Video Game / The Riftbreaker

A girl and her giant mecha

The Riftbreaker is a survival real-time strategy game by developed by EXOR Studios. Taking place in the future were mankind has begun to colonize the stars you step into the shoes of Captain Ashley S. Nowak: the titular Riftbreaker who is an elite scientist/commando inside a powerful Mecha-Suit. Sent through a one-way portal to a distant planet at the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, Galatea 37, your job is to build up a base that will allow travel back to Earth and further colonization. As well as exterminating any pesky wildlife that might interfere in humanity's colonization efforts.

A good way to describe the game would be a mix of They Are Billions combat and Factorio base building.

The first DLC, Metal Terror, was released on July 2022. It features a new biome featuring bio-mechanical flora and fauna and deals with a plot involving an ancient alien civilization that attempted to colonize Galatea 37.

The second DLC, Into the Dark was released on May 2023. It has Ashley and Mr. Riggs delve underground into the depths of Galatea 37.

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The game contains examples of following tropes:

• Ability Required to Proceed: Several abilities required for progression are tied to the Research tree, including any capacity for operating effectively in the Desert, Volcanic, and Acid biomes.
• Applied Phlebotinum: A whole separate branch of the research tree is dedicated to studying and applying technologies derived from alien lifeforms and minerals not found on Earth. The rewards include guns that shoot acid and frost, energy weapons, teleportation, gravity manipulation, time manipulation, and more.
• Alien Blood: Galatea 37's wildlife bleeds pretty much the full rainbow of colors, with the various alien species having red, green, purple, blue or yellow blood. Some even bleed mud or magma.
• Alien Kudzu: The acidic yeast found in the acid biome is an incredibly virulent lifeform. Left unchecked it'll grow from a handful of colonies to covering the entire map in about 10 real-time minutes of gameplay. The only way to mitigate its spread is by blowing up its countless pustules, then quickly laying acid-resistant floor tiles in their place before they can regrow, or by hunting down every single one of its roots. Either way you'll have your work cut out for you.
• An Arm and a Leg: During an earlier mission, Ashley mishandled a crystal with strange properties, which infected her arm and required amputation. She's not too beat up about it, though, since she got a biomechanical prosthetic out of the deal which works better than the real thing.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Whenever you teleport to a Rift Portal, Outpost, or your Headquarters, you will leave behind a green rift that allows you to teleport back once you have concluded business on the other side. This allows you to resume exploration instead of having to run all the way back to where you were.
• Artificial Stupidity: The enemy AI is pretty dumb. Artillery units will routinely blow up their own melee buddies, and any aggro'd horde will always converge on either the Player Character or the closest structures, making them easy to goad around the map and into your fortified kill zones. The "closest structures" include nonsensical wall pieces built in front of the actual defensive line, allowing your turrets to massacre whole waves while they're busy attacking the decoy buildings. That said, Galatea 37's creatures show no signs of sentience or higher reasoning, being basically animals, which makes this a justified example.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: There are multiple enemy types on the map that dwarf the not exactly small Mr. Riggs, but the "Giant Creature" that sometimes spawns as an event really is 50 feet tall at the very least. It doesn't move from its spawn point until you enter its line of sight, and it isn't all that dangerous to the player, but the species can also spawn as part of late-game attack waves where it can make short work of even the heaviest defenses.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Heavy Artillery turret shoots extremely powerful miniature nuclear warheads over vast distances. It can wipe out whole waves of aliens in a single shot, but it needs supercharged plasma to operate, which means it requires an entire, very expensive production chain setup nearby to keep it active. You could centralize this setup and run pipes all over the map instead, but this comes with its own downsides. It's generally much more efficient to just build one or two normal artillery turrets on the frontline. When you unlock liquid compressors and decompressors, it becomes much more feasible to deploy Heavy Artillery turrets, as you can centralize the production of supercharged plasma, and distribute as needed.
  • One of the four available melee weapons is a giant spear that deals cold damage, one of only three weapons in the game to do so. Most players still ignore it in favor of the Power Fist or the hammer because of its mediocre performance overall.
• Badass Bookworm: Ashley Nowak. One part scientist; one part elite commando; one part One-Man Industrial Revolution.
• Beam Spam: Railgun and laser turrets shoot bright-blue beams. Set up a defensive line composed of them and enjoy the light show.
