs it's an ok game, but largely forgettable.