The new game from Painkiller and Bulletstorm

Just the other day I was thinking “I could really go for a survival game in the style of the original Far Cry”. You know, one that has the lush tropical islands and open-world mercenary blasting of Crytek’s 2004 trailblazer, but where you plan and execute your missions from a base you build yourself.

I’m not sure why I thought this. I’ve been playing a lot of Abiotic Factor—a survival game set in a massive underground research facility inspired by Half-Life—and that must have got me thinking about what other classic shooters would suit a survivalist twist. In any case, I did think it and now I want it more than anything in the whole world.

Lost Rift…isn’t quite that. But it’s close enough that I’m left wondering whether the universe is listening to me through a particularly thick door. It’s the latest game from People can Fly, creators of Painkiller and my beloved Bulletstorm, and it sees you and several friends wash up on the shores of a tropical archipelago called Pioneer’s Landing.

At a basic level, Lost Rift appears to be a trad survive-o-craft affair. Chop down palm trees, build a little beach hut, suck on a coconut or two for nourishment, the usual stuff. But, as you’d expect from People Can Fly, it’s also a nimble first-person shooter. Here, you’ll assemble an arsenal of chunky, rusted guns, and pursue a PvE story where you follow a trail left by scientists investigating weird interdimensional occurrences.

While there don’t seem to be any beefcake mercenaries yelling things like “How do ya like those apples” before you blast them into mulch, there is an impressively swole monkey that appears to dynamically hunt you through the game. Moreover, orbiting this cooperative hub is a PvP extraction mode where you sail to other islands in the archipelago. These islands are “unstable”, which presumably means there’s a time limit to exploring them, so you’ll need to move quickly and nab what useful loot you can find while battling other players.

Admittedly, these ingredients could easily result in a shapeless, box-ticking mush, and the trailer doesn’t suggest Lost Rift will be earth-shatteringly original. That said, history tells us People Can Fly’s games tend to be more interesting than they initially appear. This was definitely the case with 2020’s Outriders, which looks at a glance like a deeply generic cover shooter. But had a pretty fun sci-fi story and—in its Trickster class—some of the most entertaining bullet-time gunplay I’ve encountered in ages.

Lost Rift arrives in Steam early access on September 25^th, and will cost $25 on launch. People Can Fly says the launch version will include at least 10 hours of PvE play alongside the multiplayer expeditions. People Can Fly could do with it being a hit. The studio laid off 120 people at the end of last year and cut back on several in-development projects, citing an “evolving” video game market as the reason.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad’s home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he’s always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he’ll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.