Game Pass First Impressions: The Riftbreaker

By Kes Eylers-Stephenson,

You stride out from the undergrowth in your mech, wildly slashing at evil lizards and laughing maniacally as blood coats the towering cliffs and vivacious green forestry. Shards of wood from the trees spray around you, tracing bullets slash through ferns, and you sidestep splashes of toxic gunk flung at you. The Riftbreaker is colourful, gross, and certainly moreish in its early stages. Once you are done with the killing, you get a ping from Mr. Riggs — your mech AI — who tells you your base is under siege. You see, while you were busy venturing into the unknown, you became short-sighted in your wrathful glee. Your base is halfway back across this alien planet and everything you built over the first hour and a half is being torn down by the vengeful wildlife. All those walls, turrets, and wind turbines you constructed... all those solar panels, AI hubs, and perfectly placed gates... all wiped out because you strayed too far and were too busy being mean to the alien locals to notice. Developer EXOR Studios made you a simple risk-and-reward RTS about resource management, and you are watching your reward be shredded through the window of your mech-suit. It's almost a shame that you're going to enjoy rebuilding your previous mess of buildings into a sensible, neat, and efficient construction — you don't really deserve it, you violent human.

That is where The Riftbreaker succeeds emphatically in it opening hours. It gives you a simple set of tasks: build a base, protect the base, explore outside the base. You start with a hub, as per most RTS games, and you have to construct other buildings around it to facilitate your colonisation of a very pretty, but very hostile, alien planet. It's a basic 'mine, build, mine' loop, really. You need to grab resources like Carbonite and Ironium by building mines on deposits. They need power, though. So, you need to choose between unreliable renewable energy — like wind turbines and solar panels — or big and easy-to-manage power plants that you must place on your precious ore deposits. As soon as you think you are good to go, waves of those aggressive alien creatures are gunning for your hard work, so you must build walls to defend and turrets to slay the enemy hordes.

More useful than those turrets is Mr. Riggs, your big hulking mech who is constantly expositing to your cynical scientist protagonist. Mr. Riggs has a big machine gun at his disposal — which can fire a limited number of bullets — or a plasma gun that has unlimited ammunition, but leaves you vulnerable as you charge each blast. If that fails, you slash at the enemy with LT and hope you live through the animation. There is a dash and some deployable mines, which allow you to speed out of combat or lay traps for enemies. The Riftbreaker offers the player a simple toolset for the early stages, but it is more than effective enough to keep the first few combat scenarios engaging while teaching you the ropes. Against bigger hordes, the shifting of tactics and the obscene amount of enemies make for fun rounds of tower defence, and the added pressure of potentially losing everything you worked for really gives every situation weight on the higher difficulties.

the riftbreaker release date xbox game pass

This game looks really quite good, too. Combat in full flow — with bullets flying, blood painting the swaying trees, and a big creature stomping away — is quite the sight and certainly impressed the rest of the TA team while they stopped by to watch me play. I cannot stress enough, the way the environment moves under your marching mech-suit or gets shredded in combat gives The Riftbreaker a much more dense look and feel than one has any right to expect from an RTS. Having dealt with the enemy in the beautiful forestry just outside your walls, you can get back to working on your base. This time you build a research centre to download blueprints that will allow you to build even more. This is the classic RTS loop; no more, no less. It is executed well enough but is very linear. Though I'm having fun building and want to do more, there isn't really a sense of exploration or diversity in approach to your construction within the opening stages of the game. That is fair enough — you want to ease the player in, after all — but I'm struggling to see a route to building a base that will surprise me in any way.

Alleviating this slight let letdown is that the building process is supported by a story about humanity destroying Earth and going in search of another dwelling. This gives The Riftbreaker more narrative padding than, say, the Warhammer: Dawn of War series or the early Total War games that I am familiar with. The dialogue here is delivered well enough, but in my couple of hours, there was a sense that this might play out with a lack of ambition and play to the tune of traditional sci-fi tropes. However, early talk of morality — "Is what Mr. Riggs and I are doing good for this planet?" — definitely makes me hope that there is some kind of big twist coming that might help dust off the early-game cobwebs. That being said, the story is the element that ties together the base building and combat. You want to build the next big thing on the docket for a little extra sliver of information, giving everything you do a context and purpose. That is good enough for an introduction, in my book.

