Th Riftbreaker is one of those odd games that sits between genres - it's right at the intersection of RTS, tower defense, and ARPG. These kinds of games can be tricky to get right, but I think the team did a great job of puling in just the right elements of each.

The core of the game is the harvest-research-build loop: you mine various resources, use those resources to build defenses, and research new techs to build better mines and defenses. While you're waiting on resources to accumulate or research to complete, you can go stomping around the planet in your giant mech. Because who doesn't love giant mechs?

The game is slow-paced and repetitive, especially in the second half, but that actually suits my playstyle. I'm very much a turtler, and that's pretty much the entire game. Build a base, surround it with towers, and enjoy the show as hordes of monsters feed themselves to the grinder. (And then loot the mountain of corpses for goodies.) Just watch out for the giant slugs that can bombard you from halfway across the map, those guys are pretty dangerous right up until the endgame.

It's also nice that you can build bases across several maps, and the resources mostly go into a global pool so there's not a ton of micromanagement to deal with. Some people have compared this to Factorio, but I don't see it; there's hardly any production chains to deal with (the most complicated one would be mud -> water -> plasma -> super plasma). Which is why I say it's more like RTS, just mine resources, build stuff, and kill monsters over and over and over again.

I did find it to be rather buggy, but more annoying than game-breaking. I tended to get a lot of lag when the screen was busy, especially when the meteor shows up. The controls would also briefly get stuck with the mech continuing to move or mine even when I tried to do something different, which sometimes led to charging right into an acid pool. I also had to occasionally reboot a few towers after a wave, because they didn't get the memo that everything was dead and kept shooting at nothing.

In short, this is definitely a fun game for people with the time and patience for it. Glad I tried it out on the free weekend a while back, or I never would have even noticed it.

Th Riftbreaker is one of those odd games that sits between genres - it's right at the intersection of RTS, tower defense, and ARPG. These kinds of games can be tricky to get right, but I think the team did a great job of puling in just the right elements of each. The core of the game is the harvest-research-build loop: you mine various resources, use those resources to build defenses, and research new techs to build better mines and defenses. While you're waiting on resources to accumulate or research to complete, you can go stomping around the planet in your giant mech. Because who doesn't love giant mechs? The game is slow-paced and repetitive, especially in the second half, but that actually suits my playstyle. I'm very much a turtler, and that's pretty much the entire game. Build a base, surround it with towers, and enjoy the show as hordes of monsters feed themselves to the grinder. (And then loot the mountain of corpses for goodies.) Just watch out for the giant slugs that can bombard you from halfway across the map, those guys are pretty dangerous right up until the endgame. It's also nice that you can build bases across several maps, and the resources mostly go into a global pool so there's not a ton of micromanagement to deal with. Some people have compared this to Factorio, but I don't see it; there's hardly any production chains to deal with (the most complicated one would be mud -> water -> plasma -> super plasma). Which is why I say it's more like RTS, just mine resources, build stuff, and kill monsters over and over and over again. I did find it to be rather buggy, but more annoying than game-breaking. I tended to get a lot of lag when the screen was busy, especially when the meteor shows up. The controls would also briefly get stuck with the mech continuing to move or mine even when I tried to do something different, which sometimes led to charging right into an acid pool. I also had to occasionally reboot a few towers after a wave, because they didn't get the memo that everything was dead and kept shooting at nothing. In short, this is definitely a fun game for people with the time and patience for it. Glad I tried it out on the free weekend a while back, or I never would have even noticed it.