Interstellar Rift

Best ship editor I've ever had the pleasure to use. I'm not going to claim this beats some other games... you aren't gonna be walking around planets or anything outside your ship or a station here, but designing the ship is just amazing in this game.

It lets you do things like clip light fixtures into some of the equipment, so for example you can end up making a lamp on the side of something with what is normally a standing light fixture, something I could never do in certain other grid based games like Space Engineers. You can easily scale rooms up in size if you want, instead of building walls block by block you set rooms by their size and connect them with doors... this makes it fast and easy to fix if you realize a room was bigger or smaller than needed.

It isn't quite as good at some other aspects, but the space combat and mining and trading are in fact all there and quite functional, if a little mediocre when it comes to combat and mining. But 11/10 on the way they handled designing your ship.

I really liked this game. I wish the developers were still working on it. It has so much potential to be great indie game. I still jump in a and play once in a blue moon. the ship editor is so cool and their are so many nice builds for ships or bases on steam. This game inspires the creative types to build amazing things. I don't know of any other space game that allows you to build your ship, inside and out, and allows other players to share space in your ship to battle or mine or be the mechanic.
Play the game but understand that it is not polished and far from perfect, but still fun.

For starters, I'll give a quick review in case you don't like to read. The game is good at what it does, but it also lacks on several things.
Now for the breakdown, in case you DO like to read.
Interstellar Rift is a good game for several reasons:
~~The main one being how well it runs on nearly any machine even when combating swarms of enemies or multiple enemy ships (in PvP)
~~The Enemy variety is pretty decent, and encountering several types at the same time can result in death (kaboom)
~~The difficulty between the different star system tiers is apparent (ignore the warning at your own risk)
~~The resource variety is pretty good and you can't get it all from the same place (go exploring)
~~The ship designer gives a lovely level of detail to your ships (be creative)
~~You can get scrap from combat, which makes obtaining some rarer resources in low-tier possible (get some kills)
~~Ship combat is nice, and goes fluidly with the flight controls (get some skill)
~~Good to play with friends, especially when you consider the weapon turrets you can install on a ship (party kaboom)
~~Stronger ammo types (3 tiers) to help deal with troublesome foes, with noticeable damage differences between each tier (and noticeable resource cost)
Now for some of the bad
~~~Not much variety for quests. They can typically be put into 3 categories which are Material-related (5 varieties), combat-related (2 varieties), or scouting-related (one type, with possible combat).
~~There's no EXO of any sort. The only time you leave your ship is if you teleport to another ship or station.
~~Mining can be... tedious. Even when you have high spawn chance of certain resources, you'll still get tons of unwanted resources in the process, which can typically be sold for pocket change.
~~No up-to-date wiki. Even the most recent one on fandom hasn't had an update in a while (I'm sorry, I retired from the game)
~~ Not much options in the realm of preset ships to buy from shops. Each faction only has 2 or 3 and they're specifically for whatever the faction specializes in, and only mediocre at best.
~~Game is not very Solo friendly. You can't really do anything besides shop in a safezone in peace. You'll constantly get attacked when trying to mine, survey, etc.
~~No preset modules for ship designer, and it takes quite a while. Even after getting used to using it, the fastest I've ever designed a ship to my liking (minus extreme detailing) was about 2 hours.
~~AI factions don't automatically expand their turf, players have to do it for them... so dead servers mean zero activity going on
~~Player-fed economy, very bad for the same reason as the above statement. If there's zero players supplying the system, then it's worthless... especially the starter systems.
All-in-all, my friends and I loved the game for the time we played it... but we've moved on. A space-type game with zero EXO activities, minimal community activity, very repetitive quests, basically no AI minus the Skrill, and essentially zero endgame made us grow bored of it. For what it was, I'd say it was more good than bad. Not many games get my group hooked for a couple weeks on end. This game barely, BARELY, gets a recommend from me. Just go find a populated server, or a consistent group of players to actually enjoy the game.
If.... and I mean ***IF*** this game were to get a sequel... then more quest variety, more enemy types, more preset ships, more preset modules for ship builder, ship builder auto-detailer, more weapon types, some sort of EXO, AI that can do things themselves.... literally anything to make the game feel alive if it isn't populated by hundreds and thousands of players. Players continuously leave the game because there's literally nothing to do at all other than mining and fighting Skrill.

I loved the game when it was out. It was like the original StarBase.
It had a pretty fun blend of go out to space gather loot (Mining/hunting), go "home" then buy/sell your loot with real players on a space platform you or they have built, with a player made automated shop. then Use the money to expand your knowledge to go deeper in space or use the materials to build your ship one block at a time.
It must of seemed not that intriguing to the masses but there's something great about being able to walk around your creation.. Coordinating guns, collectors, and piloting with fellow friends / server-mates.
I was sad to see they didn't have any funding left and shut down.

This is pretty much the definition of "we have Elite: Dangerous at home."

Yet if it's an Elite: Dangerous knock-off, why does it have such a great, full-feature interior ship-building and design system that allows for individual module placement?

To be honest, it may be worth a purchase just to play around with that. You can design the ship of your dreams...then fly it around in a lifeless galaxy.

It's alright. Fun game to play COOP with a few friends. Some good ship building and progression. Last update was 2 years ago so be aware of no new content.

One of the unsung heroes of the space sim genre! Interstellar Rift can be best described as Space Engineers meets Star Citizen with X-box 360 graphics. It's got everything to fit your fancy (mining, combat, quests, exploration, hauling, etc.) plus there are a lot of little things that take the immersion to the next level! You'll notice pretty quickly that there are almost NO popup menus. Any machine you interact with uses a touch screen... that you press the buttons on. There's an in-game wiki, but those terminals are at most stations and both you and the in-game character end up flipping through the directory like you're actually there! Not to mention there's a custom ship editor, so you can do all that from your hand-built vessel... or 6... or even a personalized space station! The options are basically endless!

I love the aesthetic feel of this game so much... it's a shame I haven't found very many people who stream or have let's plays on YT / twitch. Highly recommend this game to anyone!