Interstellar Rift
Interstellar Rift is an open world Starship Simulator with an emphasis on ship construction and multi-player interaction. Players can explore and conquer the galaxy with their own custom designed and constructed starship. Space is vast, but you don’t have to face it alone, other players will be able to join your crew, and help out, or build their own rival fleet and fight you across the galaxy.
Prepare to make these custom built spaceships your home when exploring the galaxy! Use the ship editor to design a ship to your liking, from small exploratory vessels to large cargo haulers, or even enormous battleships. With the editor you build your ship deck by deck, inside and outside. If you’d rather get going immediately you can always browse the workshop for ships that other players made, or you can upload your own blueprints.
The galaxy can be a dangerous place, even when playing solo. Strange rifts have opened up, unleashing a hostile race of alien creatures called the Skrill. If left unchecked, they will take over solar systems wreaking havoc on your enterprising. You can fight them alone, or call in the help of your friends, and man a ship together. But not all pilots will fight for a good cause, pirates and opposing fleets can come after you and your cargo at any time. Fight them ship versus ship, or hack your way aboard their vessels and bring the fight to them, in close quarters shootouts.
The economy of Interstellar Rift runs on the resources that can be gathered out in the galaxy. Vast asteroid belts circle planets and solar systems, filled with precious ores and minerals. Start up your resource extractors, or send out a wave of mining drones to do the hard labour for you. Visit the stores of LogiCorp and Galactic Trade, or drive a hard bargain with stranded pilots as you delive them fuel. Automate production lines with the ACTR (automated cargo transfer relay), and set up your own store to trade with other players, or any trade drones that might be nearby.
After choosing a faction to ally with, the galaxy is open for you to explore. Use rift generators to open up spatial rifts that transport you to new systems, exploring a system will help you map out the galaxy, and pinpoint the location of systems with special resources you might need. Construct new trade posts for the companies and factions that want to expand their influence, and help them set up secure stations and sectors. Take on missions for U-nits, or find good deals across multiple systems to make a profit from.
Steam User 9
The ship designer is amazing. It is like an improved and modern version of the old ship designer from Shores of Hazeron.
The feeling of walking around a ship while it is travelling through space is similar to that game and even Star Citizen.
I like that contrary to Space Engineers, the ship feels like a whole, instead of a combination of blocks.
The missions are ok: your typical trade/gather/hunt missions from space sims.
I like the fact that (at least in-system) the travel is "real". You actually travel at a high speed (warp) instead of teleporting from planet to planet. Between systems however it is teleportation.
So while spacetravel is cool and could be fun there is one problem imo: Higher level warp does not consume more resources, meaning that you have to max out warp level to save fuel costs. There is no real trade off between speed and fuel consumption. It means you have to hurry all the time and be busy the whole time while travelling in space. (unless you are playing multiplayer and are not the pilot). I would prefer to just activate a certain acceptable warp speed and relax for a few minutes while flying to another planet. (like in Star Citizen). You can do this, but it is very costly in terms of hydrogen consumption.
Another thing I don't like (related to the previous) is the lack of autopilot or AI crew. In Hazeron starship and X4 for example, you can just order your AI pilot/helmsman to fly to a certain star system, planet, city or station, and meanwhile can do some IRL stuff like go to the toilet or get some food or even do your dishes if it's far away.
There is no spacewalking and there are no doors on spacecraft. Getting on and off happens only through teleporters.
If you like spacetrucking and want to do so in a ship you designed yourself, this game is worth it imo. I'd even recommend it just for the amazing ship designer. However if you want to visit planets, have alot of interactions with NPCs and have a story, well you will not find this in this game.
It would be nice if a game like Hazeron starhip or X4 was made with this kind of ship designer. Perhaps Interstellar Rift 2.
Because I do enjoy the game I will give it a thumbs up.
Steam User 5
I wish it was more, but I couldn't put it down for weeks.
Steam User 5
First off to note: This game is pretty much "Complete" as far as the devs are concerned. There have been no updates in almost 2 years as of this writing. That being said there are SOME bugs i've found, but nothing game breaking. Few inventory issues. I'm only 30 hours into the game so far so take that with a grain of salt.
As far as the game itself, it plays fairly easily however it should be noted this game DOES NOT HOLD YOUR HAND. This is a SANDBOX game. You have missions, you can build pre-built stations (for everyone to use), you can highly customize your ship, you can trade, mine and you can explore the galaxy. The only thing at this point I know to do is achievement chase and try to do all the achievements.
Mining is key and very simple. Fly near an asteroid, select it from the extractor and click mine. Grab the crates and process the material in the various machines. What each material is used in appears in game and you can trace the build chain down the in game encyclopedia. There's a lot of things to build.
Cons:
In-game encyclopedia is all you have. There's basically no documentation that I've seen. The wiki is on a website full of ads and its very incomplete. Basics are there, but you can already learn that pretty easily by the tutorials and muddling through. I watched some older videos from 2019 and 2020 on youtube to get some expanded help on intermediate topics, but unless you've played some time in the game, they're all very hard to follow. My biggest gripe is if this is considered a "complete" game, documentation would have been included and better tutorials on more advanced topics.
