by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Drifting Lands
  
• Developer-  Alkemi
  
• Publisher-  Alkemi
  
• PC (Steam)

There’s something to be said for games that confidently play with the conventions of their genre. Certain ideas tend to become ingrained into the dynamics of particular game genres, and the more niche the genre the harder it becomes to move away from them. Scrolling shooters are definitely a niche where this applies and it’s easy to see why most of them are indistinguishable to an outside observer. Enter Drifting Lands, a shooter that upturns almost every convention of the genre by combining it with the world of action RPGs. What results is a shooter with bite sized missions, a lengthy story based campaign, and an action loop that will keep you fighting for gear drops and upgrades for hours. It provides a fresh alternative for players not interested in chasing high scores or 1CCs with plenty of scenarios and abilities to tackle them with. Unfortunately, it breaks the conventions of the genre without understanding why they’re in place, and ends up with something more messy than it should be. 

The first thing you’ll notice about Drifting Lands is how dense the interface. Like its ARPG forebearers, this is a game with a heavy HUD and plenty of statistics on every page. Before you even begin your mission you’ll be greeted with a hangar, a shop, the skill screen, a map of current missions and several story sequences that set up the plot. It’s surprisingly robust, especially for a genre that often doesn’t give you more than an attract demo to set up its plot. After familiarizing yourself with the place you’ll be off to the map screen to select a mission and take on your enemies.

This is where things get messy. Due to the loot focused design Drifting Lands begins you with a severely underpowered ship. Even basic enemies will take several seconds of sustained fire to destroy and you’ll find it a little more difficult to maneuver around than you’d like. Bullets also blend together with the backgrounds, making it easy to lose track of them and accidentally take damage. This is mitigated by a health bar, and the ability to repair yourself on the fly by using an ability that draws from a regenerating mana pool. It doesn’t feel great, but it’s thematically fitting, having you and your crew build up a ship from a deteriorated heap to a capable fighter.

Successfully completing a mission will reward you with several pieces of loot, allowing you to upgrade your movement, attack power, damage resistance etc. You’ll also be able to upgrade your base stats and earn new abilities that you can equip to alter your play style. After a few hours you’ll find yourself with a more capable craft, able to outmaneuver most enemies and taking them down with a few shots. Missions will go by quickly and any damage you take will be easily recoverable. Unfortunately, most weapons you find won’t be viable, either firing in slow bursts that can’t keep up with the amount of enemies or shooting in bizarre wide arcs unless used with certain ability.

 This gets to the root of the problem with Drifting Lands. It just doesn’t feel good to shoot. Guns feel strangely constrained and abilities don’t change your approach in any major way. Everything boils down to finding new ways to cause more damage per second or recover from damage you’ll inevitably take because of the unclear visual design. This might be true its ARPG inspirations as well, but because enemies here comes in waves that can simply be avoided it lacks any of the need for crowd control or taxing resource management. And because Drifting Lands can’t rely on you to have any particular abilities at a given moment enemy patterns never give you a real challenge. They never approach in a way that forces you to control space or taxes your ability. Most of the time you can simply hold down the fire button, maybe pop an ability for a few seconds of concentrated fire, or hit a dash to avoid a few bullets. But even if you fail you can easily recover that health in a few moments. It allows sloppy play and lacks tension. The threat never feels like it comes from the enemy, but from not watching your health and mana bar. The only challenge comes from the bosses, which have large health bars and high firepower, but even if those are more a test of patience than skill.

So Drifting Lands settles into a grind. You’ll keep returning to do more missions, because there’s plenty more of them and new loot to find. Maybe you’ll do one of those tedious sidequests that distracts from the shooting in an attempt to bring variety. Your sole motivation becomes earning enough currency to see the next upgrade or ability. It makes the whole affair monotonous and degrades any energy or urgency that might previously have been there. Instead of being exciting it became exhausting.

A single run of Drifiting Lands might have a longer play time than several other shooters combined, but I’d rather run through plenty of other shooters multiple times than finish another run through Drifting Lands. It’s an uneven hybrid that offers an alternative to the tropes and structures of the shooter genre, but fails to make any of them compelling. It might appeal to players who have no interest in digging deeper into the intricacies of arcade style shooters, but in the end its core combat is too shallow to provide anything but a justification for a loot grind.