Drifting Lands

great game and runs perfect on deck

I really want to recommend this game as much as I want to love it. But I don't. Too many glaring flaws that make you wonder what the devs were thinking.

No button prompts anywhere. So you have to guess what your buttons do, in game and in the menus. Then you have to remember... You want to look at that item you picked up? Pressed x? Woops out the air lock... Want to pause the game? Hit select? Woops, retreat from level and no way to cancel.... just odd. Horrible decisions. I like grindy power creep games. I know what they are, and I know what the gimmick is and I am ok with it till I get bored. But this game seems like it is trying to annoy you with its obtuse mechanics and controls. Not to mention the level map system.

I am not stupid person. I get confused sometimes because I expect things to be intuitive. But Why am I playing the beginner level over and over with no advancement? it says there are three, I thought I played all three beginner levels, but now 2 and 3 are locked again and I can only play 1....what is this? There are other things on the map but I dont know what they are, side missions or main progress? Can't tell. Since there is no explanation of what I am supposed to do. Its just half assed all over the place and the devs have obviously abandoned this game... Try it on a deep discount maybe.

I will edit my review later, but I just think that this game, while flawed in unfortunate ways, and stubbornly irritating at times, is overall a bit underrated, especially at the current price.

I really tried to push through it to see if it gets better but no, after 24h it's still awful.

A sample of the problems this game has :

- awfull drop rate. 99% trash.
- No unique weapon after 24h of play time.
- Underpower weapons. Expect having hard time killing most enemies 10 level below your weapon.
- Most weapons are useless. Completely unbalanced. Clearly the devs didn't bother.
- Skill system mostly useless. Only a few skill are really competent. The rest is situational at best.
- Half the enemies are coming from behind. Only a few skill can deal with that and they are either ineffective or make you vulnerable from the front.
- Tanky kamikaze drones faster than you and coming from behind. There is nothing you can do except taking damage.
- Minimal difference of speed between the 3 different ships.
- You have to push the joystick quite far before the ship is starting moving, causing delay in your movements input.
- Bullet sponge Bosses. Some of them are becoming easy to deal with once you learn the paterns but it will still take ages to kill them anyway.
- Useless and badly implemented "focus" system you will forget really quickly. I mean staying immobile at a certain position on the screen to slowly gain focus is dumb in a bullet hell shmup.
- Terrible UI to navigate with with a gamepad. In a shmup. Genius!
- Too much bloom effect you cannot disable, decreasing the vibility. In a bullet hell. Genius!

On overall, the game doen't seem to know if it's a bullet hell shmup or a diablo-like shmup. The diablo-like part is mediocre, farming is not rewarding and there is not sense of power. You won't get the nice feeling of finding a cool gear or weapon that will make the difference and allow you to push through the next difficulty wall. That won't happen. Never.

And the bullet hell part is underwelming with the lack of proper tools to deal with it. No bombs to clean the entire screen of bullets for exemple. Or no proper way to deal vertical and backward damage. And no cool stuff like friendly drones, permanent rocket launcher, etc.... Only pew pew main guns.

One hour into Drifting Lands, I thought it was a pretty cool shoot-'em-up.
Three and a half hours in, I had stopped thinking that way. It took me about seven and a half hours to finish the story, so the bad definitely outweighed the good here. I only got to grade 4 (out of 10) as part of that, so I'd have a lot more hours of grinding procedurally generated content to make my numbers go up if I really wanted to do that, but that was already my problem with the game.

See, Drifting Lands applies Diablolike stat grinding to the shmup model, except it's still a shmup and the main thing that determines how well you do is still player skill, followed by your skills (which are unlocked through game progress, rather than random), followed far, far below by what equipment you've got on your ship. This is especially true since every piece of equipment - except for the special features of a fraction of unique items - does nothing but tinker with your numbers, not opening up new capabilities in terms of the gameplay, so the progression never feels like you're going places, since the enemies' numbers are also going up as well, and so your attacks look and perform quite similarly at endgame as they did near the start of the game.

The story was not good, and the plot twists with what Redemption, the villains, actually were and wanted were just weird, but as a shmup that can generally be forgiven, it's not really a story-heavy genre. However, it also managed to have every single character except for the engineer's son be a huge jerk I wanted to see less of, so that wasn't good.

