Drifting Lands
Drifting lands is brought to us by France based indie
studio Alkemi taking us back to scrolling screen
space shooters with a hefty dose of RPG thrown in.
Let’s start with what made Drifting Lands fun from
the off: It does a great job of nailing what makes a
good RPG so addictive. The Ark, your Space Station
base, is equipped with a hangar that allows you to
spend your hard-earned credits to upgrade your
ship in a myriad of ways. By upgrading its core stats,
which include Navigation, Power, and Structure,
you can equip better armour, bigger guns and more
powerful engines. In addition to outfitting your ship
you can also select from over 100 skills (four active,
and two passive) which offer a number of offensive
and defensive capabilities. This is one of the places
Drifting Lands really shines, and the endless drive
of trying to improve your ship proves compelling, at
least for a while.
Where Drifting Lands differs to many other side-
scrolling shooters is that it doesn’t throw you power-
ups. If you want to heal yourself in the middle of a
fight, then you need a healing skill equipped. Want to
devastate swarms of the enemy at close range? then
equip conflagration in a slot and watch them burn.
Much like any traditional RPG, each of these skills
has its own cool-down and warm-up timer, too. This
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means a lot of watching of those timers to ensure
you are aware of when you can use them next and
to strategically place the uses of each skill at your
disposal.
Where the game does not perform as well is the story.
It’s a predictable, lacklustre tale, and often just feels
like something getting in the way between just having
fun scrolling/ flying while shooting down the enemy.
Equally the dialogue, which is read rather than heard,
is flat and generic, almost a paint by numbers and
lacking real character.
As you might expect, the gameplay does become
repetitive quite fast which, when combined with the
lacklustre story and dialogue means within a few
hours your engagement with the game as a whole
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