Raiders of the Broken Planet has a lot of promise. Its excellent character design and the wonderfully designed world has a lot of depth and lore. However, it's brought down due to the game's endless grinding and slow progression system. Despite the amazing environments and colorful characters the gameplay for Raiders of the Broken Planet has you doing the same thing over and over again for simple upgrades.

Raiders of the Broken Planet takes place 25 light years from Earth on Titan, a broken planet orbiting the Sun. These fragments support life and a powerful energy called Alpeh. Humans crash on the planet with no hope of leaving, to find a way they try to obtain local technology to build a warp drive however, the natives of the planet have abandoned their technology for centuries leading to civil war against the strangled humans. What's strange is that much of the game's lore is locked behind a level and paywall. You have to pay Gold in order to unlock more sections of the story which is bizarre. 

The game can be played alone or with up to 3 friends. Alone players can only earn rewards for completing the stage on a set difficulty and must play on higher difficulties to earn more bonuses. In cooperative mode, players earn compensations regardless if the mission was a success or not.  

Raiders of the Broken Planet is a hard game that demands teamwork, be prepared to die a lot. The game is humble with lives, granting more after losing them all if at least one member of the team survives for a certain amount of team. The reason death is frequent is that ammo, which is in short supply, can only be replenished by killing enemies with a melee attack. This encourages player's to head into fights with CQC which can be hassling.

Combat stress plays a major role in maintaining cover and amenity. Depending on your character's playstyle your Alpeh meter increases base on movement or combat. This exposes your position to the enemy and works vice versa. Characters have their own specific rate of which their Alpeh charges, with some having a full meter regardless of what they do and other's remaining hidden unless in combat.

Since each character comes with their own set of abilities, strengths, and weaknesses creating the ideal team is necessary to survival. Having too many teammates from the same class can make things a lot more difficult, especially when having to melee for more ammo. For example, Alicia can wall jump, making ideal for mobility, but is constantly exposed to the enemy. Each ally is separated into categories based on their allegiance instead of class but a helpful summary gives a full rundown of each character's weapon, power, pros, and cons.

Raiders can be upgraded with a variety of weapons, skins, and loadouts. The issue is the amount of grinding needed to secure many of the upgrades can become mind-numbing. Players can earn faction points or gold, never both, after each mission, which weapon blueprints being awarded at a flip of a coin. Microtransactions are available for $4.99 to $19.99 but can only purchase cosmetic skins. Since items obtained from each mission doesn't carry over to other characters players need to pick specific characters to earn rewards for that warrior. 

Raiders of the Broken Planet does allow you to play as the antagonist, hunting down active players. At first, this seems like an interesting concept until you actually try it. Having played several matches I noticed that the enemy players figured out the spawn points and would actively crowd over these points. Even with the tempory invulnerability I found myself completely outmatched each time since players would just camp the spawn points.

The enemy AI isn't bad, just unfair. Enemies have an absurd amount of health but can easier kill you without issue with starting weapons. Most of their tactics involve charging forward with large numbers, this can be especially problematic since Elite Soldiers can kill you with one hit. Once I powered by Raider things became significantly easier but the time it took to upgrade her wasn't worth it.

Raiders of the Broken Planet has a lot of promise. The game currently only features 6 missions over 2 campaigns but has 3 more operations on the way. The incredible world and lore of this science-fiction universe were captivating but the issue was all the grinding. Having to constantly participate in the same missions for minor upgrades was frustrating, especially considering how much ammo enemies absorb with the basic arsenal. Raiders of the Broken Planet has the potential of becoming something worth exploring, it just needs more reasons to continue playing.

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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