• BFG: Considering that your Player Character is riding in a 17-feet Mini-Mecha, any gun you can mount on it counts. Its minigun for instance would probably be installed in a fighter jet otherwise.
• BFS: Mr. Riggs' default melee weapon is a giant bifurcated blade almost as long as he is tall, with electrical discharges for added flavor. Performance-wise it hits a solid middle ground between the Power Fist and the Hammer in terms of range, damage, and attack speed.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Basically all of the enemies you face, with the most normal among them being horse-sized pack hunters that come by the dozen at a minimum and build their nests inside gigantic bloated sacks that are implied to be a separate, symbiotic species. From there you move on to arachnids with corrosive Super Spit, giants made of rock and metal, 50-foot-tall striders with a hive mind of Attack Drones, and snails that launch their own regenerating shells as artillery payloads, which itself contains their eggs.
• Boring Yet Practical:
  • The Small Machinegun you start with is a full-auto small-caliber (relatively, anyway) gun that does exactly what you'd expect, lacking any of the style or exotic behavior of what you can later unlock. Researching later upgrades however gives you a weapon that performs exceptionally well at doing a ton of damage to single targets and is accurate at range, and can be expanded further with the right mods.
  • The default movement skill you start with, a simple dash in the direction of your choice, deals no damage at all unlike most of the dozen+ other alternatives you can eventually unlock. However, it remains useful right until the end thanks to the general utility of rapid burst movement both in and out of combat, and its short cooldown. Upgrading it to leave a damaging trail of fire, acid or lightning in its wake makes it Simple, yet Awesome.
  • The standard Sentinel turret is a Jack of All Stats that is cheap to build and upgrade, draws next to no power, and doesn't require ammunition. It'll form the backbone of your defensive lines even when more advanced turrets are available.
  • The Power Fist isn't nearly as flashy as the plethora of badass guns, but there's exactly one enemy type that can't be absolutely massacred by it. Anything else might as well jump into a meat grinder the moment you charge into the fray Dual Wielding Power Fists.
  • Walls. They're dirt-cheap to build but disproportionally useful passive base defenses. A single turret on its own won't achieve much, but surround it with a triple layer of walls and that one turret can suddenly stop multiple early-game attack waves all on its own.
• Bottomless Magazines: Ammo is quite finite in this game, and a common cause of death (or a breach in your defenses) is running out of ammo at an inopportune time because you didn't have enough stocked up before a wave, or have too many weapons/towers using the same type of ammo. On the plus side, there is no need to reload, and ammo for your mech and towers is automatically produced by your Armory and Tower Ammo Factories respectively, which is instantly teleported wherever it needs to go without need for logistics.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The Acidic Plains is pockmarked with lakes of vile green sludge that will do as much damage to your armor as standing in hot magma. It's also home to lots of corrosive creatures, including colonies of self-replicating acidic yeast, which if spawned from a large enough root can eventually cover the entire map in acidic clusters, until and unless you take action against it. On the upside, the sludge pools form the starting point for the gas power technology chain, which enables an immense, inexhaustible power supply that can feed scores of synthesizers or cultivator arrays for virtually unlimited resource generation.
• Bug War: The insectoid inhabitants of Galatea 37 are not to happy to see Ashley land on their planet and start bulldozing their habitats and plundering their resources.
• Cap: Many buildings have a limit on how many of them your base can support at any given time. This prevents you from spamming research facilities, armories or ammo bunkers, which in turn puts a cap on your research speed or the maximum amount of ammo you have available, respectively. You also need to build solid material storage buildings to increase the amount of construction resources you can store.
• Charged Attack: Several ranged weapons, if not fully automatic, have alternate firing modes used by holding down the attack button. For instance, the Shotgun can charge to fire in a narrower cone with greater shot penetration, making it an excellent crowd clearer at the cost of a slower rate of fire.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Item tiers are colored white (normal), blue (advanced), purple (superior), and red (extreme).
  • Most alien species have stronger Alpha and Ultra variants that are basically Palette Swaps of the standard critters.
  • Resource deposits come in light blue (carbonium), orange (ironium), dark blue (cobalt), yellow (palladium), purple (titanium), or green (uranium) coloration. As for the rare resources, hazenite is a slightly lighter orange than ironium, rhodonite is red, ferdonite is aquamarine, and tanzanite has practically the same purple hue as titanium.
