Lost Rift Review: A Game at War With Itself

People Can Fly has created a game with the bones of a co-op survival masterpiece. The problem is, they buried those bones on an island full of geared-out chads who want to steal your shovel. And honestly? I'm kind of here for it.

Let's get one thing clear right from the start: Lost Rift, the new Early Access survival shooter from People Can Fly, is not the game a lot of people thought it was going to be. Its Steam store page is a battlefield of "Mixed" reviews, not because the game is necessarily bad, but because it commits the cardinal sin of modern gaming: it demands something of its players. This is not a cozy, build-a-hut-and-chill survival game. This is a game with teeth, and it will bite you.

The developers are upfront about it. The description clearly labels it a "high-stakes First-Person Survival Adventure Shooter" with "intense mandatory PvPvE / PvP extraction expeditions." It's not hiding the ball. But in a genre saturated with PvE-centric survival sandboxes, the whiplash of hitting Lost Rift's unforgiving core loop has left a lot of players with a bad taste in their mouths. The game presents you with a beautiful, safe PvE island to call home, lets you get comfortable, and then tells you that all meaningful progress is locked away on a separate, lawless hellscape where other players can, and will, take everything from you. It's a fascinating, bold, and deeply divisive design choice.

The Dream: Your Private Island Stronghold

The first few hours of Lost Rift are a masterclass in survival-crafting comfort. You wash up on the shore of Pioneers' Landing, a gorgeous, sprawling PvE island that is yours and yours alone (or yours and up to four friends'). This is your base, your sanctuary. Here, the game is a wonderfully familiar loop. You gather resources, craft tools, and use a flexible, modular building system to construct your dream survivalist compound.

The graphics are solid, with a clean aesthetic reminiscent of Rust, but with its own unique atmospheric flair. The dynamic weather system is particularly impressive, with sudden hurricanes and thunderstorms adding a real sense of danger and immersion to your island life. You'll complete quests for a few NPCs, uncover bits of lore about the mysterious archipelago, and generally enjoy a polished and engaging PvE experience. This part of the game is your safe zone. Nothing you build here can be destroyed by other players, and your stored loot is secure. It's the perfect foundation for a great co-op survival game. But it's only half the equation.

The Nightmare: The Price of Progress

And then, inevitably, the main quest tells you to build a boat. This isn't for a leisurely cruise. This boat takes you to the Expedition island, the game's one and only PvPvE zone. And this is where Lost Rift shows its true colors. Every single resource, quest item, and piece of technology required to advance past the most primitive crafting tier is located on this island. You want to upgrade from a wooden hut to a stone fortress? You need to go there. You want to move from a bow and arrow to a rifle? You need to go there.

The Expedition island is a 40-minute, timed instance shared with up to 15 other players. Death is permanent, at least for your gear. If you die, you lose everything you brought with you and everything you've collected. You're sent back to your cozy PvE island naked and ashamed.

This is where the game's biggest and most valid criticisms lie. Not in the existence of PvP, but in its brutal, unforgiving implementation. There is currently no solo-only queue. As a fresh-spawn with a cobbled-together bow, you will be thrown into the same shark tank as fully-geared three-man squads running meta loadouts. It is, by design, an unfair fight. You are not meant to be the predator. You are the prey. This design choice is a deliberate filter, and it's one that a lot of players are bouncing right off of.

A Brutal, Unforgiving World

Even if you can stomach the forced PvP, the game's balance feels calibrated to "pain." The PvE enemies, particularly on the Expedition island, are bullet-sponges that can shred you in seconds. The common hyenas can tank multiple headshots from an early-game bow, yet they can kill you in just a few hits. The AI's ability to see and shoot you through thick foliage that you can't see through feels cheap and frustrating.

The grind is relentless. It takes a significant amount of time to farm the resources for even a basic kit, and the ever-present knowledge that you can lose it all in an instant to an exit-camping squad can make the entire loop feel demoralizing. This is not a game that respects your time in the traditional sense. It respects your skill, your patience, and your tolerance for punishment.

A Work in Progress

It’s important to remember that Lost Rift is in Early Access, and it absolutely feels like it. While the core gunplay is solid and the base building is robust, the game is littered with jank. The UI can be clunky, building can be fiddly, and there are a host of missing quality-of-life features, like a mini-map or a more intuitive quest tracking system.

Performance is also a mixed bag. While it runs smoothly for me personally, the Steam forums are filled with reports of stuttering and crashes, particularly for players with AMD hardware. The developers have been active and are patching the game, but it's clear there's a long road ahead.

The Verdict: An Acquired Taste

I have never been so torn on a game. On one hand, I hate the forced PvP progression and the brutal, unforgiving nature of the Expedition island. It's a frustrating, often demoralizing experience that feels designed to make you rage-quit.

On the other hand... I get it. The unique gameplay loop—a safe, persistent PvE base that you build and improve using loot from high-stakes, full-loss PvP runs—is a brilliant concept. It’s a solution to the biggest problem in games like Rust: the misery of being offline raided and losing hundreds of hours of work while you sleep. In Lost Rift, your home is safe. The only thing at risk is what you choose to gamble on each expedition.

This is not a game for everyone. In fact, it's not a game for most people. If you are a solo player, or if you are looking for a relaxing PvE survival experience, I cannot stress this enough: do not buy this game. You will hate it. But if you have a dedicated squad, and you love the adrenaline-fueled, high-stakes gameplay of extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, then Lost Rift offers a unique and incredibly compelling twist on the formula.

The developers made a bold choice to chain their game's progression to a hardcore PvP system. It's a filter, and it's working as intended. For the small niche of players who crave this specific blend of creative survival and brutal competition, Lost Rift is a treasure. For everyone else, it's a beautiful island best left undiscovered.

6.5/10 A fascinating, frustrating, and deeply flawed experiment with a core of pure, unadulterated genius.

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.