There are three classes of ship, which are the standard shmup variety: slow and bulky, quick but flimsy, and somewhere in between. In keeping with its RPG design, Drifting Lands also gives you a lot more room to tailor your ship to your playstyle. For the min-maxers and stat nerds, there’s plenty to work with here.
On top of that, loot comes with a wide range of semi-randomised stat bonuses, which you can then refine and tailor through a complicated crafting system.
It’s not a one-to-one relationship, either, so you can’t simply stack all your points into Power to bolster your attack strength the other stats also contribute, both directly and by allowing you to meet the stat requirements for desired pieces of equipment. There are just three main stats – Navigation, Power, and Structure – that you can manually upgrade, but these feed into a range of secondary stats like health, defense, attack power, and so on. The integration of these different mechanisms is really quite ingenious. Drifting Lands puts a more practical spin on learning the ins and outs of the game’s scoring systems by tying that directly to ship progression – better play means more credits earned and better, more frequent loot drops. That’s certainly enough motivation for the sorts of hardcore players that the genre usually courts, but for the more casual player, such goals can seem esoteric and not particularly exciting. In a typical shmup, good play and mastery of the game’s systems all lead to high scores and topped leaderboards. Defeated enemies leave behind credits and loot, which can be used to improve your ship’s stats and abilities, or even buy entirely new ships. However, the damage you deal, your defence, and your available weapons and tools are no longer set in stone with the ship or character you choose at the outset. The basic idea is simple: while on a mission, Drifting Lands plays like any other horizontal scrolling shmup, as you dodge bullets by the hundreds and take out an onslaught of enemy ships. That’s what French indie studio Alkemi decided to do with Drifting Lands, and it works well – for the most part. Take the hectic action of a shmup and layer RPG loot and progression systems on top of that, and you’ve got a fresh new take on both.
I’d never really thought about before I heard about Drifting Lands, but RPG and shoot ‘em up are two genres that should go together really well.
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