Riftstorm: PVE and nothing but PVE, which is exactly why it has to be flawless

Fighting hordes as a team is a pleasure that never goes out of fashion. And Riftstorm's choice is clear: no PVP, PVE only. That suits me perfectly, on one condition, and it is a demanding one. When you give up the opposing player, you also give up the cheapest source of replayability in the world: other people. All you have left to hold players is your own content. So yes, if you are not doing PVP, the PVE has to be flawless.

What the game offers

You are a Weaver, an elite operative of the Mythic Protocol, trained to close rifts, wield supernatural powers and survive encounters with entities that should not exist. You deploy alone or with two others into unstable combat zones. The programme's motto sets the tone: investigate, contain, exterminate.

The structure borrows from extraction games, but in a softened version, and the studio owns it: you complete objectives, collect weapons and field upgrades, then decide how far to push before calling for extraction. Rifts escalate over time, creatures swarm, and not everyone necessarily makes it out. The important nuance, confirmed by the studio to players who filed it straight into the extraction genre: you do not lose your equipped gear on failure, it is only damaged. That is a coherent choice for a purely co-operative game, where you do not want to punish a group of friends the way you punish a lone player in a competitive one.

The real argument lies elsewhere, in the builds. Each Weaver has their own abilities and role, and above all, upgrades collected during a mission let you reshape how you play mid-run, stacking modifiers and triggering synergies. Setting out with a clean loadout and finishing with something completely unreasonable is the promise, and it is the right engine for this kind of game.

The signals around the game

The studio, Confiction Labs alongside Agate, talks openly with its community and it shows in the details. Asked about an interface judged too crowded with data, it acknowledged that customisation was minimal for now and added an option to hide certain elements to its backlog. On local multiplayer, the answer was frank: their netcode is built for online play and they have not managed to graft couch co-op onto it, while presenting it as a feature they would love to add. That kind of direct answer beats silence.

A detail enthusiasts will enjoy: the studio says it borrowed its impact effects from Vanillaware's games, Odin Sphere in particular, and applied them to three-dimensional models. That is exactly the sort of reference we like to see cited, and demo feedback confirms the hit feel works.

What remains to be proven

Everything, in truth, and that is the genre's burden. A co-op PVE game lives or dies on the variety of its missions, the generosity of its loot and the regularity of its support. With no human opponent to renew the experience, every map must survive dozens of runs, and plenty of games break their teeth on that after three weeks.

The game launches today in Early Access, around fifteen dollars according to the studio, with no user reviews yet, which explains the absence of a score. It is available in French, and the studio itself admits it is still hunting bugs reported on the demo build.

The premise is good and the feel appears to be there. All that is missing is the only thing that really matters here: enough to keep going.

And the verdict has landed, less kind than expected: Steam reviews are Mixed at 58 percent across more than 100 reviews. That is precisely the point we feared: with no human opponent, the content must carry the game alone, and it does not yet.