It's unfortunate that I have a few technical issues to whine about. I'm sorry. Every time the game saves, the action just totally freezes. It feels a little bit like you're glitching and the game is about to crash. I refuse to believe that the Series X I was playing on isn't powerful enough to allow you to play and save at the same time. In fact, this is such a conspicuous oddity, I'm starting to believe it was on purpose for some secret reason. The other technical hiccup I had was some serious frame hitching as soon as there was a big batch of enemies. Nothing major, but just a little unexpected that has me concerned that in harder, meatier bouts, performance might really drop. The audio cut out and controller vibration occasionally just went dead during combat sometimes, as well.

The menu was an obvious concern because RTS games are notoriously a bit of a no-go on a controller, but it was fine for the most part. Sometimes, though, I was a bit lost as to what menu I needed to go to, or I would keep forgetting that the main menus use a mouse cursor to control. It was never bad, per se, and you will get used to all the little quirks — but every now and again, I would feel stranded. The final bad thing (I promise) is that I am just really concerned that there might not be anything more to The Riftbreaker. It holds the potential to be a really great RTS, but I'm not yet convinced that it is going to offer me something special. With a game like Tropico 4, I got totally sucked into every intricate system and came out the other end of every play session unable to think about anything other than my island nation. I don't know that The Riftbreaker is going to leave me wanting to hop back in every waking second. At the moment, it feels like the simplicity of the opening hours isn't going to bloom into a multitude of interacting systems to offer near-inescapable depth or the opportunity for player independence.

The achievements seem like a lovely lot at first glance. In essence, the developer is asking you to see most of everything and play the game fully, without making you do everything. Get 75% of the bestiary completed, explore most of the map, so on and so forth. There are a few gimmicks throw in, like building a scale replica of The Great Wall of China or completing a run using only green energy sources. Even the cumulatives seem pretty manageable — 50,000 kills won't seem like that many once you've seen the size of some of the bigger enemy packs. The only ones that might bring you down are things like getting the best quality gear, weapons, and mods in every slot, but it's hard to contextualise and judge those at this early stage. There is no doubt that this should be a pretty spot-on kind of list for many players, though.

Summary

Even if it didn't blossom into something more, 'solid action-RTS' is probably the label I would slap on the box of The Riftbreaker from the first impression I had during its opening few hours. Aside from some technical hitches and unintuitive menus, it functioned really well and has some 'explore, build, and gather' gameplay loops that offer serious promise. I just hope that these systems expand a touch more further down the line. The real shining light here is just how pretty this beast is — with a vibrant world swaying just out of reach of your base walls, you will always be enticed to explore more of the gorgeous undergrowth. Even if you don't like RTS games traditionally, the visuals, hack-and-slash elements, story, and the pared-down strategy aspects will really help you ease into the world that developer EXOR Studios has made. There is no doubt, Game Pass is a great place for The Riftbreaker to become known to many who would otherwise not touch a top-down strategy game. So, I would wholeheartedly recommend that you check it out because this is a Free Pass every day of the week. Now if you'll excuse me, I still have a base to reconstruct from the bloody ashes of the last one I lost...

Kes spent two hours beating the opening stages of the game and getting too caught up in making sure his wind turbines were perfectly aligned. In the process, he absolutely nailed a single achievement: well done him!

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Xbox Game Pass First Impressions

Written by Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Working across TrueTrophies and TrueAchievements, Kes writes news, reviews, and a variety of bespoke features. Kes left university after four years with a first-class MA in English Literature — a subject that required research, creativity, and lots of writing. He also has dabbled in teaching, farming, and building websites. Some days, he plays Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag to pretend he is a pirate.