• Dash Attack: Most melee weapons synergize with the default (and upgraded) dash ability, performing a powerful slash towards the end of the dash.
• Death from Above:
  • Random events may pelt the map with hailstorms, meteor swarms, or volcanic bombs for a minute or so.
  • Some alien species can lob powerful explosives long distances and even over walls, making them very dangerous additions to attack waves.
  • One of Mr. Riggs' available movement skills lets him perform a highly damaging pounce on enemy forces.
  • The Orbital Laser and Orbital Bombardment call down a giant beam of death and a screen clearing swarm of explosions respectively from the sky.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If Mr. Riggs loses all his health, he merely drops a currently equipped weapon and respawns 5 seconds later at the HQ/Outpost.
• Death World: Galatea 37 is a planet with not just a wide variety of biomes, but a wide variety of biospheres. Not far from the acid-filled plains with self-replicating yeast colonies is a volcanic hellscape that makes Mordor look cozy, and the desert is home to crystaline plant life that eats enough uranium to bathe the landscape in radiation, along with a near-total lack of atmospheric shielding from the sun. On top of this, there's no apparent source of free-standing water that doesn't first require filtration to be usable, aside from a single desert oasis. Even the relatively calm tropical zones suffer from freak tornadoes and hailstorms severe enough to punch holes in the brickwork. And that's without getting into the hundreds upon thousands of hostile predators gunning for you, possessed of a deadly cunning and fantastical powers born of equally fantastic anatomy. Even the smallest are still larger than a human. Despite this, your job is to lay the groundwork to staving all this off so that humanity can colonize the planet anyway.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Several enemies explode fantastically when killed. This ranges from the slightly annoying Granan splashing acid around, to the "Do not melee under any circumstance" Bomogan and Lesigian.
• Deflector Shields:
  • Although called armor in-game, Mr. Riggs is equipped with an outer layer of shielding that prevents health damage while active. It's represented by a blue bar, regenerates quickly after a short time of taking no damage, and can be strengthened through various researchable upgrades.
  • Late-game research unlocks shield generators that can be constructed at the frontlines to protect other buildings in a circular area around them from taking damage until the shield is depleted.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Power Fist combines very high attack speed with good damage, stunning blows and an inbuilt Life Drain trait that allows Ashley to punch entire armies of aliens into Ludicrous Gibs while taking next to no damage herself. It can be unlocked within about half an hour into the game.
• Drone Deployer: Available in civilian and military versions. The former is used in automated agriculture and building repair, the latter in the form of turrets that either lay minefields over time or just attack any enemy in range with small Attack Drones.
• Dual Wielding: Mr. Riggs can switch freely between up to three sets of weapons, all of which can be mixed and matched as the player desires, which includes dual-wielding identical weapons. Using two matched melee weapons gives them a unique animation that hits with both.
• Easy Logistics: Especially when compared to its inspirations. While fluids need to be locally harvested and transported by pipe, there is no need to fuss over transporting solid resources from point A to point B, and all solid resources go into a universal stockpile. You can also set up remote mining outposts in distant locales which will keep your industry fed at home with no additional setup.
• Enemy Civil War: Played with. A few powerful enemy types are hostile to other critters; it's not unusual for some of them to wipe out large groups of weaker creatures in seconds without taking serious damage themselves. However, while certainly useful to the player when it happens, these battles are much more likely to be regular predator-prey clashes than part of an actual civil war.
• Enemy Scan: The unlockable Bioscanner lets you safely sample alien flora and fauna from a distance as long as they're in line of sight. Doing this is required to get a reading of their stats, weaknesses, and dropped resources, and getting enough samples of a given species will improve your combat and loot values against them.
• Final Death Mode: Hardcore mode can be enabled on any difficulty setting to give the player exactly one life. Get Mr. Riggs destroyed and it's game over.
• Flash Step:
  • The default movement ability, Dash, works like this, near-instantly moving Mr. Riggs a short distance in a straight line. Upgraded versions leave a damaging trail of fire, acid or ice in its wake that can be used for defense and offense alike.
  • One rare elite enemy type can use such an ability against the player by charging right through them. It takes a moment to charge the attack, but getting hit deals enough damage to one-shot Mr. Riggs on higher difficulties.