Not recommended. The basic mechanics were good, but there's a lot of "grinding" due to stages being procedurally generated, and the feeling of progression is basically nonexistent. Something like Tyrian, where you go from a single pea shooter to four map-crushing weapons plus a special weapon, is a much better model for shmup progression.

When it first came out, the game didn't click with me. Now I can't get enough. The game really comes into its own when you start slotting in unique items. Their skill boosts/modifiers will introduce entire new play styles. Sometimes I am playing it like a traditional shmup, then my brain gets the Diablo loot drop buzz with the skill rotation as well. It pumps a lot of dopamine.

After slogging through a 25+ hour story campaign, I figured I would just say this is a really fun game that does have its shortcomings.

For starters, it takes about 4-6 hours to feel like you're making decent progress. The story ends abruptly just as it seems to get interesting. The grind is real.

But it's beautiful, the soundtrack is top notch, the skills are awesome, and the more you dig into the RPG elements, the more it keeps you coming back.

Drifting Lands will probably become a cult classic over time. I hate the sales numbers weren't up to expectations because the devs were clearly onto something here. I hope they take another crack at this style of shmup/rpg hybrid. A stronger story and a little less stingy on the good loot drops would elevate a sequel/spiritual successor to an all-time great shmup.

The game is probably fine, but I failed to grasp its charm and got bored: two hours in there was only a handful of enemies present, while the only aRPG element I noticed was the constant garbage loot management.

You know, I want to like side scrolling shooters. I like randomized loot and narrative storytelling to pull me through the missions.

But.

Drifting Lands has some...problems.

- Enemy bullets are very hard to see. They move slow (unlike enemies! Expect to take most of your damage from either bullet spam or fast moving ememies) but they're very hard to actually SEE in around the various explosions and other effects (FU weather, FU).
- Enemies can spawn behind you, no gun shoots behind you.
- Speaking of which, 90% of the gun designs are trash. I can tolerate exactly three of them: Triple Gatling, Scatter Laser, and the Trident. And of those 3 the Scatter Laser is the best. Why? Bullet spread or the lack thereof.
- Guns fall into one of two (annoying) buckets: ZERO bullet spread or UNCONTROLLABLE bullet spread. Triple Gatling has a very narrow spread, but non-zero, Scatter Laser has the best code and seems to pick its own targets, Trident cyclically adjusts its spread over time (the outer two guns reciprocate up and down in a tolerable spread cone width).
- Double Gatling starts narrow and spreads wider over the course of about 1 second, then pauses all firing to reset. Machine Gun resets to zero spread whenever you stop firing, then gets wider (to about 160(!) degrees) as you hold the fire button. Single Laser has no spread (its a SINGLE laser). Etc.
- A bajillion meaningless stats. 90% of equipment is trash because it only has a primary attribute (the thing the slot does, eg. armor plating gives armor, fuel cells give energy) and then a collection of primary an secondary modifiers (the more the better, the rarer the more). I don't even know what some of them do and don't care because having them or not having them makes no difference. Is 5% slower shield recharge worth 1% more critical chance? Is 4.8% less focus loss reduction worth +7 shield HP? I don't know and I don't care. The only thing that matters is that the new piece should on average have more total stats than the old piece.
- Three primary attributes: Structure (hp), Navigation (dps), and Power (skill effectiveness) exist solely to make you spend money to equip items. That's it. If you actually care about a stat, its Navigation because each point is raw 0.35% more DPS. Everything else only matters to equip the best gear and buying stat deficiencies is CHEAP. By the time I unlocked Difficulty 2 I almost had enough cash to outright buy the 2nd hull upgrade, skipping the first.
- Market: don't bother, the only reason the market exists is to sell off gear you can't use. Nothing you can buy here (even uncommon/blue) isn't better than the trash tier common garbage you just sold them from your last mission (to say nothing of the rares your ship is built out of).
- Blueprints: MEH. I wish these didn't exist. The only part you can equip more than one of is armor, so why would you spend money to buy three copies of the same item with different attribute modifiers? Just give me the item and get rid of blueprints. I mean I GUESS if you're playing on "destroy my stuff when I lose" mode, but honestly even then, why bother? You're spending money for the privilege of spending more money...
- Money is useless, see Market and Blueprints. That's basically the only thing you can spend money on and you get so much of it (even after the game's plot's atrocious 90% tax rate). I mean I GUESS I could buy more storage space for loot back at the hangar...
- Keybinds are...tolerable. Good luck figuring out what the defaults are without going to the settings menu. And good luck figuring out which skill slot (in a diagonal 2x2 grid) is which keybind (if #1 is the bottom, and #2 is on the right...then #3 would be the top..? Nope! Its the one on the left. They're unlabled though, so have fun!) Still not sure why [Alt] acts like the "press A to continue" button but no other key does. Why yes I wanted to confirm that when alt-tabbing.
- "Move loot from ship to storage? Yes, No, No and never ask again." Uh... what about "Yes and never ask again"?
- Skill usage (ie. how does I aim skill?) No idea. Press button, things happen, have fun learning how to use the dash skill in the direction you actually want to go. Grab the aoe detonation skill as your offensive one, repair, and then the bubble shield because they're always useful. Do whatever you want for the fourth I guess.
- Various cutscenes that do nothing. They're literally "ooh shiny animation" between short bits of dialog are unskippable. No reason. There isn't any voice over or text or anything, they're just 5 to 30 seconds of nothing. And you're going to see the same ones over and over again.

