Is it any good?

...

The original system? Sure.

The kike starter funded savage worlds version? Hell no. It takes everything bad about savage worlds (i.e. 90 percent of the system) and magnifies it by a factor of 7.

It's a very awesome mess.

Good to rip ideas from

Get off the internets Kevin. You're drunk.

It's a clusterfuck. Nobody who has read or played it will tell you otherwise, unless it is their sole experience with RPGs.

Do you like 80s Marvel and DC? IE: "Aliens are invading the lost world under the arctic ice and putting cybernetics on the T-rexs there! We have to team up with the psionic ape men and fight back" level crazy?

Do you like a metric fuckton of random tables?

Do you think ideas like "Game balance" and "logic" are for little bitches?

If you answered yes to these you'll love RIFTs

Its a beautiful disaster. Like a complete Neonglowing-cocaine-fueled 80's mashup dumpster fire.

What's so horrible about Savage Worlds? I like Savage Worlds.

This. It can however be a highly entertaining clusterfuck. Nobody who has ever played it hasn't done so with houserules, but the setting is this incredible kitchen sink setting with just enough lunacy (and the occaisonal piece of excellent Perez art) to make it entertaining.
Only a madman could have created the setting for RIFTS, and boy does Kevin Siembieda count.

He's that butthurt grognard who shitposts about Savage Worlds in every Rifts thread.

Savage Worlds is a fine system.

The mechanics are a huge garbage dump fire, but the setting is totally awesome gonzo insanity that's perfect for Saturday Morning Cartoon gaming.

Mechanically, it's Siembieda's fantasy heartbreaker that can be summed up as "AD&D with more crap piled on top" with an additional layer of very stupid crap piled on top. It's basically functional, but does nothing particularly well.

It's total crap and the author is one of the biggest thieves in the industry. If you're gonna play it, pirate it. The sooner that fucker goes out of business he better.

All that you need to know is this:
1) You can not kick in Gerwalk mode. The rules explicitly say so.
2) There is no such thing in this game as Gerwalk mode. It's only ever mentioned in the rules once, when you are told that you can not kick in it.
3) This is because Kevin prefers cut-and-paste (with literal scissors and glue) as a publishing method, and many tables, paragraphs, and rules are physically snipped out of some of his other books and glued onto the publishing masters for Rifts. And vice-versa.

The rules are a mashed-together hot mess, which kind of reflects the world the characters must live in quite well. And with a good GM, it's hella fun.

The deepest darkest secret of RIFTSis that it was always intended to be a system for a kirby superstar RPG. They never got the legal rights to do so, but kevin sama was so dedicated to his dream of the ultimate kirby PNP that he delivered a slightly tweaked system and shipped it with an insanely cheap cop-out setting. Very few people are aware of this secret and I guess that's a good thing. 1/5 kirby PNP games result in the players ascending to an unknown reality.

It is ass. But entertaining ass. Also the Rifts boardgame kickscammer crashed burned hilariously last week. It was a 5 day troll extravaganza.

He shows up every single time Rifts or Savage Worlds gets mentioned to shit all over Savage Worlds. He never actually mentions any problems with Savage Worlds other than vague ad hominem.

I think Shane Hensley ran over his cat.

I was tempted to pledge on it for about five seconds just to get minis for Savage Worlds, and then I realized the only Kickstarter exclusive was literally the worst D-bee race in the game; the only race dumber than the "butter troll" race printed in the Rifter to whine about online complainers.

I'm currently running a game in it. The world is pretty fun, but there are many things that aren't as fleshed out as they should be. Which considering the age of the game should have been clearly explained much sooner.

Same answer everytime: Mechanics are a dumpster fire on a trainwreck, nearly unplayable.

Fluff is interesting enough if you like kitchen sink techno-magic settings.

You know, in an alternate reality WH40k never made it across the pond and Rifts became the borderline stupid/edgy/awesome setting that everyone obsessed over.

Kind of sad really. If Kevin was less of a psycho-autist the line might have more of a franchise presence, but at the same time might have been tinged with irony or something else that'd ruin it.