Drifting Lands might sound like your next big fantasy adventure or role-playing game, but in reality, this unique hybrid blends equal and perfectly balanced parts of RPG-lite and side-scrolling shoot-em-up gameplay to create one of the most original shooters I’ve played in years. The sheer scope of the game impresses with stats alone, boasting 100 levels of difficulty, 70 active and passive power-ups, and all sorts of parts and gadgets used to equip and power your fully customizable space fighter.
Fans of Diablo-style RPG’s will instantly be at home with their ship config screen that resembles a character sheet complete with assignable boxes for engines, shields, thrusters, weapons, helmets, and a pair of ROM chip upgrade slots. Throughout this massive adventure you will either collect new gear or sell off your scrap for credits to buy stuff in the store that can be equipped to these various slots, and much like your typical RPG, gear is limited by level and prerequisite stats.
With three classes of ships, there is something to suit everyone’s play style, and with so many ways to customize it is very easy to create slow heavily armored ships that deliver powerful railgun attacks, or fast nimble fighters that can warp around the screen raining down endless streams of mini-gun fire. There are seemingly endless combinations of equipment including primary and secondary weapons along with passive and active abilities that can boost credit earnings, magnetically attract collectibles, or even rescue your ship in near-death conditions, because; yes, you can die and lose your ship, but if you are rescued you only lose your cargo.
There is a simple and somewhat disposable story being told through gorgeous story panels and pop-up characters with dialogue bubbles – no speech. The main screen had this cool Wing Commander vibe with a visual menu that lets you click on parts of the screen to access the market, hangar, leaderboards, and command ops. The latter option brings up a mission map with icons representing available missions as well as story bubbles to advance the story and unlock more missions.
Missions must be completed in numerical order, and while it is possible to replay older missions, if you break the sequence, you must start over, but at any given time you will have your primary mission as well as a covert ops mission assigned to you by a story-based contacts. These prove exceedingly challenging as you go deeper into the game.
The actual gameplay is pure shooter goodness with smooth analog movement and rapid-fire trigger action for your primary weapons. Abilities are intuitively mapped to the face buttons and their smartly designed icons switch to a cool-down counter when activated. I really appreciated the icon designs that clearly show the type of weapons or abilities, because once you start switching things around it’s hard to remember what does what.
Despite each mission being randomly generated, enemies appear on screen in predictable and repetitive patterned waves, so it is possible to learn their pattern if you repeat a level multiple times. It’s also possible to learn which weapons and abilities work best in certain levels. I was a big fan of the railgun for a few levels only to reach a level where I died almost immediately because now, I was fighting massive waves of smaller one-hit enemies that were more susceptible to a trident or mini-gun type weapon.
I love the twist that Drifting Lands puts on the shooter genre. Rather than building up your firepower through in-game power-ups it treats the game as an action-RPG where you must collect and sort through loot then equip that loot to your ship. There is a lot more thought that goes into this type of game, and I found myself often spending far more time in the configuration screen and marketplace than I did in some of the missions, which can range from short, medium or long and are labeled as such, but even the long missions are usually over in five minutes or less.
The presentation is outstanding, both in the aforementioned story panels and interactive menu backgrounds, but especially in the game where there is so much variety in colors, scrolling backgrounds and enemy ship designs including some jaw-dropping bosses with crazy fire patterns that will test your reflexes to the max. This is old-school shooter goodness with an innovative RPG twist, and it’s all complemented with one of the best high-energy soundtracks I’ve heard since my Gates of Thunder days on the TurboGrafx-16 back in 1992.
Even when rooting around the menus and inventory screen the text is crisp and sharp and there are helpful color codes for all the attribute boosts, DPS, and modifiers clearly showing you what is better, worse, or staying the same. Drifting Lands supports resolutions up to 4K, which is what I was playing at in silky smooth framerates even during the most chaotic moments of scrolling combat.
Shooters like this are typically games I play for a few days then delete, but Drifting Lands really hits that special niche of addictive RPG-lite where I find myself becoming personally attached to my ship, much like a created character in a traditional adventure. The inventory system really personalizes the game to the point where I won’t un-equip my rescue perk because I don’t want to lose my progress if I should die – and that perk has saved me numerous times already.
And the more you play the more you unlock and discover about the game; especially how certain weapons and abilities work together in these interesting synergies, and how certain equipment perks can boost those abilities even further. Even gamers who typically don’t like to mess around with these config screens will find themselves getting lost in the details and loving every minute of it.
Drifting Lands turned out to be a huge surprise and a game I never thought I would enjoy as much as I have or will continue to enjoy moving on, because with so much content and so many ways to tackle each of the missions, there is no end in sight to my addiction to this totally awesome and wholly unique RPG-shooter hybrid.
