Developer: EXOR Studios
Publisher: EXOR Studios
Release Date: 14th October 2021
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
▫️ Review code provided by the publisher ▫️
As a big fan of 2017’s X-Morph Defense, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Riftbreaker, the latest game from EXOR Studios. The Riftbreaker blends twin-stick action, tower defence, and real-time strategy in a way that, frankly, feels revolutionary for all three genres. Let’s break some rifts!
A new home for humanity
As Earth is running low on natural resources, it’s your job to prepare Galatea 37, a planet far away from our own, for future human colonization. Armed with some awesome tech and your trusty mech suit “Mr. Riggs”, your job is to establish a foothold on the planet by building and defending numerous bases. This is the basic setup for The Riftbreaker, the new base-building, tower defending twin-stick shooter by EXOR Studios.
The game’s campaign spans over a few dozen hours and, interestingly, never has you rebuild anything – unless you get overrun. Unlike other games of this type, The Riftbreaker tasks you with building one main base and leaving you to expand and defend it throughout the entire game. This may sound repetitive or boring, but let me explain why it very much is not.
Researching future technologies
One thing you will be doing throughout the entire game is researching new tech. When the game first starts, you have very basic weapons, towers and other buildings required to stay alive. As Galatea 37 throws evermore dangerous waves of aliens at you, your arsenal grows right alongside it.
Your research is divided into three distinct categories. Your base, your arsenal and the aliens. Initially, you will only be researching new buildings, as well as upgrades to your existing ones. You’ll get better walls, better towers, better mining equipment, and more. You’ll also constantly unlock new melee and ranged weapons, mech upgrades, and other gadgets to stay alive. After you make certain progress in the story, you’ll start researching alien technology, that helps you deal with whatever the planet throws at you – and even lets you give the aliens a taste of their own medicine.
There’s so much to research and unlock that even when I finished the game (and the platinum trophy) after 38 hours, I still had things to research. You decide in which order you research everything, so whether you want to focus on your base or your mech is entirely up to you. You will need both to stay alive, however.
Build and defend – then do it again
I’ve already alluded to the need to build and defend. Your constant research means constant building and upgrading, but any good base takes proper planning. As mentioned above, you build and maintain a single main base throughout the entire game, but you are able to build smaller satellite bases pretty much anywhere. Most resources are shared among your bases and you will need to explore other parts of the planet to find every resource available to you. This is where rifts come in.
As you progress through the story, you will unlock the ability to travel to other parts of Galatea 37, where you will have to establish outposts responsible for gathering new, unique resources. It is vital to keep these operational at all times, which involves setting them up with proper defenses, power generation, mining operations and more. These outposts operate concurrently with your main base; if you have a handful of outposts responsible for mining additional resources, these will then become available across all of your bases. This is why only having a single main base isn’t a problem – you’ll have an ever-growing network of bases to deal with, which keeps the experience interesting throughout.
Each part of the planet is a different challenge, too. Some biomes require you to deal with active volcanoes that regularly rain fireballs down on everything you’ve built. Some areas are too hot or otherwise unstable to natively support any structures, which is where your alien technology comes into play. As the game goes on, you unlock more and more tech, more and more locations, and more and more gameplay challenges to overcome. It’s a really addictive loop.
Not every resource is shared though, so every base, however small, needs to be self-sustaining when it comes to power – unless you build power lines from one base to another. This isn’t usually worth it, however, as you’ll need to defend them from attacks and natural disasters. As I mentioned before, you can build pretty much everywhere, so you should always keep your surroundings in mind when establishing a base. If you have a rock formation at your back, then that’s one less direction to worry about when aliens attack – and attack they will.
Mr. Riggs to the rescue
Alright, so I’ve talked a bunch about building and all the things that go into that. Building is only a part of the equation here, however. When you explore a location, you do so in your mech suit. Armed with two weapons, one in your left arm and another in your right, you’re very capable of fending for yourself. You even get two extra weapons per hand that you can swap to (out of whatever you have researched), which will be necessary as you run out of a specific ammo type. Ammo, of course, is just one of the countless things you will be producing in your bases, too
In addition to your weapon loadout, you can also equip eight different gadgets or abilities, as well as four different mech suit upgrades. Oh and a movement ability. And weapon mods, too. Yeah, there’s quite a lot to it. Your movement ability can be a combat roll, a dash that leaves electricity, acid or other elements on the ground to hurt or hinder enemies, or it can be a jump with similar effects. You could even equip temporary invisibility, if you like to avoid confrontations.
For your gadgets and abilities, you can equip things like black hole grenades, automated turrets, nuclear mines, a radar to explore the map faster, or a long list of other alternatives. These all have limited use, but if you get ammo production up and running in your bases, it will all replenish over time.
For the weapon mods, these can be things like increased damage, range, homing capabilities, damage over time effects and more, and all mods drop in several different tiers from defeated aliens. Everything comes in different tiers, in fact, which is part of what creates this perfect loop of constant upgrades and overall progression.
It’s all about survival
In a nutshell, The Riftbreaker is all about survival on a planet where pretty much everything is trying to kill you. I alluded to enemy attacks getting bigger and bigger over time, and eventually you will see enemy waves so large the mobs fill the screen several times over. If you have flawlessly built bases, they will be able to withstand most attacks by themselves, but there will countless moments where Mr. Riggs has to step in or things won’t work out for you – and because you’re essentially playing on one continuous playthrough, everything is permanent (unless you load a previous save), including bases that get overrun and destroyed. Don’t overextend, don’t underestimate the enemy, and don’t get ahead of yourself, and you’ll be fine.
Since survival is the focus here, it’s only fitting that, in addition to the campaign, there’s a Survival mode, too. Survival currently offers four different challenges, all playable across multiple difficulty levels, where your objective is simple; starting from scratch, build and defend your base for the allotted time and make your escape through the rift. Each survival challenge ends with a massive wave of aliens coming for you, so all I can say is good luck. They’re doable, but I barely completed them even on Easy.
A perfect blend of genres
The Riftbreaker is a fantastic game. It flawlessly blends twin-stick action, tower defense, and base-building into an amazing experience that I truly believe could serve as a gateway (or rift, if you will) into these genres for a lot of newcomers. I was already a fan of these types of games and The Riftbreaker has only cemented my love for them. It really does feel like the evolution of these genres and easily the best RTS-like experience on consoles in a long, long time.
The promise of additional performance patches (which were definitely needed), as well as the addition of post-launch co-op, makes me incredibly excited for the future of The Riftbreaker – and the genre as a whole. If you’re curious about The Riftbreaker, there’s a free playable Prologue available on all platforms, so I’d suggest you start there.
Verdict
The Riftbreaker is a perfect blend of twin-stick action, base-building and tower defense, and feels like the natural evolution of all three.
-K.A. Pedersen