• Fog of War: Riftbreaker utilizes the proven system of a map wholly obscured until you explore it, and regions you can't actively see being covered by a lighter fog that only shows the map's geography but not enemies. Radar stations can be built to reveal undiscovered terrain and prevent random mobs from respawning in unobserved zones.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Laser weaponry can be unlocked by progressing through the alien research tree. It's particularly strong against powerful individual targets since it does increasing damage the longer it remains focused on a single target.
• Friendly Fireproof: Your turrets can't hurt you, and neither can you damage any of your own structures. They still block your fire, though, which can throw defensive plans into chaos if you failed to account for that by constructing parapets. Interestingly, Galatea's critters can hurt each other, usually by charging into the blast radius of the bombs launched by their own living siege engines.
• Gaia's Lament: The Riftbreaker program was created to scout and prepare distant worlds for human colonization after mankind raped Earth so hard the planet is barely habitable anymore. Ashley intends to make sure that Galatea doesn't suffer the same fate once colonization begins. Mr. Riggs, who adheres to the official mission statement, couldn't care less about protecting the environment.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The characterization of Riftbreaker's protagonist Ashley frequently clashes with its gameplay. Ashley constantly talks about her desire to explore the planet's biosphere, research it, and hopefully learn how to coexist peacefully with the local fauna despite knowing how ruthlessly the rest of mankind will exploit Galatea 37 once they arrive. In gameplay, however, she gleefully slaughters tens of thousands of aliens with oftentimes horrific weaponry, and turns whole swathes of nature into an industrial hellscape to pave the way for mankind's arrival.
• Gatling Good: The minigun is the most powerful small-caliber gun in the game, available in portable and turret-mounted versions. It eats ammo like candy, so you'll need all the armories and tower ammo factories you can build to avoid running out of bullets in the middle of a fight. Even then you can run dry very quickly if you rely too much on minigun towers.
• Genre-Busting: The game combines elements of at least half a dozen different genres, most prominently Tower Defense, Diablo-style Hack and Slash with twin-stick shooter mechanics, Survival Sandbox, and Construction and Management.
• Geo Effects: The natural conditions in the various biomes have a huge impact on the gameplay. The volcanic biome for instance is constantly covered in ash clouds that block the sun and calm the winds, making both solar panels and wind turbines largely useless and forcing you to use alternative power sources like geothermal or magma power plants. All biomes but the tropical zones also have unique natural hazards that hinder base construction - quicksand in the radioactive deserts, unbearable heat in the volcanic zones, and rapidly spreading acidic yeast in the acid biome.
• Glass Cannon: Mr. Riggs can wipe out thousands of aliens in under a minute, but one or two hits from a decently powerful creature are usually enough to do him in. Some high-level enemies can one-shot him on any difficulty above Normal.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: You get an achievement for killing 500 enemies with Mr. Riggs' bare hands. And of course, dual Power Fists.
• Gorn: Any encounter with the local wildlife results in fountains of Alien Blood and exploded carcasses.
• Gravity Screw: On entering a specific campaign map, Mr. Riggs mentions that the area has significantly below-average gravity. This is not just Flavor Text. The Grenade Launcher becomes much harder to use on this map because its targeting reticule doesn't adapt to the change, and any collectible may end up flying off into the stratosphere instead of landing somewhere on the ground nearby.
• Grenade Launcher: Arguably the most versatile explosive weapon, featuring a good balance of damage, splash radius, refire rate, and spare ammo, plus it can arc its shots over obstacles, something no other weapon can do. With a bit of practice one can even bounce grenades around corners to hit aliens out of direct sight. Higher tiers of the weapon can launch grenades in salvoes instead of just one per shot.
• Guide Dang It!: The game can be a bit secretive about its features.
  • A lot of players spent dozens of hours without realizing that holding down a specific button during building placement^note Alt on PC automatically places the highest available tier of that building, thus saving time by sparing the player a bunch of consecutive upgrade steps. The loading screen tips may mention it, but it still went over many people's heads.
  • It is actually possible to get rid of the levitating magnetic rocks in the volcanic biome - but the use of acid weaponry is only quickly speculated on in dialogue and never remarked on again.
  • The game-breaking cultivators and harvesting stations are easy to use but badly explained. Forum threads asking how to pick specific plants for the cultivator to grow are plentiful online.
