Riftstorm pre-alpha test kind of surprised me because, usually in alpha tests there's like 2-3 hours of gameplay at most, but usually it's just one level of a game or a small chunk of the open world. Riftstorm had 5 levels that you could do with 4 different characters with every level having randomized rooms, power-ups and loot. It felt more like an open beta with how much content there was here, but of course, not everything was peachy and there are plenty of red flags this game has so lets get into it.

Riftstorm is a top-down twin stick roguelike looter shooter, you can play it either solo or in co-op with up to three players, and you can choose between four different characters to play and every character has a different playstyle, there's a normal soldier character which uses assault rifles and has skills like throwing grenades, then there's a sniper character which has an ability to spawn turrets etc. The gameplay loop is, you choose a character, you choose a mission that varies in difficulty and lenght, you finish said mission, the character you picked levels up and unlocks either new abilities or passives and you bring home loot that's randomized. You then equip better loot that you got and go into a more difficult mission and rinse and repeat. It's does get repetitive quick, and not even playing with friends helped in the fun factor. 

The graphics are nice but you can really tell it's a pre-alpha because most of the environment looks... cheap. The enemies look nice, the characters look nice, but the environment is really boring to look at, the sound is ok, nothing to write home about, and as I said, the gameplay is fun - but the longevity just isn't there yet. I've been playing for 45 minutes before I stopped seeing new power-ups, which again, might be because of the pre-alpha but I'm just calling it how I see it. I've also read something that might rub a lot of people the wrong way - me included. There are some curators on steam that say that this will be an NFT/blockchain game, I know I hate those types of games and don't wanna touch them with a ten foot pole, but if you're into that, check back when the game releases.

Overall, I can safely say this pre-alpha build of Riftstorm is really polished in terms of gameplay, graphics and audio. Though it lacks a bit more content in terms of (fairly non-existent) story and missions, as a glorified tech demo to showcase what the game could be, Riftstorm is not that bad and it could have a future. The worst thing it has going on is that there are way too many similar games to it, and though the execution so far seems sound, there's not much about it that stands up above the rest.

So basically, even as it's obviously well made, it's very basic and bland. It veers dangerously close to the pitfall of becoming just a very well-executed clone of different popular games, which does lead me to believe that it might be a NFT/blockchain game when it releases. It takes more than that to make players invest their time and money. Riftstorm is very much just Diablo but with guns and progression like Hades, so it still lacks something that is going to make it stand out and bring something new and unique to the table. But hey, if the developers don't care about having an original idea and are perfectly happy to have a game that's a mixture between a lot of other popular games, then they are certainly doing it right. But once again, wait for it to fully come out to see how it is and how it plays, the planned release date is 2025.

5/10