While at one time the first-person shooter genre seemed to be king on both consoles and PCs, over the years their popularity has slowly waned. Sure, there are still periodic franchise releases like Call of Duty, Borderlands, or Far Cry, but you don’t tend to see too many new ones popping up. Indie developers have somewhat tried to fill the genre void, with a few releases a year, but their quality has tended to be pretty wildly inconsistent.

Extinction Rifts fits into that mold, feeling like it is brimming with a variety of ideas like a combo meter, and a mix of normal guns, a special attack, and even a powered punch… but outside of that the overall picture is somewhat all over the place. Right out of the gate I had troubles with areas that were overly dark, making it even tough to find my way around, and when that’s one of the first things you encounter in a game it doesn’t bode well for the overall experience. 

From that point on I’d say the gameplay moves between being somewhat interesting in a generic way to confusing and a bit irritating. While the tutorial felt like it was trying its best to get me up to speed on everything there was to know about playing effectively, once I was running around I wasn’t as confident. I think there being so many options for how to deal with enemies may actually be to the game’s detriment, as I tended to move between methods, simply trying them out, and not necessarily feeling like I was playing everything the way I should have been. In that area I blame the game for not doing a good enough job of communicating what I needed to be focused on in a clear and concise way, leading me to just roll through killing things and not feeling terribly engaged with any of it.

To some degree this simply feels like an incomplete set of thoughts, worked into a playable state, but not really iterated over or refined very well. Yes, it is playable, and yes it has a different sort of feel to it, but the experience as a whole doesn’t feel like it gels very well around what its central hook is, or at least in filling you in on what it should be so you’ll latch onto it rather than just messing around.