  • Higher level mines do not just produce materials faster, they do so more efficiently - they produce more resource but deplete the ore at the same rate as their lower level counterparts.
• Guns Akimbo: All ranged weapons can be dual-wielded if the player so desires, although the overreliance on any one ammo type can be dangerous due to different enemies having different resistances. There's an achievement for dual-wielding miniguns for 15 seconds without releasing the trigger.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ashley can pull one at the end of the campaign by destroying the portal to Earth, thus saving Galatea 37's territorial wildlife from certain extinction, at least for a time.
• Hold the Line:
  • With Riftbreaker being part Tower Defense game, this was to be expected. The game periodically spawns increasingly large and powerful waves of attacking alien hordes that you need to fend off lest they overrun your bases. Unsurprisingly, the campaign's Final Battle takes it up to eleven.
  • Survival mode is all about holding firm against waves of enemies for 90 minutes. Higher difficulty settings reduce the time between waves and increase their strength.
• Hollywood Acid: "Corrosion" is a damage subtype, which includes acid, poison and radiation-based weapons. Enemies struck will be engulfed in burning green liquid, and its the only thing strong enough to melt (much less destroy) the floating rocks in the volcanic biome.
• Humans Are Bastards: Dialogue between Ashley and Mr. Riggs makes abundantly clear that mankind as a whole is a species of planet looters that couldn't care less about preserving the native biosphere of the worlds they invade to strip-mine for resources. It's quite likely that most of Galatea 37's wildlife will be exterminated once you open the portal to Earth, seeing how the ending cinematic shows fighter jets, tank columns and an army of infantry ready to roll.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Chainsaws deal EXTREME DPS with whatever enemy they make contact with. If that wasn't enough, they also stunlock whatever they hit into oblivion. This means that you can walk up to any enemy that isn't outright immune to physical damage, and tear it to pieces in record time.
• Interface Screw:
  • Ion storms disable the map, making fast travel impossible for the duration. The same happens in the vicinity of any of the floating magnetic rocks in the volcanic biome.
  • Dust storms and fog seriously reduce general visibility while they last.
• Item Crafting: The only equipment you're given for free are the three starting weapons - a basic sword, machine gun, and plasma blaster. Everything else you need to research, then craft from the game's various resources. Higher-tier equipment requires both more and additional resources, usually the rare ones you need to unlock first.
• Kill It with Fire: Flamethrowers are available in mobile versions for Mr. Riggs or turret-mounted for base defense. One of the upgrades to the Dash ability also sets the ground behind the mecha on fire, much to the detriment of any alien that runs into the flames. Some advanced enemies and of course most of the critters native to the volcanic biome are at least resistant to fire damage, if not outright immune, but there're enough flammable enemy types left that it remains a very powerful weapon regardless. It's particularly useful against smaller enemies that move in hordes and swarm their targets in melee.
• Kill It with Ice: The spear, the Cryogenic Atomizer and the Cryogenic Mine deal Cold damage (which few things resist) and slow enemies caught in its blast.
• King Mook: Most of the larger enemy types have at least one giant boss version that comes with its own skull symbol on the minimap. These are mostly encountered in the campaign during specific missions, but they can also appear in Survival attack waves on higher difficulties. Aside from that, only one boss monster, the Arachnoid Boss, spawns on a semiregular basis as part of the Unusually Large Creature event, making it the one you'll be seeing the most by a wide margin.
• Landmine Goes Click:
  • Mines come in all sorts of flavors - standard hi-ex, cryo, gravity, and even nuclear. There's also a turret that covers the area around it with a dense minefield over time, perfect against vast swarms of melee enemies.
  • The acid biome contains whole fields of invisible organic mines that deal heavy acid damage in a huge radius. They can be detected with the geoscanner, assuming you have the time and opportunity for minesweeping, but the aggressive wildlife often makes this unfeasible.
• Lethal Lava Land: The volcanic biome, so incredibly hot that even Riggs's armor will constantly take damage until you've gotten far enough in to develop stronger shielding. Even then you can't actually build anything there except within the relative safety of a Cryo Tower's chilling aura. Aside from that it's also prone to sudden showers of erupting debris, earthquakes, and ash storms choking your solar panels.
