There’s a new 3D space shooter making its way to Steam from Action Block ARL and ArtLiminal called Rift Frigate. Even though the game had the unfortunate trailer rolled out on April 1st, with a lot of people probably ignoring it thinking it was some kind of April Fool’s joke, the game is in fact real and it’s scheduled to release at some point in 2020.
The gameplay is actually quite a refreshing take on the space-shooter genre. Instead of being another bullet-hell scrollers or a “realistic” sim where you’re balancing ship systems or flush the cooling vents while charging up the laser cannons, you still have your basic loadout and then you go around shooting and blasting anything in your path and using your tractor beam to gather up supplies, resources, new weapons, and armor.
The attachments and upgrades are all instant and happen in real-time, so you can buff out your ship with all new armament or upgrades while scavenging through the rift gate junk yards. However, there are other scavengers there that are also attempting to gather supplies, and they will fight you for it, as showcased in the trailer below.
You can see that as the player-controlled ship is navigating the rift, gathering up any trinkets or space flotsam that could be rendered useful, there are others there attacking the ship and also attempting to get away with the goods.
Your ship will evolve as you destroy enemies and siphon their parts, or you’ll see various aspects of your ship get destroyed and fly into the ether as you take damage. It all happens in real-time, giving the game a much different feel than other space-sims out there.
It’s not all just a crap shoot of dogfighting and resource gathering, though. Action Block are actually crafting a lore-filled story around these mechanics, as you play a member of a machine race that obliterated their creators’ planet, and now they’re on the run. As a Karack Arbiter, you’re currently seeking refuge, supplies, and big enough guns to vaporize anyone in your path.
The modular ship designs can be modified, tweaked, upgraded and specialized using the ship editor. You can modify where and what you place on the ship, which will help determine how it performs during combat.
It’s a shame we don’t see this kind of feature more often in games, but it’s nice to see it implemented whenever or wherever it pops up.
You can actually see what one of the custom designs looks like in action from over a year ago as the developers were releasing new footage and diary updates related to the development of the game.
Rift Frigate has actually been in develpoment for the last half decade, since 2015 in the Unity 3D game engine. Action Block and ArtLiminal are finally confident enough to place a 2020 release window on the game, and if you’re interested you can wishlist or follow the space shooter’s development by visiting the Steam store page.
