Combining the action RPG combat of Diablo with the survival and base building of Satisfactory, The Riftbreaker is an impressive genre mash-up. It’s a fast and fluid mix of ideas where you bounce between calm moments of construction and frantic fights, but you’ve always had to do this alone. That’s not going to be the case for much longer though, as developer Exor Studios details all the mechanical changes coming to the new co-op mode, and you can still sign up to give it a try ahead of time. Best of all, The Riftbreaker is dirt cheap right now in a Steam sale.
If you’re familiar with the base building of survival games like Rust, Satisfactory, and 7 Days to Die, then you know how a session of The Riftbreaker starts. After traveling the galaxy and looking to colonize foreign planets in your trusty mecha-suit, you need to farm resources and build a fully functional base filled with mines, refineries, and power plants. It’s from here that The Riftbreaker shifts gears, as periodic waves of wildlife will storm your base to stop your incessant industrialization. All of a sudden you’re locked in combat akin to Last Epoch, Diablo, and Path of Exile, needing to use the downtime between waves to explore and upgrade your base.
This has proved to be a winning formula, with over 15,000 user reviews giving The Riftbreaker a 90% rating. It’s a beloved mash-up that’s cheaper than ever in a Steam sale, and a fully functional co-op overhaul is on the way.
According to Exor Studios, the survival mode is playable from start to finish in co-op, as the team is now turning its focus on improving The Riftbreaker’s overall online experience. The main problem: four-player co-op makes the game too easy. “It quickly became apparent that when everything was working fine, four players could easily clear the entire map in just about an hour, build an impenetrable fortress, and then start yawning and playing checkers,” Exor explains. “Some changes were necessary.”
To mitigate the lack of challenge, Exor is making adjustments to all difficulties in online co-op and giving you the tools to customize the settings as well. The team calls co-op “Riftbreaker on overdrive,” with the survival mode’s cooldown between attack waves reduced from seven minutes to four. Exor assures that this is more than enough time to maintain and upgrade your base between waves when online, even if it seems like it’ll go down to the wire.
Exor adds that it’s also removed the attack waves tied to headquarters upgrades. This means you can’t trigger an HQ upgrade to stop an attack, but you can better predict when the next wave will come and plan accordingly instead. The co-op mode will also add new prototype bosses, which will have special bonus stats and between one to three special abilities to contend with. Bosses will come throughout regular waves, so your team will need to decide if you all want to blitz them together, or would rather split up and defend your base at the same time.
While co-op should make base building and combat easier, The Riftbreaker’s resources are still finite. The last thing you want to do is spend all your resources and have no more to upgrade your base, so Exor has made weapon costs cheaper the more people you have in your game. By the same token, small loot caches now respawn at random intervals across your online game. So you’ll want to explore and grab some early on, and then head back to them between attack waves to see if they have any more to offer your team.
The Riftbreaker’s co-op mode will also introduce pings and emotes to help ease communication, and every player can directly teleport to each other to help them out of a bind. These changes should make online play efficient, but Exor is aware that features like these might need tweaking over time.
Exor Studios says it has no schedule for giving out multiplayer beta keys, but you can sign up for a chance to get involved here, with the feature still in development.
The Riftbreaker is currently 45% off until Monday August 5, so expect to pay $16.49 / £13.74 until then. You can also download a free Steam demo right here, if you want to try it out before paying.
If you want to focus on the construction side of The Riftbreaker we have plenty of incredible building games to check out. Alternatively, our list of the best games like Diablo will keep you busy if you’re more interested in the ARPG side of the game.
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