• Lost Aesop: It's hard to tell what sort of message the devs sought to convey in Riftbreaker's campaign. Your Player Character is a moral scientist who wants to study and preserve a new planet's fascinating biosphere, but at the same time she's an elite commando sent to pave the way for human colonization by any means necessary. She spends a lot of time talking about her desire to explore, study and coexist with the local wildlife, but she also spends at least as much time slaughtering that very same wildlife by the thousands without batting an eye. The gameplay reflects this dichotomy by focusing equally on research, exploration, and fun, fast-paced combat against vast hordes of alien creatures. Sooo... we should strive to study and preserve strange new biomes, but only as long as burning them to the ground isn't so damn entertaining?
• Magikarp Power: The majority of technologies start out pretty lame but gain massive bumps in power and efficiency as they level up. For instance, the gas power chain on tier 1 requires two sludge pumps to supply one gas power plant that generates an unimpressive 500 power. On tier 3 these two pumps can supply six power plants that generate 1,000 power each.
• Magma Man: Hedroners are found in the volcanic regions, and can cross pools of lava with ease and throw flaming rocks at you or your base. The smaller ones will teleport to safety if you get too close, so the safest way to fight them is to just gun them down.
• Magnetic Weapons: Alien research can unlock railgun technology in mobile and turret-mounted versions, both characterized by their One-Hit Polykill behavior.
• Mis-blamed: An In-Universe example. Mobs on the map start attacking the player on sight, and failing that, the moment they take any damage whatsoever, even if the player had nothing to do with it. This can result in a good portion of the map dogpiling Mr. Riggs simultaneously because a random meteoroid shower sent every single enemy within a few screens of the player's location into a murderous rage.
• Multiple Endings: Winning the Final Battle of the campaign lets you decide between fulfilling your Riftbreaker mission by fully opening the portal to Earth, or letting it collapse so the planet will be (temporarily) spared from mankind's invasion, at least until Earth sends another Riftbreaker to finish the job. Both endings have their own unique cinematics.
• Mundane Utility: The hammer can turn whole platoons of aliens into a bloody paste with a single swing. It's also very handy for clearing dense vegetation quickly, to make room for a new outpost. Granted, most weapons can do that, too, but few are as good at it as the hammer.
• Necromancer: Necrodons can revive slain critters, provided they haven't been turned into Ludicrous Gibs. Sounds bad in theory, but when you're slaughtering 50+ enemies per second, some of them getting back up for another round hardly makes a difference.
• Nintendo Hard: As can be expected from a game that takes equal inspiration from They Are Billions and Factorio. Don't be surprised if your base gets wiped out.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Galatea 37's hyper-aggressive wildlife isn't attacking out of malice; it's simply defending its territory from a murderous invader. It's the genocidal, planet-looting humans that are the real monsters. And you're playing as one of them.
• No-Sell: If you attack an alien and see a "Resisted" hint pop up above it, it's taking no damage whatsoever from your attack. You better have a weapon with a different damage type in your arsenal when this happens. This is also the main reason why you should never rely on any single type of turret for base defense - a single physical-immune golem is enough to wreck your entire base if you don't have energy or explosive weapons in the mix.
• Nuke 'em: The uranium research tree provides access to both offensive and defensive nuclear weapons in the form of a nuke missile launcher and nuclear landmines, respectively. Both deal obscene amounts of damage in a huge area; the nuke launcher even has a Charged Attack that instagibs pretty much everything on the entire screen in one shot. The downsides are high ammo consumption and extremely low refire rates.
• One-Hit Polykill: Weapons have a penetration stat that determines how effective they are at overpenetrating the first target to hit others behind it. Some like the Sniper Rifle and especially the Railgun can punch clean through dozens of smaller enemies in a line.
• Our Giants Are Different: They come in two flavors. The Gnerot is a literal "sleeping giant" made of stone which shrugs off bullets with zero effect, and the Krocoon is a steel behemoth with one leg that uses its arms to move and is immune to explosives. Neither are aggressive until attacked (unless part of an attack wave), but it's pretty easy for you and your enemies alike to accidentally splash them with something and draw their ire. Both are several times bigger than Mr. Riggs, himself several times larger than Ashley the human.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: When Riggs gets defensive over the quality of his programming, Ashley sarcastically reassures him, alone on Galatea 37 with Ashley, that he's "the best AI on this planet."
