The Riftbreaker
The Riftbreaker is a unique mix of several different genres. Simplistically, it's a base building tower defense game with some light factory elements and resource management. You mine resources, build a base, power it, and defend it from waves of creatures while you try to build a huge rift gate back to Earth. There's a 30 hour campaign as well as a survival mode and it should have a decent amount of replayability. The level of polish and content really sets it apart from competitors though; right from the beginning it's well voice acted, animations are really smooth and it's very easy to get into. If you enjoy base building, definitely give it a go.
Pros
- It runs really smoothly, even when there's thousands of things going on
- Decent dialogue between the main character and her AI
- It's gorgeous to look at
- There are missions off to other parts of the planet instead of all taking place on one map
- There's great attention to detail. For example, in one of the biomes, the plants react to impacts; so if you hit the ground with your hammer all the plants light up around it
- Huge research tree with a lot of different paths you can focus on
- Actually has way more "factory" stuff than I expected. I thought it was just power and tower defense, but it does have systems for converting one substance into another. I'd love to see more of that though; it's definitely not Factorio
- You can scan and research creatures
- You can build teleporters
- Weather events and creature attacks to keep things interesting (could be a little more variety here)
- Lots of different options for combat by combining different weapons, equipment and skills
- Wide variety of materials to mine
- Great sound effects, weapons have real kick
- Huge range of weapons
- Some really cool ways of generating power and resources. The cultivator station allows you to grow different plants. Depending on the plants grown, you can harvest biomass and burn it for power, plus harvest rare resources. There's also wind, solar, solid fuel, geothermal, magma, nuclear and fusion
Cons / wishlist
- When an outpost is destroyed, I'd like to be able to see what WAS there to set it up again (like how Factorio leaves "destroyed" sprites of buildings). Otherwise I have to guess what I need to rebuild
- Even though my storage is full, I'd like to see how many mines I own so I know whether to build more (even when storage is full). Currently, if storage is full, it says +0/s
- I'd like to be able to switch sets of gear. There's loads of different things you can wear for different situations, and switching between them is kind of a drag
- By the time you get to end game and you have a large base, it's impossible to tell where anything is from the minimap. It simply uses light blue to denote 'a building', so if I want to find my carbonium synthesizers, I can't
- The gear you can wear adds all kinds of extra stats, but there's no overview screen of all your statistics in one place
- I'd love a way to upgrade either "all buildings of this type", or a larger "paintbrush" for upgrading. Running along walls or rows of buildings upgrading them 1 at a time is annoying