+ Awesome, awesome OST
+ Great gameplay, with a few BUTs below
+ Great usage of classes with unique hitboxes and stat effects, stats, skills and items to make pretty unique builds
+ Great storyline til where I am
+ Great graphics
+ The focus system on different classes is cool, particularly when using Master skills that depends on focus level
+ Procedural levels and itemization; Sometimes the same level might be easier or harder depending on the boss patterns
+- At first I HATED the fact that every enemy explodes in a rain of bullets directed shotgun-style at the player, but now I kinda enjoy it cuz it makes gameplay more tactical
+- Thanks to the above, it is a MUST to stop firing sometimes, and it is almost impossible to kill every enemy without dying to a hellish no-path barrage of bullet hell (Maybe unless with an Interceptor, much later)
- Somewhat repetitive enemies and bosses (But they're procedurally mixed at least)
- Pretty grindy (But then, even thou I am a good shmup player, OCD made me start w Sentinel to get max scavenging (item finding))
- Some very useless weapon "templates" (IE, its like, how the weapon will fire)
- It shows that it is inspired by very old euro-shmups where the ship's bullets are not instant like japanese bullet hell shmups, but it is to most weapons a stream of tiny, tiny, somewhat slow bullets that must hitt tiny, tiny, enemies. It was a great turnoff for me at the start. Depending on the weapon used, a skill that hits masses is a must.
- This is a bad one: MANY, MANY Places where the bullets are the same color as the background, Battle-Garegga style. I believe bullets should have better contour, be more visible, ala Dodonpachi.
- The fullscreen flashing when taking damage makes me have some hard migraines

Overall, is a worthy experience and must play for SHMUP lovers that like RPG aspects, and maybe ARPG lovers that can play SHMUPS.

This game has beautiful graphics and sound design, and I did not encounter any bugs, so good quality software. However, the biggest problem I have with the game ist that it's p a c i n g is not at all well done, unfortunately.
You start will all weapon types and all skills unlocked (except for skill variants), this is overwhelming! Then the enemies are very generic (If you have played a few levels you have seen most of them) and the missions auto-generated and repetitive. After each level you get a pile of loot, which is cumbersome to equip, move, sell and compare - in short, I spent a lot of game time in the item menu where even he simplest item has 2-3 generic bonuses. Though the bonuses are not meanigful.
In the later levels finally the games gets more challening but it punishes you very hard for failing a mission ( For example losing your favourite item..), and at that point, really, you have seen everything the game has to offer.
Also the story is very skippable, unfortuately. At the beginning I read it, until I realized the charackters never say anything which has an impact on the game (except one time), basically they are only making smalltalk.

So while this game has nice ideas and good presentation, it's just not fun to play.

One of my favourite shmup ever. It's sad to see how ignored a game this wonderful is :(

Edit: installed on the SteamDeck and works like a charm. It's incredible how good this game it is, even years from release. Do yourself a favor and play this.