• Plasma Cannon: Most ranged energy weapons shoot blue plasma bolts, usually with a decent rate of fire and good per-shot damage.
• Powered Armor: Ashley's Mecha-suit, which she calls "Mr. Riggs", is designed to withstand the harshest environmental conditions as it is to be used to explore hostile, unknown territory. It also has a full range of equipment for base construction, resource extraction, gathering biological and geological specimens and combat.
• Power Fist: The Power Fist, an absurdly powerful melee weapon that can be acquired very early and can massacre almost anything with next to no resistance.
• Power Source: Researching uranium handling unlocks the construction of nuclear power plants, one of the most efficient power sources in the game. They require a constant supply of refined uranium and water, though, so they usually can't be set up just anywhere you'd like.
• Procedural Generation: All maps are randomly generated, which can make the game much harder or easier from the outset, depending on where and how bountiful essential resource deposits are spawned. Fortunately, Save Scumming is possible - if you don't like a map, reload the last save and try again.
• Random Event: The game will occasionally change things up with random events depending on your current biome, ranging from storms that change the effectiveness of solar/wind farms, to meteor showers bombarding your base, to Giant Mook minibosses that will continuously spawn enemies until destroyed.
• Randomly Drops: Creatures killed have a chance to drop various common resources, which increases the more familiar you've become with their species, as well as a lesser chance to drop weapon mods of varying quality. Additionally, any weapons you craft will have random stats within a certain range, so it may be worth crafting multiple copies of something if you can spare the minerals.
• Random Number God: Crafted equipment is subject to a considerable range of randomization. Base stats can vary wildly, and any item's secondary traits are rolled semi-randomly as well. Crafting the same item over and over can result in a massive power boost with a lucky roll, but you'll need a very robust economy to keep this up for long due to the rapidly escalating resource requirements.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Unusually, human scientist Ashley is the calm and restrained blue to Mr. Riggs' much more aggressive red.
• Rousing Speech: Mr. Riggs is programmed to recite a number of these to Ashley, written and pre-recorded from Earth's highest military leaders, as she reaches certain progression milestones. Ashley quickly realizes that the speeches are nothing more than Mad Libs Dialogue, however, and she declines to hear more than the first.
• Save Scumming: Can be used to mitigate some of the more exasperating aspects of the game, to the point that shortening the autosave interval to no more than 5 minutes can make the game much more enjoyable overall.
  • All maps are randomly generated. If you don't like what you've been given, reload and try again.
  • Every couple of minutes the game picks a random event from a quite extensive list, some of which are a real pain in the posterior to deal with. Reloading the latest save right before the event fired can save the player a lot of headaches and frustration by, say, turning a devastating tornado into a much less annoying thunderstorm, or even a beneficial event like a meteor that spawns a new resource deposit. And if you're unfortunate enough to roll the same event again, it might well be weaker, or occur in a different area of the map where it doesn't inflict as much damage.
• Scenery Porn: The game has amazing graphics and a huge variety of lovingly detailed alien biomes for the player to rampage through.
• Sentry Gun: One unlockable consumable is a short-lived but fairly powerful automated turret that the player can plonk down anywhere. The thing deals a good amount of physical damage, but most importantly it draws the undivided attention of every critter in range, taking the heat off the player while it lasts.
• Settling the Frontier: Your goal is to explore Galatea 37, pacify the local wildlife and build up the necessary infrastructure so humanity can start colonizing the planet in earnest.
• Shifting Sand Land: The desert contains uranium, and is marked by howling wind tunnels, a burning hot sun completely unmitigated by any protective atmosphere, and patches of quicksand too unstable for you to build on until you advance in research.
• Shock and Awe: Some high-level enemies deploy a variety of powerful electrical attacks against you. The Energy Dash ability also works like this by leaving behind a trail of crackling lightning discharges that deal high damage to any critter that touches it.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Not really. The shotgun has easily the worst DPS of all ranged weapons, being mostly ineffective against anything larger than the small One Hitpoint Wonder critters while consuming disproportionate amounts of ammo. If you like guns, use any of the rapid-fire slug throwers. If you need something for CQC, mount a flamethrower or any of its ice/acid variants.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Queen Bee achievement, awarded for having 50 drones active simultaneously, is subtitled "I am the swarm".
