The Riftbreaker – The Complete DLC Review

The Riftbreaker DLC 1 – Metal Terror

Introduction

This first expansion for The Riftbreaker will bring Ashely and Riggs to a new biome on Galatea, the Metallic Valley. Sometime during the normal campaign progression, you’ll get a unique event in your headquarters zone; when completed, it will start the questline and grant access to the first of several new DLC-related zones. If you’re a fan of EXOR Studios’ previous games, you’ll definitely see an unexpected comeback from one of them during this DLC.

Secondary questline in an all-new biome, with new resources and research opportunities.

Your main mission in the Metal Valley, spanning through multiple standalone zones, will be to investigate the alien machines and whatever happened in this region seemingly thousands of years ago. Other than the usual objectives of setting up and defending outposts, there will be some variations to the formula customary of the main campaign: for instance, some objectives will ask you to build research stations in multiple areas and defend them all from attacks at the same time, or roam the map in search of specific devices to activate. The new mission subtypes aren’t extremely innovative, but they offer some degree of variation, enough to not be the exact same stuff of the main campaign. Of course, scanning the new animals and plants of this zone will unlock research blueprints in the usual way.

New weapons, modules and gadgets.

Speaking of new stuff, this DLC mainly introduces three weapons and a handful of gadgets for your mech. The lightning gun is an AoE energy weapon with a high fire rate, similar to a flamethrower but with the ability of chaining to even distant enemies – I found it to be a great addition to deal with fast hordes of small enemies, especially if modded correctly. The heavy plasma is a beefed-up version of the regular plasma gun: slower, but more powerful, akin to an autocannon rather than a machine gun. Last but not least the Chainsaw, a melee weapon with very high speed that has the unique ability to literally perma-stagger any enemy if used in dual-wielding – even the heaviest foes or the thickest hordes will succumb to this never-ending spinning blade.

For gadgets, we have the Orbital Cannon, a powerful, linear energy strike that inflicts enormous energy damage across a straight path but has a long cooldown, and the Scanner Turret, one of my personal favorites, allows you to deploy limited-duration towers that scan everything in range for you at an increased speed and with better range, adding the results to research automatically, but without having to manually scan everything. Overall the new weapons and tools are useful and pretty cool, none of them is some stupid gimmick and they all feel worth trying/investing into upgrading with mods.

Morphium Technology towers & buildings.

Liquid metal pools of unspecified origin, Morphium, are the only fluid found in the new areas. Despite being rich in minerals and other resources, you won’t find any water, mud or acid here, and almost no sunlight for solar panels as well. That’s why harnessing the power of Morphium will be crucial to not only progress in the mission, since only Morphium Towers can clear the path ahead from the alien barriers, but also to use as an energy source with the new power plants and turrets that need active feeding from pipes in order to work. Unless you are advanced enough to build expensive fusion reactors, which are also a viable alternative here if you have the resources.

Speaking of turrets, they are markedly different from anything else in your arsenal: they don’t cost AI Core points, which is great, but also have defensive and offensive functions at the same time, as they not only bestow a shield on nearby units (much weaker than the one of a dedicated Shield Dome of course) but also attack enemies with lethal effectiveness. I found this new tower type to be quite effective in general, however, the Morphium supply requirement means more logistics work to set up pipelines, containers and compressors to distribute it where it’s needed.

Additional foes to fight against.

The Metallic Valley hosts both creatures that heavily mutated due to their exposure to Morphium, and also artificial constructs belonging to the ancient civilization that came before, still roaming around with lethal intent. All the neutral and hostile creatures in this biome will be unique, exceptions made for a few recolors – some of them are particularly strong and different in attack patterns, compared to the ones found in the main campaign.

Then again, difficulty modifiers will impact the challenge level more than anything else here, but aside from that, you’ll surely need to adapt your defenses and equipped weapon to specific resistances and damage types different from the ones you’ve been used to so far, for the most part. Sadly enough, unlike the two more recent DLCs, you won’t find a final boss fight here, but instead only a dialogue with a certain entity; it was disappointing to go through a crescendo of fights and difficulties, only to then have a finale of this type.

Is it Worth Buying? How long does it last?

How much content you get out of Metal Terror largely depends on difficulty settings and your current tech level when you start it out. In my case, I started it on Custom difficulty (Brutal combat/enemy waves, everything else standard) when I already got most Tier 3 towers and at least Superior modules and weapons; pretty far into the main campaign. It took me around 5 hours to finish all the new quests, taking extra time to explore and gather additional research, clear points of interest and build additional logistics in the new areas for future use.

For the price of 10€, this DLC is worth the money in terms of content, quality and usefulness of newly-introduced technologies, which open up new opportunities in your base-building outside of it. I can recommend buying even without a discount if you enjoy the main game and want more, and especially if you played X-Morph Defense, Exor’s excellent tower defense title prior to Riftbreaker because this DLC could be intended as a crossover of sorts between the two games. Even if you didn’t play it, don’t worry, you won’t miss out on story content or lore because of that.