I was really looking foward to playing this game. The skills are fun to use, and I think the art style is great.
Lot of potential here!

Unfortuneatly... As others have brought out, the loot system seems great on paper, but new equipment brings little to the game other than higher numbers to allow you to advance in levels.

I feel the mistake they made is that you only get one weapon slot, while at the same time the weapons tend to be un-inspiring or tedious to use. Most games of this SHMUP genre will give you more weapon slots or change how a weapon acts as you progress, to really make things exciting! Like the rest of the equipment though, it's mosly, again, just bigger numbers. Because of this, the game will quickly start to feel stagnant.

I'll keep my eyes on it though. If they were to release an update that would address this, I would be happy to try this game again. 'till then I'll keep my eyes out for Drifting Lands 2.

Looks pretty, and it sounds like a good idea on paper, but the actual execution was lackluster.

It has a stat system, where you can spend credits to increase your primary stats. Problem is, the bonuses from the stats are miniscule, like 0.35% attack damage per point of Navigation, and in the beginning at least, you're seeing maybe 4-6 points of navigation on gear at best, and most gear has either one primary stat or no primary stat modifiers (meaning you might end up with a couple pieces of gear with navigation). It's just not game-impacting.

It has an equipment system. There is one weapon slot, so you can equip only one weapon at a time. Most of the weapons are garbage, and the few types that are good are boring. This is probably my biggest beef with the game. The weapon system is boring. I'm used to interesting weapon systems, like in Raiden or Jets n Guns. There isn't even a secondary weapon system.

Then there's about a dozen other equipment slots. Each slot doesn't do anything particularly special, you really only care about the supplemental stats. Common gear doesn't have supplemental stats at all, so it's basically all vendor trash regardless of level. Blue and above gear has supplemental stats, but the stats are small and don't impact gameplay much.

There is a skill system, where you unlock active skills and variations of them. These run off energy, which regenerates over time. This is fairly unique for SHMUPS. I found that the skills ended up doing more work than the main weapon system. The offensive ones have short cooldowns (few seconds), so it definitely encourages you to use them. I found that I really didn't need the main weapon most of the time. Problem is, they do so much damage that supplemental stats are irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much your weapon damage is, because you one-shot most things with the offensive skills, which are all AOE to some degree.

There's a focus system. Each of the three ship types gains focus in a different way. But what does focus actually do? I have no idea. I didn't notice anything during gameplay, like an increase in damage or loot. Maybe it was explained in one of the many boring cutscenes (text bubbles over still frames), but there should have been something in-game indicating its effects.

Is there a story? Maybe? There's still frames with text bubbles, but it never felt engaging.

Gameplay is slow and the levels got samey real quick. There's no terrain like you might see in other side-scrolles (EX: R-Type, Gradius, Jets n Guns... really what other side-scroller doesn't have this?), just enemies, and there's only so many enemy patterns. It never felt frantic. There was never a rush to kill anything. You don't actually have to kill anything to win. There's no score system. You don't get anything for doing well. It feels like effort isn't rewarded.

Overall, it's just meh. The SHMUP part isn't bad, but it's not good either. The looting part is boring. The RPG part is boring.

The developers of this game tried to combine the shoot em up genre with the looting system of Diablo. That sounded amaaaaaaaaaaazing to me since I like one genre (shoot em ups) and LOVE the other genre. This is why I really wanted to try it. Now that I've tried it, I wish to GOD that the looting system was done so much better T_T.

First, the positives. The abilities are so much fun. There are a lot of abilities and they completely change how you approach various scenarios. In the beginning, I was having trouble with enemies approaching behind me or the side because you can only shoot in front of you. Then, I got an ability that does AOE damage to everything around you. Once I got that, I start coming close to any enemies I was having trouble hitting and then BAM. Dead :D. What was really awesome was finding the perfect combination of abilities (you can equip 4) to deal with as many situations as possible. It felt like creating "builds" in Diablo type games. Well done.

Another great thing was the music and art. Very well done.

