Twin stick crafter-shooter-basebuilder The Riftbreaker aims for a very ambitious 2024 roadmap

The Riftbreaker art of a large yellow mecha suit walking in an alien swamp.

(Image credit: EXOR Studios)

We haven't posted much about twin-stick shooter slash base-building survival game The Riftbreaker since its 2021 launch, but fans of butchering hordes of bad bugs and nasty monsters with either a carefully-constructed network of defensive guns and/or your giant mobile killer mech suit have enjoyed a few years of expansions and major updates since then.

Now developers Exor Studios are working on the third big expansion to The Riftbreaker's world, bringing the story of a stompy mech and its pilot to a new biome, the swamp. They're also working on much-requested multiplayer co-op, enabled by its broad success even though they didn't design the game for co-op at all.

"While swamps on Earth are rather uninviting and gloomy most of the time, Galatean Swamps are rich, colorful, and teeming with life. The unique creatures inhabiting these lands display adaptations never seen before in other Galatean species. The plant life is extraordinary as well, with several new species, including aggressive, predatory plants capable of attacking everything that moves," said Exor about the upcoming new region.

The DLC will expand the story campaign to include the swamp region, but it'll be free in the large new Survival Mode update. Exor says it's a "massive upgrade and a rework of many game systems you had issues with." Those include new gear, a new more easily legible research tree, and more.

One of the major new upgrades and changes will apparently focus on cool new weapons and a revamp of existing ones. As it is now Exor feels like not every weapon is actually useful, so the weapon power curve will be flattened and the functionality of weapon mods will change for what looks to me like more of a looter-shooter vibe of mix and match upgrades adding new properties and abilities to weapons.

Exor also posted about progress on that co-op multiplayer update, focusing on survival mode. The principal problem they're having, at the moment, is that while they've got co-op working they don't like how well it performs and need to get that up to acceptable levels.

"From that point onwards, we will start introducing multiplayer-centric changes, like adjustments to the difficulty level, more interaction options between the players, additional challenges, and more," they continue. They're very clear, however, that it's all in-development: "We do not have any estimates when it comes to the release date. Our progress has been quick lately, and it feels like, for the first time, we can finally see the end in sight. Still, we can’t predict what challenges lie ahead and prefer to be flexible."

You can find The Riftbreaker on Epic, GOG, and Steam, but mostly on its website riftbreaker.com. I've posted the roadmap image below, but you can find the entire Roadmap Update - January 2024 post on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.