The Riftbreaker DLC 2 – Into The Dark

Introduction

Into The Dark is the second expansion for The Riftbreaker, and will have Ashley and her mechanical companion Riggs venture into a vast, labyrinthine system of caverns that span many miles under the surface of Galatea. Aside from the usual roster of new towers, gadgets, weapons and enemies that come with each DLC, this time around the people at Exor cooked up a brand-new mechanic as well. Other than that, many new environmental hazards of devastating power will be found here, and also an enemy from Ashley’s previous military campaign on Orion, the Anoryx, that somehow reached Galatea ready to wreak havoc. Ashley’s backstory is in fact considerably expanded upon in this DLC.

Secondary questline in an all-new biome, with new research opportunities.

As customary with all DLCs, at some point during the main campaign, a random event will trigger and start the questline of Into the Dark. You’ll then be able to teleport to the underground cave system; here, wind, sunlight and fluids are almost absent except for rare spots, and environmental hazards are more frequent than on the surface, not to mention more dangerous.

One of the main challenges will be setting up a reliable infrastructure to progress your objective, the lack of energy sources and cramped spaces being the biggest problems. You either go for geothermal, wind and biomass shared with other locations, or break the bank with fusion, but always supported by wireless energy transfer pylons (a new entry with this DLC), since building landlines in this biome is very difficult because of the constant attacks and debris falling. In this DLC there won’t be any new resource type, like it was for Metal Terror, however, the new gameplay mechanics and more enemy variety make up for it.

The objectives you’ll be given will have some unique tasks never seen before, other than the usual exploration and research ones already customary for the base campaign. It will be quite difficult with lower tech tiers to keep up all the multiple outposts and facilities required to satisfy such objectives, so I recommend you to progress a good while before attempting this DLC, as it’s unlocked relatively soon, but you probably won’t be ready for it yet unless you play at low difficulty levels.

New weapons.

This time around, there will be several elemental weapons for you to research and equip. Mainly, this DLC has acid, fire and cryo-themed variants of the basic ones found in the campaign, such as the Fire Spitter, which is a flamethrower that works in a slightly different way, or the Immolator, one of my favorites, which demolishes large areas with plasma balls dealing fire damage. I found only two weapons being the real highlight: the Immolator, and the Bouncing Blades, which fires a barrage of piercing saws that can annihilate long hordes of enemies in one go. The other ones, including the Shard Gun given out when defeating the DLC’s boss, aren’t that great and are superseded by other alternatives.

Improved environment destruction and new towers.

The biggest feature of this DLC is the introduction of a new gameplay system, namely destructible walls. Using RIggs’ integrated drill, you’ll be able to clear limestone and free space for building, uncover resource deposits, or make shortcuts to reach places quickly while being shielded from the enemies lurking around. Be aware however: some foes that come in with attacker hordes also are able to dig through, so don’t assume your outposts are safe just because they’re surrounded by limestone, as the enemy may attack from an unexpected angle. They act as spearheads for the following horde of ‘regular’ enemies.

The energy pylon, one of the new towers coming in with this DLC, is in my opinion the single best utility of the entire game. It allows you to wirelessly transfer energy between all pylons, so there won’t be any more building kilometer-long landlines that may break for any reason: they’re cheap, fast to build and immensely useful for when you have many outposts apart from each other. This DLC would be worth the price just for that single tower! There are also other defenses and traps which are fine, but nothing game-changing compared to the ones already available.

Additional new enemies and a two-phase unique boss.

The caverns host a number of enemies with unique skills. For example, some blue-hued ‘dogs’ (?) are able to spawn out of thin air after other ones have been killed and assault you from cracks and pitfalls you couldn’t normally go to. So, instead of enemies just coming from the same places you can also walk into, in this place enemies can also come out of rather unexpected ones. Another new entry is what I call the “medic” because there’s no way I remember its actual name in the Codex – what this guy does is either summon foes out of energy circles in the ground or resurrect the corpses of dead ones. There are two variants of this, and they both teleport around when approached, meaning you can only really kill them with ranged weapons, preferably modded to be homing. Other foes are more similar to the archetypes already seen in the main game, save for different resistances and a couple of new attacks here and there.

The Anoryx boss is a two-stage encounter, and a proper boss, health bar and all. Won’t spoil you the mechanics you’ll have to figure out for yourself, just know it can become immune to damage and summon help, other than pummel you with some really strong AoE in a rather small arena you can’t get out from. I found this boss to be rather easy even on the hardest setting, because a specific weapon is extremely effective against it, to the point of 2-shotting it if used right. Once you figure that out, a fight that is surely challenging becomes quite trivial instead. I think it’s well-designed, with evolving phases and two different encounters, the second being an even more amped-up version.

