Riftbreaker is another one of those games I wish I liked more than I actually do, as it ticks almost all the boxes and the dev team did a very good job, but I constantly felt myself struggling to find the fun and entertainment as I went through the motions of building and upgrading things while also killing space bugs.
The game itself is a pretty nifty mixture of dualstick shooter and basic base builder where you explore little maps to find ore deposits, as well as rare weapon mods and such hidden away in unexplained space cocoons, while also running research in the background in order to upgrade the walls and defense towers surrounding your mining machinery and other important buildings. It all controls very well even on a PS5 controller and the whole eoxperience is smooth and easy to play, engaging and addictive with many bars to fill and many new guns, towers, moves and customization options to unlock and it's all just so...boring.
I feel bad about writing it because this game does do almost everything well and it looks and sounds good. Framerate drops when the hordes become larger, but nothing insufferable, and the game runs, looks, sounds, controls and just overall plays well, but there's something missing in the loop for me. Building a sustainable base is a little too easy (on normal difficulty), enemy attack waves are a bit too samey with a horde just sprinting straight at the nearest object built by you, levels are a little too samey and there's too much combato against space monsters that are boring to fight. I thought I had unlocked the fun when I upgraded to the third level of machine gun, only to find that it gets raised damage but severely lowered ammo capacity and that's about the time I got bored with all the unlocks and realized that I had spent the whole game wondering if I was even having any fun to begin with.
All that said, I didn't hate the game and any time you combine a dualstick shooter with a genre with a bit more depth, I am intrigued and can find things to enjoy, which I did in Riftbreaker for a solid 10-15 hours before I realized that's all very repetitive, the campaign is a bit too long and there isn't much interesting challenge. I didn't hate those 10 hours and don't regret my purchase, but I can't really recommend the game to anyone either.
The game itself is a pretty nifty mixture of dualstick shooter and basic base builder where you explore little maps to find ore deposits, as well as rare weapon mods and such hidden away in unexplained space cocoons, while also running research in the background in order to upgrade the walls and defense towers surrounding your mining machinery and other important buildings. It all controls very well even on a PS5 controller and the whole eoxperience is smooth and easy to play, engaging and addictive with many bars to fill and many new guns, towers, moves and customization options to unlock and it's all just so...boring.
I feel bad about writing it because this game does do almost everything well and it looks and sounds good. Framerate drops when the hordes become larger, but nothing insufferable, and the game runs, looks, sounds, controls and just overall plays well, but there's something missing in the loop for me. Building a sustainable base is a little too easy (on normal difficulty), enemy attack waves are a bit too samey with a horde just sprinting straight at the nearest object built by you, levels are a little too samey and there's too much combato against space monsters that are boring to fight. I thought I had unlocked the fun when I upgraded to the third level of machine gun, only to find that it gets raised damage but severely lowered ammo capacity and that's about the time I got bored with all the unlocks and realized that I had spent the whole game wondering if I was even having any fun to begin with.
All that said, I didn't hate the game and any time you combine a dualstick shooter with a genre with a bit more depth, I am intrigued and can find things to enjoy, which I did in Riftbreaker for a solid 10-15 hours before I realized that's all very repetitive, the campaign is a bit too long and there isn't much interesting challenge. I didn't hate those 10 hours and don't regret my purchase, but I can't really recommend the game to anyone either.