RIG Riot Review

RIG Riot delivers fast, customizable Mech combat with a roguelike twist.

RIG Riot is the kind of game that tells you straight away what inspired it. It’s hard to miss the impact of the Armored Core series from the moment you start maneuvering your mech across the battlefield, boosting through the air, dodging incoming fire, swapping weapons, and assembling parts in the garage. Developer Sage Boatman has been clear that one reason RIG Riot came into existence was the demand for more games with the kind of mech action found in Armored Core 6.

However, just calling it an indie version of any mech game would undersell what this game is genuinely aiming to do. RIG Riot takes the fast-paced third-person mech fighting and blends it with a roguelike structure. Instead of a single major campaign where your machine becomes increasingly better through a standard progression system, it’s all about ongoing experimentation.

You bring a permanent rig into a run, complete objectives, take down foes, find temporary weapons and upgrades, gain experience, and eventually make your way back to the garage with new options for your machine. That combo gives RIG Riot a personality all its own. RIG Riot is his first big gaming project, so Sage Boatman is a really impressive narrative in the game's development.

Development was a long period of iteration, with early versions seeing major changes to movement, melee, enemy behavior, mission structure, advancement, onboarding, controller support, and the interface. The developer's own updates outline how much feedback shaped the project, including an introductory raid, updated tutorials, objective revisions, balance adjustments, and other quality-of-life enhancements.

And that history matters, since RIG Riot doesn't feel like an abandoned prototype that someone just slapped a title on.

It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it also has a distinct sense of someone slowly working out what this game should be. The result is a focused mech roguelike that understands why movement, customization, and build experimentation matter so much in this genre.

Story is perhaps the one area in RIG Riot has the least interest in competing with the larger mech games. The story stays firmly in the background, but it has a science-fiction backdrop with a huge structure, mean machines, enemy rigs, and all kinds of flavor text around the gear you pick up. You’re not here for cinematic scenes or character-driven campaigns.

The plot exists primarily to provide the battle and progression a setting. Your tasks happen in the environment, but your real progression comes from upgrading your rig and learning the technologies at your disposal. As time passes, you discover which guns work well with specific builds, which parts suit your preferred movement style, and how different mods might interact.

Given RIG Riot's breadth, this approach makes sense. In a solo-developed mech roguelike, there are already a ton of systems to construct, balance, and manage. “It’s not fair to expect the kind of storytelling they have in a much bigger production. Still, this is one area where I’d want to see the developer take things further. The universe has enough of a foundation that a stronger story might make the setting a whole lot more memorable.

But for now, RIG Riot focuses more on what type of machine you can build than what kind of persona you can become. At the core of RIG Riot is mech movement and fighting, and it's strongest there. You control a customizable machine that can boost, dash, alter elevation, attack from varied ranges, and move vertically through its environments.

Movement is exactly what you'd expect from a mech action game, with lots of speed and responsiveness.

The momentum feels wonderful when it all clicks into place. You can sprint toward an enemy, shoot your guns, escape while dodging incoming fire, gain altitude, and change direction on a dime. Fighting means you’re always on the go, not just sitting in one place shooting till something blows up.  This is especially fun when you're up against another formidable mech, because fights can often devolve into frenzied exchanges where both sides are constantly moving in and out of attack range. 

The leg system matters because it gives the machine a physical identity. Your choice of pieces matters more than picking the component with the highest numbers, since different configurations affect how you traverse the terrain.  You can build lighter, more mobile rigs, heavier machines built to take punishment, or builds that favor certain weaponry and movement choices.

The game’s customization system lets you do all of this and more. So the garage is almost as essential as the combat itself. RIG Riot is based on the premise that every run is a learning experience about your machine.

You might uncover a weapon that's better than you thought, a part that alters your mobility, or combine temporary tweaks that create a whole new way to play. Steam describes the game as having thousands of permanent elements, each made by combining components from different sets. That sounds like a lot, but the key isn't the number. What counts is if those elements stimulate exploration, and for the most part they do.

There’s also an Arena mode, a particularly welcome addition for those who appreciate the pure combat aspect of mech games. Instead of stressing about a bigger run, you may focus on your rig and test it against opponents in more concentrated clashes. The arena was added later in development, along with biped legs, more objectives, weapon customization, and other upgrades.

The game even recreates some of the old-school fun of entering the arena again and again just because fighting another mech is fun. It feels different from the core roguelike loop, but it plays to the game's greatest strength: the mech itself is entertaining to handle.

RIG Riot doesn't really have typical puzzles, so the fighting and mission structure become the main challenge. As difficulty rises, missions may require killing foes, capturing areas, hacking, retrieving parcels, fighting bosses, and other objectives. Depending on how you want to play, a run can take about 20 to 30 minutes, which keeps the roguelike loop at a tolerable cadence.

The task structure is good because you don’t just go into an arena and destroy everything.

Objectives matter, incentives matter, and you decide how far you want to push a run. As you go on, enemy pressure ramps up, and the roguelike tension is familiar: you want the higher rewards, but one bad encounter can bring it all crashing down. Bosses are especially fun since they compel you to use the build you have made.

A good build can make a battle feel like it’s in hand; a bad one can suddenly expose your deficiencies. That’s when the game’s personalization system transcends a mere menu of statistics. Another area that could still improve is the variety of task types. The current aims function works, but you can start to recognize familiar patterns gradually. More target modifications will help keep longer sessions from becoming repetitive.

