The Riftbreaker

I was lured into playing The Riftbreaker by images and videos of massive hordes attacking a well-defended base. Mowing enemies down by the hundreds, thousands even, looks really cool, I have to admit. The same can be said for the overall art style of this game. Everything looks high-fidelity, and so it's really quite visually attractive. Sadly, behind the glossy exterior, there is little substance to be found.

Riftbreaker can be described as a base building tower defense game. Your goal is to defend your base from attacks while gathering resources, researching new technologies, and completing some objectives. While some people draw parallels with Factorio, the factory elements here are barely stronger than in your average RTS, which I would say this game more resembles. There is barely any logistics to speak of, with the exception of electricity and liquids, and production chains are nonexistant. The difficulty of the game comes from having insufficient resource income and free room. While the map has plenty of resources and room, defending your base (or multiple bases) becomes increasingly difficult as it gets larger. There's a wide variety of towers and weapons you can equip on your mech, which is your most powerful unit. Enemies can be resistant to a damage type, or can appear solo or in swarms, so different damage type, AoE, and single target weapons may all be desirable.

But as mentioned, it's pretty shallow. If you're missing a resource, you just put down another factory that makes it. No logistics means you can just put most things anywhere you have room. There is no point to using different tower compositions at the different parts of the base, so everywhere gets the same towers. How many towers? How much to expand? As much as you can. Really, if anything, the interesting part of the game is time pressure, again, like in an RTS, not strategy elements like I would expect from a base building or tower defense game, and I'm not a fan of this.

Overall, it's not exactly a bad game. The action part is well done and looks cool, which may be sufficient for fans of that. But I think that if you came looking for a good tower defense, or "Factorio with a larger emphasis on base defense", you will be sorely disappointed. Personally, I didn't like it, and I wouldn't recommend it.