And……. Yea…… now the negatives:
• The looting system sucks so much T_T. God dammit that was such a letdown. I understand taking INSPIRATION from games like Diablo, but don't copy them verbatim. There were stats such as "increase attack speed" and "increase critical chance". There's also some core stats that for every point, increase weapon damage by "0.35%" or increase skill damage by "1%"………………… Look. I understand that those stats are very important for Diablo and number crunching is very important when creating builds. Seriously, I get it. I played Path of Exile a lot and got to end game. But this is a SHOOT EM UP. There was NOTHING to just increase the number of bullets you fire. NOTHING. Come on. I remember playing a shoot em up back in the day which let you buy upgrades and I was so excited to buy an upgrade that let me shoot missiles in addition to my normal bullets from the front. I didn't give a shit how much damage the missiles did. I just thought it was cool to shoot bullets AND missiles. When I thought of a looting system in a shoot em up, I was thinking "AWW YEEAAAA. Time to make a ship that shoots bullets, missiles, lasers, cannons, and whatever else I can find :D". Unfortunately, there's only 1 weapon slot……… God dammit. Once I settled on a favorite weapon (happened in the first hour of the game), I didn't give a shit about the loot. Not even the UNIQUE loot was all that interesting. If a loot system doesn't make you excited to get better loot, then it just becomes a chore. It was boring spending a few minutes after every run equipping the higher level stuff and selling off the unneeded stuff. Why couldn't the looting system be more interesting? Why not "for every 20 points in Navigation, you get an additional laser fire. For every 20 points in Structure, you get an additional missile fire. For every 20 points in Power, you get an additional Bullet fire". Just SOMETHING to make the looting system more fun so that I could become more invested in it!!! Bleh.
• Unique loot (the best loot) has a high chance to break on automatic retreat. Basically, if you have automatic retreat, it's non-hardcore mode. If you don't have it, it's hardcore mode…… WHY DO THIS. I don't WANT to play hardcore mode, but that doesn’t mean I don't want to equip the best loot I find!!!! Hardcore mode is an OPTION in Diablo and Path of Exile just to enjoy the CHALLENGE. There are supposed to be NO LOOT BENEFITS to playing hardcore mode…… so yea I did not like being encouraged to play hardcore mode.
• At some point, the game becomes a grind. The only loot that really matters is the weapon because that determines your DPS. It's very important to have a high DPS so that enemies don't survive for too long and fill the screen with bullets. This is not too much of a problem for the first half of the game but at around level 28 it most definitely is. I could feel the game becoming difficult simply because I didn't have enough DPS to kill the enemies in a reasonable time, and DPS is solely determined by loot. Annoying.
• The level design is boring as hell. Basically, every level is divided into "stages". The stages are randomly chosen based on a certain pool of enemy scenarios. Guess what….. There aren't a whole lot of enemy scenarios. In one level, I faced the EXACT SAME enemy scenario twice. Come on man. You couldn't specify in the game design "IF this scenario occurred, take out of pool until level finishes". Even if the developers did that, the game is incredibly repetitive due to unnecessary padding. In order to progress in the story, you need to play the same level 3 times quite often (the missions are LITERALLY called Back to Work (1), Back to Work (2), Back to Work (3)). So yea….. Very repetitive.

This game has SUCH an interesting concept but is executed so poorly that it actually becomes an impediment to enjoying the game. Yes the abilities were really fun, but once I settled on my 4 abilities, the excitement of finding new ability combinations was gone. Because the looting system wasn't interesting, there really wasn't much fun left to look forward to. Sigh.

Drifting Lands is a rogue-like... ish, ARPG ... ish bullethell ... ish horizontal shooter. It tries to merge all of these things together, and sort of gets it? Enough to get a thumbs up, because Steam doesn't have a neutral rating, and that's really how I feel about the game. It's a very grindy ARPG horizontal shooter, with 'permanent destruction' of ships. The story doesn't appear to be anything to sneeze at and mostly happens in tiny vignettes between missions that largely consist of similar waves and patterns between missions, so i'm not going to spend much time on it.

