The Riftbreaker: Four Idiots in Mech Suits

Dune: Another Game on the Scrapheap of CCF Memories

Eventually you reach that point where the dunes lose their mystique, the sand in your underwear stops feeling adventurous, and the weekly “base redesign” starts to sound suspiciously like an unpaid internship. That’s when you start glancing over the horizon for a new game.

Choosing said game, however, is a saga unto itself. It can’t be too old (because graphics), can’t be too PvP (because we’re rubbish), must have a story (which only Dave reads), must have exploration (for Craig’s wandering tendencies), must include shooting (for Zaph’s sniper addiction), and must allow for tactical systems and item hoarding (for Myles and Dave respectively). Oh—and if it’s on sale on Steam, that’s the real clincher.

Enter: The Riftbreaker

So, without further ado—cue the sound of machine guns and an overly dramatic drum roll—we have begun our next misadventure: The Riftbreaker, a cooperative tower-defense survival game where you stomp around in mech suits, gather resources, build a base, and pray your research tree wasn’t designed by Kafka.

In an attempt to avoid our usual night-one chaos, Dave—ever the project manager—assigned homework:

• Dave played the prologue three times. Because of course he did.

• Zaph played the prologue once, but somehow it was a completely different game.

• I (Myles) accidentally started the campaign instead, which… also counts?

• Craig installed the game, and arrived on the night ready to complain about the controls.

Base Building for the Terminally Overconfident

The campaign began innocently enough. We built a base (too small, as Dave filled it to capacity within minutes), explored the jungle, slaughtered bugs, and heroically lost the eternal war of Power Generation vs Power Demand.
Who could’ve predicted that solar panels don’t work at night, wind turbines need wind, and nothing functions if you forget to connect it?

And then there were the minerals. So many minerals. Everything ends in “ium”—carbonium, ironium, unobtainium. It’s like the galaxy’s worst periodic table.

The Team, As Ever, a Well-Oiled Disaster

Some habits never die:

• Dave, evangelizing about “doing number twos all over the map” (that’s small mines, not… well, you know).

• Zaph, perpetually out of ammo.

• Craig, convinced that co-op means “shouting for help after dying.”

• Myles, wondering why we even need a flamethrower yet.

And yes, the objective—helpfully displayed in massive letters on-screen—remained a mystery to Craig.

Field Notes from the Front

A few hard-earned lessons from our time as incompetent mech engineers:

• Don’t carry two of the same weapon. They share ammo. When one’s empty, they all are.

• Stop asking for a flamethrower. You can have one when the research tree says so.

• Asking your teenage son how to connect a pump to a filter to a pipe to drain the swamp is humbling.

• Building your base on radioactive quicksand is, surprisingly, bad.

• Random fence pieces scattered around the map make excellent early-warning systems (and bug chew toys).

• You can never have enough storage.

• You can never have enough carbonium.

• You can never find enough ironium.

• And if you stand inside the building footprint, CRAIG, the building never finishes.

• Number twos are life.

• By the time you finally get your flamethrower, the bugs have artillery.

Epilogue

So here we are, another game in the annals of CCF legend—equal parts chaos, sarcasm, and mild radiation poisoning.
With luck (and possibly divine intervention), we might even survive long enough to build a riftgate and escape this jungle hellhole. But knowing us, we’ll just forget to power it.