Is it Worth Buying? How long does it last?

It took me around 6 hours to complete Into the Dark, including the optional missions given after you defeat the final boss, taking some time to explore and do whatever POI was on the way. As usual, this time is heavily influenced by your tech level and difficulty settings – I played on a Custom mode with Hard / Brutal enemies and everything else default. The price of 10€ is definitely worth it even without discounts: the DLC is interesting, adds very useful items, and is a good change of pace from the usual activities of the main campaign.

The Riftbreaker DLC 3 – Heart Of The Swamp

Secondary questline in an all-new biome.

The fungal swamp area will, as usual, introduce new resources and creatures to analyze. In this case, the Resin resource is revealed, which can be processed in unique ways and is a central piece of the questline progression itself. Differently from other areas, this one will have a lot of build-restricted terrain and many movement-impairing zones such as mud, so you might not be as quick on your feet as in other cases to kite and dodge around, making combat more difficult.

The questline revolves around the great fungus tree, a gargantuan bio-structure that has been corrupted by a yet-unknown spore and threatens to expand at an uncontrollable rate, which may threaten the entirety of Galatea, so Ashley and Riggs need to fix that in order to make the colonization effort secure.

Many new research options in the Tech Tree.

A lot of new research, including modules, towers and weapons, is introduced in this DLC – in fact, more than in any other DLC before. A highlight is surely the floating towers, uniquely built on liquid surfaces to add more flexibility where there’s not enough solid ground to work with. I can’t name any particularly good or standout weapon that I can think of though, as the other ones from the previous DLCs already fill your every tactical need in that sense, so the ones we have here have the risk of being a bit redundant in a sense.

New ‘oversize’ offensive towers category.

New threats demand new responses, that’s why Heart of the Swamp introduces oversized towers that can deal with even the strongest enemies. These include the plasma machine gun, firing heavy plasma balls at a high fire rate, think of it as a plasma turret on steroids; the HCM Silo, with enormous range and capable of firing cluster bombs on a huge area, and the heavy artillery tower, armed with nuclear plasma shells that obliterate anything unfortunate enough to be the target. These won’t come cheap, and often require a steady supply of some optional resource to work, like plasma or water to name some. So, they’re great, but they cost a lot of energy, take up a lot of space, and are logistically challenging to place, especially in cramped outposts. But, they’re worth the pain.

Logistical challenges like never before.

True to the namesake of this DLC, you’ll spend most of your time in a swamp filled to the brim with mud and dampness. With only some scattered islets of dirt as solid ground to build upon, you’ll not have the usual spaces to craft outposts comfortably as in other DLCs or the main campaign. In fact, only about 20% of the total map is terrain for building – the rest, fluid surfaces that prevent construction, save for the new ‘floating’ defense towers which are specifically designed for that – without the safety of walls to protect them, however, they might not prove as durable despite their firepower.

This translates into the need for extreme space optimization since you’ll have to build multiple outposts and research stations to fulfill the quest objectives and defend them from enemies that can climb obstacles and come out of places you’d not expect. Also, you’ll need to extract specific resources to have enough output to proceed with the mission: extensive pipelines have to be built and defended, all without the usual solid ground to put defenses onto – a daunting task that will prove challenging and time-consuming even with the highest tech available. This DLC is designed to put you out of your comfort zone and find efficient, minimalist ways to defend against some of the deadliest enemies in the entire game.

The deadliest enemy yet.

This DLC will introduce, as usual, many types of new creatures and enemies. Some of them will be recolors, but most totally new, with the additional gameplay mechanic of having to feed some of them in order to progress certain mission phases – something not seen before. However, the big deal is the Canceroth, a corruption-spreading amalgam of cells that will lay waste to all in its path, and infuse creatures with its deadly mutation.

This enemy is different from anything else you’ve seen before, because not only does it have a very high resistance to almost all damage types and a living shield protecting its central core, but it can also climb over environmental objects and walls, effectively overrunning your defenses or strike from impossible angles. Multiple of them can come in an attack wave, and only the strongest defenses will withstand this assault – I lost several outposts fitted with Level 3 towers and impeccable defenses to these monsters, despite the belief the defense would have held against anything. It’s a breath of fresh air that will force you to adapt your strategies in a totally different way.

Is it Worth Buying? How long does it last?

Heart of the Swamp is the longest of the three DLCs in my experience. Aside from the fact difficulty and tech level at the moment of starting it always influence the playtime, the sheer logistical challenges and the strength of enemies, together with the complexity of the tasks at hand, make this a DLC that will keep you occupied for at least 6-8 hours. The new additions are distinct and worth experiencing, especially the oversized towers being an especially welcome one. For the usual DLC price of 10€, I’d say this is the most worthwhile of the three to get, from a ‘bang for your buck’ perspective.