The basic gameplay loop is as follows: Choose mission, fly mission, get loot and money, repeat. Ship progression is entirely tied to the items and money you get - there is no XP or levelling up. This means if you do poorly in missions, you are simply doing those missions more times to see a benefit. There are three classes of ships: A light, medium, and heavy ship. The Light ship is also objectively the worst stat wise outside of being fast and a small hitbox: It always has less armor, health, and other stats, always has less equipment slots, but has a better score multiplier (i.e. More Money) and as said a smaller hitbox, which can make a large difference. The heavy ship has the largest hitbox, and the most equipment slots, and the medium ship is in the middle. Each ship accrues Focus, your score multiplier differently: The Light ship wants you to graze (stay close to) bullets and lasers, the medium ship designates areas of the screen for you to stay in, and the large ships gains it as your shields regenerate, meaning you want to be taking constant little hits to always have your shield recharging. You can freely buy new ships as you play, allowing you to change your playstyle on the fly, as long as you can afford to outfit all those ships.

Progression can come to a sudden halt, as if you are destroyed, you're sent back to your hangar. You have an array of skills that affect your playstyle, with one of these being "auto" skills. The one you start off with is "Auto retreat". This makes it so if you die, you lose all your money and items found but come back to base. If you ever unequip this and die, you lose everything, including your ship, and need to buy a new one. My problem with this is that generally, making ANY contact with any medium-ish ship or larger will instantly kill you, no questions asked, let alone any boss. This means one mistimed dodge and you lose your entire suite of equipped items and your ship that you've invested hundreds of thousands of credits into. You can turn on "forgiving" mode to disable this, but if you don't, realize you will only have 1 Auto-Skill slot available to you, not two - unless you want to skirt with permanent loss of massive amounts of time every mission you fly. Forgiving Mode will still instantly Break every item equipped until you can spend hefty chunks of money to repair every single equipped item, putting you behind progression wise regardless. This entire situation regarding permanent destruction of ships and items is my biggest grievance with the game, as is the instant destruction on barely nicking a larger ship, since the game so heavily incentivizes being close to enemies to do any sort of damage. Weapons generally function on a very wide spread, or lose DPs the further away you are from the enemy, so you're always encouraged to be up close to do full damage - but beyond the tutorial stages, all enemies fire retaliation bullets when they die, meaning being close is that much more dangerous.

The game is fun, but ultimately didn't capture the "fun feeling" for me. Grinding out DPS weapons to be able to blast through enemies without desperately trying to focus down two of the twelve wasn't fun for me anymore, and I stopped playing about partway through Grade 3 (of Grade 10 - items stop levelling after Grade 6, so grades 7 to 10 are all purely your own skill.) It didn't help that many levels share the same patterns over and over, so individual levels just feel blurred and same-y, making grinding new levels just a matter of slightly different numbers, rather than any sort of new locale or monsters or effects. The backgrounds generally look the same, and other little complaints exist: Enemies fly freely from foreground to background, both obscuring your view, and soemtimes making it difficult to tell what can be shot at and what can't, since enemies will also do acrobatics while remaining in the game's play area. Enemies will explode with pretty particle effects and rippling distortion waves - that will block your view of suicide bullets and where they're going.

If you REALLY enjoy horizontal shmups and don't mind losing progress as items break, or, if you disregard the game's many warnings and allow your ship itself to explode, losing everything, then the game culd be fun for you. For me, if I wanted to grind out things forever, I'll stick to Grim Dawn, PoE, and Titan Quest.

Bought this game in Early Access. I just came back to see how it was, and the UI was still very bad, very slow gameplay, poor feel of progression. The experience while in the action parts is so-so and the experience outside the action parts is poor. Then was very surprised to find the game is out of Early Access - and sad to see that updates stopped months ago and so no hope for the game to get to a decent footing.

I've tried several times to get into this game because I enjoy the shoot'em'up genre and it seemed like a good contender. It is not. Your weapons and abilities lack power, it just feels like your poking things once you get past the first few missions. The most disapointing part is that the objective of 95% of the rounds is to simply survive, you don't have to kill anything (not that your weapons are powerful enough to take them down anyway) even "mini-bosses" after a certain period just fly away and the mission just ends anticlimactically.

As far as RPG goes, I wouldn't say it is one, the story line is boring and linear.

Having played as far and as much as I have, I've quietly become more and more dissatisfied with the weapon selection of this game.