Second con is the combat is really clunky. Its pew pew and watch health bars drop and dont die. When your ship starts to catch fire, its chaos especially if you're all alone.
Third con is related to that, being alone sucks. There's not many people who still play the game, so hopefully you have some friends who want to get the game. Having friends would probably make this game a lot more enjoyable for me. There is automation to help you run the ship on your own but you have to have the more advanced ships to get those features, and it is hard to do so solo. I was able to get my rep up to level 1 to be able to buy the second level ship fairly easily by building the various space stations in the starter system, but a public server would already have those built which will make it more challenging. There's a lot of grind in this game and having someone help you with it, would probably make it easier for a new player. If both are new or one has a little bit of concept of how the game works, a duo would have a lot more enjoyment from the game. I've never played it with anyone so I don't know how well it works, but from the videos i've seen it has some pulsar lost colony vibes with space engineers building thrown in.
Last con is it feels like there's no content, but its not REALLY that empty. You just have to gain skill and rep to unlock more things to do. If you go and play the game as each of the various factions, they all have their own spin on the game and how to play it. One is combat oriented, one is trade oriented, one is a scavenger, and the last one is mining oriented. It seems most people play as the mining one since its the easiest to do. To have a better challenge play one or all of the other factions and get their rep to max. Landing on planets or having some kind of planetary interaction I feel was a missed opportunity but its not really required the way the game is setup. This is about space and not planets. That being said I would have liked to have seen some ground colonies to land at and interact with and it wouldn't have been too hard to make them "space stations" on the ground. You could have teleported to the surface with a long range teleporter or something.
Pros: It is a fun challenge to learn the various aspects of the game. I've tried to figure stuff out on my own and it makes the game fairly interesting. There's a lot of depth to the game mechanics. The ship building is fairly easy to use interface with a lot of technical underlying components to customize your ship and how well it will perform. I have yet to build a ship, but i've dabbled in the interface some and realized its a bit over my head for what I know at this point of the game. I need to understand more of how the ships work before going into building my own, and I don't want to steal any off the workshop because I won't know how they work.
Overall opinion:
The game is challenging, it doesn't hold your hand which I personally like that. It provides a challenge. Those that want a guided mission, story line, and tutorial won't like this game. There is a tutorial for it, but it only scratches the surface and was very easy to complete. Almost to the point of I didn't even understand what I was doing when I played them the first time through. In the end I'd recommend buying the game on sale since the devs are done with the game clearly. I don't think $20 is a good price for this game since there's a lot of things it could have had that it doesn't have. The "polished" and "finished" feel of the game to me at this point isn't there. Things like only hearing "one foot step" when walking around is quite annoying and in a finished game I'd expect those kinds of things to be non-existent. The combat and flight mechanics could be better, and the drones running into stations while you're on them are very disorienting when the whole station starts to spin. None of that should happen in a "finished game" imo. I got it on sale for $6 which I feel was reasonable for what you get. I'd have paid $10 for it, but not much over that.
TL;DR -
I do recommend the game if you're into space games and enjoy a challenge when the game is at a sale price.
Steam User 3
I weakly recommend this game but it's relatively dead in multiplayer (barely any playerbase) and it's best in multiplayer so that's a catch-22. The strong point about the game is the ship designer and that you can tailor your own sci-fi vessel (or edit an existing one). Other negative things about the game, in my opinion, are the sometimes unintuitive UI elements, and that the game lacks a solid storyline meaning it's easy to just bore out, at least for me.
The game also starts with abundant starter resources meaning you can design any vessel by just spending time at the starting location (space station). This might be a plus for some people but not for me unfortunately. I would have wanted to have to use the starter vessel to go search for asteroids with a little bit of exploration. Now it feels grindier, even if you can skip exploiting the station's nearby asteroid field, it is hard to not do so.
More rare resources are however harder to come by so there's exploration to be done and upgrades that you need to explore to get.
I haven't to this date played this game a lot and reasons mentioned above are behind that, although I wish I could love it. It feels like an unfinished game but the game dev rarely ever release updates anymore. If you are willing, can afford it, you can get some hours of exploration and so on from it but it's hard to justify the purchase. I leave a recommended review but you might want to think about it before you buy it, because you buy a clearly unfinished game which one can wonder if it will be finished.
If you like what I wrote above, custom ships which are built a little like in 'the Sims' building editor (clunkier interface though), and are a sci-fi nerd, and preferably have some friends to play the game with, then I actually recommend the game but don't expect endless fun and you'd likely get bored after building the vessel, some upgrades and spending some hours in the galaxies. I don't regret I purchased the game but I'm a little disappointed about the development, although I had some fun while playing it I must admit.
Steam User 3
You will spend a lot of time in the ship builder. but it needs much more content.
Steam User 3
I like this game
Steam User 3
A great space game made by a small indie team. The way you interact with every device is such a unique and immersive way to play the game. A great time solo or with a group though it is a bit harder solo. I have owned this game for many years and find myself coming back just for the mechanics.