Rift Breaker, a unique RTS multi-genre fusion

By Brian Aykut. Published: Monday, 15th November, 2021

The Rift Breaker title screen.

Rift Breaker is a cool fusion of RTS + ARPG. Build bases and slog through enemies whilst exploring and defending them. It provides a minimal but adequate story and tonnes of exploration to keep one quite engaged. Essentially you travel through a multitude of missions on different maps spanning several biomes. Each with its own unique challenges. By selectively building bases you can amass various new resources and progress technologically. These resources are then used to build the infrastructure required to open a portal to earth or for new/better buildings.

Rift Breaker features an extensive research tree and diverse equipment so that you can customize your Mecha “Mr Riggs”. Adding to that customization enemies from time to time drop mods. These can be installed in higher-tiered equipment or defence towers. Many of the alien species are quite unique, with some of them having hints of zerg inspiration.

The environments

The flora also offers an interesting opportunity to “grow” minerals as opposed to simply strip-mining the planet. This allows for a possibly more sustainable approach late-game. Personally I mostly just strip-mined the planet. I did try to harvest a little but it generally didn’t feel needed.

I found the varied environments made for engaging gameplay. Each biome has its own unique challenges relating to the environment, flora and/or fauna.

It’s quite fascinating how flora and fauna purportedly interact with their environments. Discovering these tidbits by scanning in between battles makes scanning much less of a slog.

Graphics and performance

The gameplay is mostly smooth. It looks great even on a quite modest PC (i7 4770 + GTX 1060). When I shifted to my primary PC and cranked up the settings that’s when the games’ graphics REALLY shined. Stutters were noted from time to time even on my higher-end PC running from NVMe storage. This was in addition to the autosave issue I note below.

The bugs

Most bugs/issues I encountered were minor and tolerable. However one stood out and I consider it game-breaking as it halted all progress.

A few of the bugs I encountered:

  • The movement keys often get stuck when using the alt key to produce maximum level buildings.
  • Sometimes when I used 2 weapons simultaneously one or both being unusable until I changed weapon.
  • A bug with the final mission prevented completion without cheats. This was despite completing all available objectives in all locations including all requirements for the Rift Station.
Lightning everywhere the rift gate open but no end sequence or follow-up mission triggered.
It looks pretty awesome but damn it was anticlimactic.

The other issue which I found quite annoying was when the game autosaves it stutters severely. The cadence of autosave often is about the same as that of events. Given that said events are often battles this can frustratingly result in death. This issue was present running on SATA SSD’s and on a 4 disk RAID 10 array of HDD’s. Using a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD minimized the stutter to tolerable levels. I recommend installing to an NVMe SSD if you’ve one available. This issue is known by the developers and is noted in their known issues FAQ on Steam discussion.

Conclusion

I feel that overall Rift Breaker is a very cool game with a lot of potential. The progression halting bugs and the diminished experience from a progression halting bug was truly disappointing as I’d very much loved to have written a purely positive review. It’s a great game but for me, hitting such a significant bug was quite the letdown.