  • Ashley lost her arm after she touched a crystal that was growing more of itself - the crystal infected her arm and the arm needed to be amputated to save her. Sounds like she found another Tiberium-infested planet.
• Socketed Equipment: Slain enemies and salvaged egg clusters may drop weapon mods that can be inserted in any weapon better than Normal tier. Advanced models have one slot, superior have two, extreme have three. One can also add up to two mods to upgraded turrets.
• Spell My Name with a "The": The game's name is The Riftbreaker, thank you very much.
• Taking You with Me: Some critters either explode on death or leave a puddle of Hollywood Acid behind when killed, strongly discouraging melee combat against them.
• Tech Tree: Three of them, actually. One covers general base buildings, one is for weapons, and the third for anything related to the alien research done on Galatea, which makes it the most diverse by far. Progressing through the trees requires upgrading certain buildings like the HQ, the armory, or the alien lab, respectively. Some technologies also don't unlock in the campaign until certain other prerequisites are met.
• Thinking Up Portals: Insta-travel portal technology forms an important part of the game's story and gameplay. The player can plonk down fast-travel portals pretty much anywhere they want to quickly move around the map or between bases (or even within the same base), and constructing a long-range two-way portal that links Galatea 37 with Earth is the whole point of the campaign.
• Underground Monkey: While the weak horde critters are unique to each biome, some alien creatures have mostly identical subtypes that only differ in their coloration and the type of damage they deal. For instance, the living mortar creatures in the Tropical biome launch orange bombs that deal explosive damage, whereas their counterparts in the Acid biome throw green bombs with acid damage.
• Universal Ammunition: Played with. Both your mech and your defensive towers have separate pools of ammo, themselves divided into separate types such as low- or high-caliber bullets, energy cells, liquid fuel, and explosives, depending on the weapon, but for example explosives can be used for anything from swarm missiles to massive nuclear rockets.
• Villain Protagonist: For all her talk about wanting to study and preserve Galatea 37's biosphere, your Player Character is still a ruthless colonialist who invades a foreign planet and brutally slaughters its native inhabitants so she and her species can start exploiting the world's bountiful resources. You have the option to defy your orders at the end of the campaign by destroying the portal to Earth, thus at least delaying mankind's invasion for a time, but that's cold comfort for the tens of thousands of natives you'll have killed by then.
• Visible Invisibility: One rare and powerful alien species is nearly invisible while moving, uncloaking only right before they attack for massive damage. They can be spotted by the faint visual distortion effect of their camouflage if you're sufficiently attentive, but it's easy to overlook them while busy fighting other enemies. Thankfully they can be damaged regardless of their visibility. Gaining enough familiarity with the species allows adapting their camouflage ability for use by Mr. Riggs.
• You Bastard!: You're not exactly playing as an archetypical hero in this game, seeing how you invade a foreign biosphere and launch an indiscriminate slaughter of its native inhabitants for fun and profit. The game is happy to call you out on this behavior with the Horrible Person achievement, which you get for exterminating 1,000 neutral creatures. It's pretty much impossible not to unlock it rather sooner than later even if you don't go out of your way to target the harmless wildlife For the Evulz.
  • There's also the Scientist? achievement for killing 50,000 hostile creatures, easily unlocked about halfway through the campaign.
• You Require More Vespene Gas:
  • Building construction requires carbonium, ironium, cobalt, titanium, palladium and uranium. All of these can be mined from resource veins on the map. The latter three are mostly used for late-game technologies and can only be found on separate maps when playing Campaign mode. They can, however, be farmed via the cultivator if you're sufficiently familiar with the right plant species. In Survival mode they're all found on the main map, although the fairly short time limit means you're unlikely to get to use the more advanced materials before the round ends one way or another.
  • Item Crafting consumes large amounts of the rare resources hazenite, rhodonite, ferdonite and tanzanite. These can only be acquired from specific plants, leaving cultivator/harvester setups as the only way of farming them automatically.
• Zerg Rush: The energy emissions of your base (especially when upgrading your HQ) will periodically attract swarms of enemies from all directions, which can be hundreds or thousands of bodies thick, to assault you. As you continue to progress in the game, the variety and toughness of the enemies will increase in kind. Fittingly, the earliest enemy you meet in the game is a dead ringer for the Zergling and you can bet you'll see a lot of those.