YMMV / The Riftbreaker

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Ashley and Mr. Riggs like to remind you every minute or so that your carbonium storage is full, build more carbonium storages. And your steel storage is full, build more steel storages. Oh, and your uranium storage is full, build more uranium storages... And every time you load into a savegame, reminders for every single resource will be given one after the other.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Power Fist trivializes combat against all but a handful of alien species. There's exactly one species that's totally immune to it, and a few that explode on death, making melee combat somewhat more dangerous against them. These enemies rarely participate in raids on your bases, which usually means you can just plant yourself in their path and keep punching thousands of them into a fine colorful paste without the critters even getting in range of your turrets. It's also one of the easiest and safest ways to explore new maps.
  • The Cultivator/Harvester combo can quickly make mining ore patches obsolete. All it takes is some diligent scanning of the planet's flora, a bit of power, and a lot of water, all of which is easy to acquire on pretty much every map. The cultivator can then grow plants that yield up to four different resources including the rare ones used for upgrades at a decent rate, indefinitely, with a single field serviced by a bunch of harvesters providing a higher yield than the corresponding, fully covered and finite ore patches. Once you have the required tech at level 3, economic concerns are essentially a thing of the past.
  • Fusion Plants. While they are expensive initially, you can unlock several equipment options that drastically reduces their build cost, up to 48%. Once they're built though, they only require a small upkeep of water. In exchange, you get 7k energy, and 200 plasma. The energy production of a single Fusion Plant alone can power a single medium base, and ten of them can easily power all but the largest of bases. The plasma they produce can be combined with liquid compressor and decompressors to provide your walls with over 20k health in shields, or be turned into supercharged plasma for use in heavy artillery towers.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Hailstorms, tornadoes and earthquakes are world events that players have absolutely no way to mitigate. Dust storms, lightning storms, ion storms, strong winds - all of them can be neutralized by diversifying your energy mix. Meteor hail or volcanic bombardment? Targets only the immediate area around Mr. Riggs, so just go to an empty spot on the map and wait it out. Giant waves of alien critters zerging your base? That's what turrets are for. But hailstorms and earthquakes just... appear out of nowhere, deal varying amounts of damage to your base either in a large area or on the entire map, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except wait for it to end and then spend an inordinate amount of time warping from base to base for repairs. It adds nothing to the gameplay but frustration. It was bad enough that the first major patch turned hailstorm from a map-wide event into a localized one, reduced the duration and damage of all bad events, and introduced more neutral events to the pool so that bad ones would roll less often.

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