Riftborne

Day 1. Already obsessed. Send help!!!

Look, I'm not going to pretend I knew what I was doing for the first hour. Riftborne threw me into a terminal-based space empire and basically said "figure it out." And you know what? That's the best thing about it. Every time something clicked - a trade route, a raid, a spy mission — it felt amazing because I actually worked it out myself. No hand-holding. Just pure "wait, I think I get it now" energy.

The Discord community is half the fun right now. Everyone's in the same boat, piecing things together, sharing discoveries, hyping each other up. It's got that rare early-game buzz where the whole playerbase is exploring something new together.

And the dev? Absolute legend. Active in the community, great to chat with, and was pushing out fixes on the spot during launch day. That's the kind of passion that tells you this game is going somewhere.

It just launched and it's brilliant! If you like deep strategy games and enjoy actually thinking, buy it!

I have been looking for a game like this for a while now. This is a strategy game bordering on an idle game, without many of the negative connotations typically associated with idle games. It's not trying to beat you over the head with constant distractions and new toys. I would not be surprised if Neptune's Pride was an influence on this project.

There seems to be a lot of meaningful systems here and I'm slowly beginning to see how they fit together. If the strategy space is as deep as the in-game guide suggests, I could see myself playing this for a very long time.

If I have one gripe, it's that I'm frequently not able to find information that I'm actively seeking. This is partially a consequence of the game being a large sandbox. But there's also just a lot of places where the UI currently fails, which is completely fine in EA. It's just something to be mindful of. I'd say be prepared to do a lot of reading and reviewing in the codex.

OLD REVIEW AT BOTTOM

Switching my review to positive. In the short time since my previous not recommended review, the dev did a great job immediately addressing my concerns and put in a tutorial, as well as adding some sort of quicker progression. While it is not entirely the answer I am looking for and is more of a band-aid, I can respect the dev a lot for immediately putting the work in so quickly so I could have a better experience. Devs like that feel rare and I felt it was fair to rebuy the game and give this project a positive review and the support it deserves. Will be looking forward naturally to the offline progress update, as well as anything that is added to this game.

OLD REVIEW:

Let the first thing I say in this quick review be that the dev has been extremely helpful and has answered all my questions. I want to like this game. I really do, but at this current moment, I cannot recommend this game.

This game is pretty much an idle game without the offline progression, meaning, you play this game for a bit, turn it off, and come back hours later, and no progress will have been made at all. This game has those typical timers we're all familiar with where things can take real life minutes, hours, and maybe even days to complete. This means you have to leave the game open at all times on your computer just to make any progress, meaning you aren't really playing the game, but waiting the minutes/hours until you can finally upgrade/build or you finally get enough resources to do, well, anything really. I can't support that. I shouldn't have to leave this game up all day, or leave my computer running all night with the game up just to make progress in a game with real life timers of minutes to hours. I have barely any play time and already I have to wait over 6 hours just for one of my resources to reach the maximum amount, which isn't much since I've barely played and upgraded my resource extraction rate. I'm not going to leave my game running for 6 hours, I'm just not. Also, not tutorial. Needs to be there from the start.

Now in defense of the dev, he says it's a technical issue that they hope to resolve in a future update that will come out with multiplayer. That's cool. But I am reviewing the game in it's state right now. I do not review games of future updates and promises. Again, in defense of the dev, he has put options in the game to speed up stuff like gaining resources which is cool, but eventually you'll always make a certain amount of progress where those boosters in gaining resources for example will lead right back to having to wait a long time to build that next ship, building, or upgrade. It's just not worth it in my opinion.

So for now I cannot recommend this game at it's current state, unless you are ok with leaving the game up at all times. I will refund my game, but keep it on my wishlist and keep an eye on it, waiting for offline progression. I wish the dev well and hope they can bring the offline progression soon and of course allow us to choose to disable multiplayer since I have no interest in that. The Dev has shown a clear passion for their game and I think with the offline progression being added this could be a great idle game to play.