Pc drifting lands manual#

Manual retreats allow for keeping your loot, but the point here is that you can replace the Automatic Retreat skill with a different passive, at the risk of potentially losing your ship. This skill makes it so that when your ship gets down to 0 health, you run back to the hub area, while losing all the loot in your hold. This allows for lots of experimentation, while also giving the player a difficulty modifier of their own in the form of the passive “Automatic Retreat” skill. On top of that, there are repair skills and shields. Then there are mines, plasma beams, even skills that modify your primary fire. There’s a good level of variety here as players can choose from fiery spears that destroy foes in front and behind their ships, to devastating AoE attacks that clear a circular area. Only one skill from any given family can be equipped at a time. These skills are spread across different skill families. This is built upon even more by the game’s skill system.ĭrifting Lands allows players to equip up to six skills (four active, two passive). Thus, right off the bat, we’ve three ship types that require different approaches to how they’re played. The Interceptor, the lightest ship, favors getting dangerously close to enemy bullets or lasers in order to increase its Focus level. The Marauder is required to stay in certain areas on the screen, while the bulkier Sentinel gains Focus while recharging shields. They’re also differentiated by the way they raise their Focus level, which acts as the score multiplier, score being turned into credits at the end of a successful run. Furthermore, upon reaching higher difficulty Grades, better variants of these ships can be unlocked. There are three types of ships one can choose from, each coming with their own stats, movement speed and armor slots. These include cooldown-based skills and a pretty large degree of random loot. What it does is try to mix shoot ‘em up gameplay with a handful of aRPG elements. Playing out its many difficulty levels, it allows for a good amount of introduction to its mechanics.

Drifting Lands might have some good ideas and a lovely visual style, but the presentation and repetitive nature of the game can’t back it up, delivering a rather mediocre game.The first few levels of Drifting Lands put me in the situation of experiencing the most serene shoot ‘em up gameplay I’ve ever seen and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. The story presentation certainly isn’t the strongest side of this game and I found myself not really caring about it.

But in all honestly, it couldn’t captivate me and soon I found myself clicking away the text balloons. At first I was still following the story. These rather static scenes tell you the story of the game through basic text balloons. In the command center, where you select your mission, you’ll also be treated to small story sequences presented in comic book-like panels. Even if there’s some kind of rarity system and a difficulty tier system that allows you to reap better rewards on higher difficulties. But again, this is nowhere near as elaborated or satisfying as in real ARPGs. Trying to emulate the loot grinding from RPGs, enemies also drop items. When you’re not on a mission, you’ll either be upgrading your ship in the hangar or researching blueprints and buying and selling items in the shop.This is all rather basic, so don’t expect a deep RPG system here. Due to all of this, you might get the impression you’re playing the same level over and over. Even the variety in enemies is rather limited. Besides the enemies there are no obstacles to be found. The lack of diversity can become a bore, especially considering the level design is flat. During the missions of the first chapter, you’ll fly 90% of the time through the level design you see in the picture above. Since the levels are procedurally generated, they are very bland and repetitive. A Forgettable ExperienceĪfter playing a couple of missions, you’ll start noticing some flaws in the game’s design.

You’ll have to come to terms with the silly ‘pew pew’ sounds some weapons make though. But other than that, the shooting and dodging can be pretty fun. But giving you so many options and swapping out skills, can lead to easy mistakes which results in frustration as you press a button and you forgot you swapped another skill instead of the one you wanted to use. At times there can be a lot of enemies and projectiles on the screen, turning the game into a typical bullet hell. There’s a variety of skills available that allow for different attacks and the different weapons do change the experience.

Pc drifting lands