The maps themselves add another layer to fighting, with verticality surprisingly essential. Some settings contain many layers, so you can move up, down, and around structures while you fight. Jump pads. They let you reach higher areas, and the verticality makes combat feel livelier than if the arena were completely level.

Unfortunately, these areas aren't always as easy to navigate as they are to fight in. Health and ammo stations can be a pain to find, and the objective/loot marks aren’t always clear about where you should head. The compass can often be confusing, especially if a target is on a different vertical level.

It’s not catastrophic, but it can disrupt the flow. You are thinking about your movement and your enemies at the same time. You lose momentum when you're traveling about looking for a location where a supply station or reward has spawned. Roguelike progression helps mitigate some of these problems. You gain experience during runs and level up as you pick up weapons, upgrades, perks, and modifications.

Temporary decisions shape the way a specific attempt plays out, while permanent components give a longer-term incentive to return to the garage. That is a huge difference. RIG Riot isn't just about every run being a chance to get unbelievably powerful. Instead, it urges you to make the best use of the tools provided. Sometimes a run pushes you into more long-range fighting; sometimes a run pushes you to be more aggressive at close range.

That’s also why the roguelike idea works better here than it might seem at first.

You’re not grinding because the game wants you to grind. You grind because the next piece could totally transform how your next rig works. So every failed run might feel like an opportunity to experiment, not wasted time.

That system isn’t without its flaws. There’s a lot to get your head around here: weapons, parts, stats, effects, modifications, energy management, enemy behavior, temporary upgrades. If you like researching builds, depth is a strength. If you just want to jump into a mech and start shooting, the detail can feel daunting.

That said, note that RIG Riot isn’t aiming to go toe-to-toe with the visual extravaganza of a big AAA mech production. The graphics aren't great, but they do what they have to do. The visual coup is the machines themselves. Your mech takes on a unique look because you are always swapping parts and building your own setup. Some combinations look sleek; others may look weird, hefty, or almost contrived.

Exactly everything you want in a game with personalization in mind. The game’s focus on verticality also helps the settings. Corporate, dystopian-themed places give the world a cohesive character, but the layered layouts leave enough room for the movement system to shine. One of the more memorable sceneries is a unique purple city-like ambiance, which fits especially well with the soundtrack.

Admittedly, the landscapes sometimes feel a little barren, and the presentation lacks the hand-built feel of a much larger game. Some of the animations also lack the weight and refinement you might expect from a high-budget production. But given the circumstances of the game’s production, these limitations are reasonable.

More importantly, the images show what’s happening in conflict. Weapons are legible, foes are identifiable, and the action is comprehensible even when several machines and bullets are filling the screen. Sound design follows the same approach as the visuals: not innovative, but it gets the job done. The mechs sound like mechs, the weapons have enough punch to make the strikes feel satisfying, and the combat soundtrack helps keep the tempo of an engagement going.

The music is more all over the place.

Some tunes fit the locations well and make fights more exciting; other pieces can get repetitive over long sessions. The music is decent, and at times terrific, but not necessarily something you'll remember long after you've turned the game off.

But the mix of weapon sounds, mechanical motion, and music does its job. During frantic combat, the soundtrack adds to the impression of speed, rather than detracting from it. RIG Riot is an interesting example of what can happen when a creator takes inspiration from a great game and refuses to just duplicate it. Yeah, the DNA of Armored Core is plain.

Any Armored Core 6 fans will immediately recognize the focus on movement, mech customization, weapon variety, legs, boosting, and arena-style fights. But RIG Riot ultimately serves a different function. It feels different because of the roguelike structure. Instead of going through a traditional campaign, you're always asking yourself what to create next.

You start with a certain machine, adjust to the equipment you encounter, acquire experience, survive ever-tougher missions, and head back to the garage to try again. That loop works because the combat is fun on its own. But none of the customization matters if maneuvering your mech around is unpleasant. Luckily, the movement is quick, the weapons feel responsive, and encounters can be quite exciting.

There are weaknesses. Minimal tale, monotonous music, some visual/animation elements could use a bit of polish, could use more mission variety, and navigation can often be unnecessarily confusing. Menus are also hard to read in spots where text overlaps, and some controller navigation and interface changes feel clunky.

But none of those problems shake the foundation.

What Sage Boatman has made is a tight mech roguelike that understands why it’s so satisfying to operate and customize a massive machine. The biggest compliment is that RIG Riot may make you want to go back to old-school mech games. Not because RIG Riot replaces it, but because it reminds you why that sort of mech warfare is so fun in the first place.

Don’t buy RIG Riot expecting AAA visuals. This is a smaller, more focused roguelike with its own advancement system, and it succeeds because it doesn't try to recreate everything a much larger game offers. But it takes the bits most important to its concept. Movement. Combat. Customization. Experimentation. The thrill of constructing a machine that feels like yours. And that’s really impressive for a first major game by a solitary developer.

There’s still plenty of opportunity for RIG Riot to expand – especially in the variety of its missions, its presentation, its navigation and its plot – but the foundations are strong enough to make it worth the ride. If you take a run and instantly start thinking about what you can do to change your legs, try a new weapon, swap your build, or try a new combo of mods, then RIG Riot has already succeeded in what it set out to do.