The Riftbreaker

Had I not played the excellent Yakuza 7/Like a Dragon at the start of the year, this would be my Game of the Year without a shadow of a doubt. The core gameplay is split up into base building and tower defense with the tower defense only really taking the front seat once you get towards the very end. I was able to get by with Sentinel towers through 2/3rds of the campaign. I found if I kept up on all the upgrades for my character, she could take only most waves of enemies. The weapon selection was huge and just about every weapon had a place. Even melee weapons which can sometimes be pretty underwhelming were perfectly balanced. So much so that the power fist was a regular weapon. It was incredibly satisfying to feel as strong as I was without ever feeling like everything was a total pushover. The constant onslaught of events kept me on my toes. At some point, events stopped becoming mountains with serious problems and became annoying blips. Only towards the end did I need help from the towers and right at the very end was it absolutely compulsory to have proper defense. It started off as a coop with friends but they didn't feel as strongly about the game and I wanted more control about where things go. My friends would put things in spots because...vibes? I would have thought I would be far more organized with everything having a specific place and a layout that would be look coordinated. But as I progressed, that fell apart once I started to discover more tech that could replace what was there with different sizes and requirements. In the end, my HQ became a means to end with practicality taking priority rather than LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL IT ALL LOOKS. The tech trees feel overwhelming at first as you seem to research things very quickly and the game does a good job at first to explain what everything does until it you're deep into the tech tree and then it just assumes you're going to figure it out for yourself. None of it is hard to work out but it does take time. It's time well invested because the pay off is ten fold when you can start to go from rudimentary tech to far more advanced stuff that requires different elements which you mine. I never unlocked everything because there were two elements that I found enough of along the way that I didn't need to bother setting up outposts and mining specifically for it. Nor were there any critical missions in those biomes that would have made it compulsory. I felt it didn't really seem to add much to the campaign. I also didn't find a new location to rift to. The preset campaign already had enough varation on biomes and challenges that didn't make me feel the need to use this feature. The one thing I absolutely loved was shifting the micromanagement from having to tediously rebuild an outpost that got bowled over by the last wave of enemies to furthing the missions and harvesting resources. Rebuilding the base was super forgiving - it required little time but you still needed the resources to build from scratch and everything still had a knock on effect. I need to move water to this spot: how am I going to do that? And how well do I need to keep this tiny little area defended? Are the locals going to leave it alone or is this a spot that gets constantly attacked? I would be lying if I didn't admit that the trial and error was mostly error on my behalf. Any issues were all because I didn't do something, not the game punishing me because I didn't play it the way they wanted me to. Oh, and it's worth noting that you are absolutely the bad guy in this game. I did often lament that my entire purpose was to kill the locals that prevented me from harvest minerals out of the ground to build buildings that kill the locals and and upgrade my robot to...kill the locals. The locals were not doing anything wrong. We just came in and pulled a US-style invasion, taking what wasn't ours in name of creating a rift that allows humans to terrform Galatea 37. We were liberating them from the burden of having such a rich deposit of highly sought after minerals. This is not only an strong recommendation but also an easy one because it is often on sale and the price they ask for when it's on sale is almost criminal considering the dense amount of content. It also runs well on Linux. There are only two disappointments: 1. I will never be able to play this game for the first time again 2. This game has set a high precedent and is now the metric of what I was compare similar games to.