When you’ll be outside combat, you’ll spend your time in the Ark, your homebase. Still, you can manually retreat anytime you want, and by doing so, you’ll get to keep your credits and cargo. Afterwards, you’d have to start from scratch with a new ship. Obviously enough, if you don’t have the Automatic Retreat skill equipped, you won’t be able to save your ship, and therefore, upon death, you’ll lose everything you had on your ship. Upon retreating you’ll lose all the cargo stored in your hold, and you don’t get to keep the credits earned during that mission, and some of the items that you have equipped have a chance of breaking. One of the skills that you unlock right from the start is the Automatic Retreat, which essentially saves your ship when your health reaches 0. On the other hand, automatic skills don’t cost energy points, but these are either passive abilities or are only triggered when certain conditions are met. Active skills use up energy and, once used, have a cooldown. With that in mind, you can have up to six different skills equipped at any given time, two of which are automatic skills, and the other four are active ones. You also have your Focus level, which gradually increases, and this allows you to achieve higher scores, but the way you gain Focus is different between ship classes. These range from simple repair abilities to area of effect explosions to protection from projectiles. Having to manually select one and then the other back and forth is a waste of time, and I’m sure this wouldn’t be something that is hard to implement.Ĭombat is the main focus of the game, combined with the enormous variety of weapons, and, besides your basic attack you also have a set of skills that you can equip. It’s worth pointing out that the game lacks one thing that I’m sure every single player would love to see, and that is a real-time comparison between the equipped item and the one you have selected on your inventory, for comparison reasons. These can require a specific amount of points allocated to your stats. Still, you can’t go around equipping every single item you find during your missions, in order to do equip one of these items you must first meet any requirements to do so, if there are any. Items can also come with modifiers, which can be extremely beneficial to you during your missions, or which can also come with negative effects. Still, each ship has three main stats that you can upgrade, including Structure, which affects your health and armor Navigation, which is correlated to your health and firepower and Power, which also corresponds to your health and skill power.Įach ship can be outfitted with items from eight different categories, with these being armor plates, engines, thrusters, energy cells, shields, cpu’s, helmets and weapons. These include the Interceptor, a fast ship that packs heavy firepower at the cost of low damage resistance the Marauder, which is sort of the in between ship class, which features moderate resistance and firepower and the Sentinel, which can take quite the beating at the expense of mobility. The game offers three different ship classes, each with their own unique stats, strengths and weaknesses. As you play, you’ll come across various pickups, which can go from simple health and energy pickups, to rare and unique items that you can equip. However, despite the fact that, at first, Drifting Lands might look like just any other game in its genre, the game has a strong focus on loot. The core gameplay loop is, as mentioned above, played in the form of a side scrolling shoot’em’up. Other than that, you’ll be seeing text dialogue between characters that you’ll meet throughout the game. Now, remnants of Humankind fight for survival against corporations that turned into totalitarian states, and you’re part of one particular group of survivors that lives aboard the Ark, a massive ship that does their best to survive in this post-apocalyptic scenario. Basically there was this worldwide catastrophic event that shattered the planet into several pieces, thus creating the Drifting Lands. The game does provide a rather concise introductory scene that presents you to the game world. In terms of story and narrative the game doesn’t offer much sadly. These two elements together make up for very compelling gameplay loop that has the potential to bring in people that normally wouldn’t be fans of a game with these characteristics. In essence, Drifting Lands is a brilliant mixture of elements from different genres, on one side it has the core gameplay of a shoot’em’up, and on the other it has the loot focus characteristic of a hack and slash or an action rpg. This is the second game from Alkemi to be released on Steam, but this time around they bring in a very different game than their first title, Transcripted. Drifting Lands was released early last month on Steam after being on Steam’s Early Access program.
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