I find the weapons in this game to be underwhelming in one aspect or another. They are either boring in execution or painfully lacking in effectiveness. I've played a great variety of shmups of different sorts and I really expect the weapons to be more impressive in general. For the weapons in this game to do the job I need them to do requires excessive grinding which I don't appreciate in a single player game.

Without weapons being retuned I can't see myself playing anymore, let alone completing the game.

Edit: Just a quick note for anyone wondering. My personal preference for a really good shmup would be something like R-Type Final if you've had the chance to play it. Really good replayability, and plenty of options for unique ship choices. That's the yardstick by which I measure my side scrollin' shooters.

Diabloesqe loot driven shootem up with nice graphics and fun skills. Levels can become slightly repetetive, but it still has plenty of hooks to keep you going.

The core gameplay is a lot of fun. Flying around shooting stuff feels great and their different ship classes have slightly different score systems which is very cool. That being said, the current progression and loot systems make the game incredibly frustrating. There are too many stats with few explanations that make comparing gear very difficult. A lot of the higher quality gear drops with negative aspects that aren't made incredibly obvious. Some flaws will even cause you to lose equipment if you fail a mission. Good luck beating that boss after having equipment destroyed.

I can't recommend Drifting Lands to anyone until the loot system and related punishments are smoothed out.

It's not a bad game, but... it's just not very good.

The combat (at least in the first few levels) is very slow. More importantly, the weapons and skills just don't have any oomph. This game needs some juice in its combat. Even with skills that cause explosions and instantly vaporize the smaller enemies, it just felt... blah.

The UI is serviceable but obnoxious. In particular, the game says it plays best with a controller, but then forces you to use a cursor even with the controller. It also doesn't give you much feedback on how weapons behave. For example, I couldn't find any way to tell the fire rate of a weapon besides equipping it and going on a mission. This was a nasty surprise when the first thing I equipped turned out to be a powerful, but very slow, cannon.

This has potential to be a good game. It's not a fundamentally bad idea. Most of its problems are fairly superficial and it just needs to spend a bit more time baking.

- Controls are not tight enough for the bullet hell/schmup environment that this is based on
- Weapons continually feel underpowered and lack any unique elements, mainly varying by angle of spread, rate of fire and damage over distance
- "RPG" progression is watered down and linear
+ Soundtrack is good
+ Interesting concept

Updated Feb 2018

EDIT: Edited parts upon full release of the game

NOTE: I played the demo of Drifting Lands for damn near 20+ hours before the Early Access release.

Drifting Lands. The only colorful post-apocalyptic ARPG you'll ever play that's not ugly shades of puke green, sand colored, or rainbow.

You're the pilot of a ship under one of the last groups of humanity fighting for resources on a newly shattered planet. You mass murder waves of enemies who likely have families and stuff of their own - but you get sweet loot, can customize your ship, get money, and cause more mayhem than nuking the hell out of anyone in your path.

Pros:
+ VERY neat art style. Graphically incredibly pleasing on the eyes
+ the UI is clean, very user friendly and never confusing on what's what and where to click for what
+ You can use a huge amount of skills in any configuration you want
+ ship upgrades to give you an RPG feeling along with collecting loot such as weapons, thrusters, hull pieces, CPUs, etc.
+ leaderboards for those of you who love competition
+ tight, responsive controls
+ For $13.99 you WILL get your money's worth out of the game
+ OST is AMAZING. Will keep you entertained while blowing♥♥♥♥♥♥up
+ Three traditional kinds of ships or "classes": The Marauder, which is a balanced 50/50 ship between resistences to magnetic/plasma damage and power; The Sentinel, which is your tank - low fire power but high resistence; and finally, the Interceptor; which has the highest fire power between the two but is also the lightest and most nimble but also the most fragile
+ No weapons restrictions! Like that laser on one ship and want it on the maurader to increase its fire power capabilites? Go for it! Want a true tank? Stick on a railgun to your Sentinel! Want an even more nimble ship? Go hunt down an engine or thrusters that increase movement speed! Every ship is completely customizable and even those ships have three variants (so far) that are an upgrade from your base model.
+ Missions carry on the plot. Unlike the EA missions, there are missions that you can do that tie into the plot. Choose your missions carefully!

Cons:
- Not many xD


10/10: Would blow♥♥♥♥♥♥up again