Drifting Lands

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 [i]pauses all firing[/i] 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 [i]CHEAP[/i]. 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 [b]anything[/b], they're just 5 to 30 seconds of nothing. And you're going to see the same ones over and over again.

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.

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.

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.

Every stage is like the last except the background changes sometimes. If they tried to copy R-type and Diablo, then they forgot that stages should make you feel there is some sort of progression being made.

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.

+ 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.

whats there plays decent enough, but theres not much in the way of variety, the same enemies and enemy patters on every level and it feel like the game stops in the middle of the campaign. the weapons and skills could use some more thought designwise, most of the weapons you'll never use cos they have such odd attack patters that its impossible to hit anything with em, so youre stuck with like 2-3 okish ones out of the 7-8 (or so) that are available. same with skills, theres a couple that are usefull and the rest is very situational at best. the charge/score multiplyer mechanic are different for each of the 3 ships and they all kinda suck, especially the one of the more balanced ship that makes u hug a randomly appearing circle on the screen that moves every few sec. story was ok but a bit all over the place and it kinda feels like they went out of their way to put in obese women, strong african women, boss women etc etc in the game. all in all i feel its one of those game sthat could have been good if they put some more effort in it, but well, its not a big market for this kinda game so its understandable

Sooo this game It's hard, it's unforgiving, it's highly unbalanced at times, but it's a relatively okay game. I am at a point where I am unable to get proper new gear, which sucks tbh, but ah well. I'd still recommend it if you're looking for a shooter game with spaceships, a good story and some nice lore in the background and just some mindless actions. It's a game about grinding, you grind till you get better gear, you go higher in levels until you can't anymore, then you grind again, rinse and repeat. You collect the gear, sell it to get money, then upgrade your ship and so on. There's perma death in this game too. If you loose your ship that's it, it's lost forever. There's nothing you can do about it. (You can modify this by getting a power up - so you just lose items instead). Big complaints: - You only get 10% money from each mission so that sucks big time because you can rack up to 70k per mission and all you get is 7k - you can't get better gear without grinding and better gear rates are very low so you have to grind a lot - unbalanced difficulty spike. - The whole perma death system and loot system needs a rework along with how the gear shop works because it's awful Wish they would update it at one point, or just give it a slight polish after 6 years. If you can overlook the cons, you have a nice little indie game in your hands. It's a nice rogue-esq ship shooter looter kind of thing. Otherwise, this might not be a good game for you.

ハクスラとSTGの融合らしい。レベルという概念はなく3種類の能力値をお金を使って上げていくSTG。能力値を上げても機体が強くなるわけでもなく能力値が足りていれば各々の拾った装備をつけれるという具合。道中死ぬとそのステージで拾ったアイテムやお金が無くなりモードや状況次第でそれまで能力を上げて強くした機体と集めた装備品がすべてなくなる。今は壊れても治せるモードが出来ており、もしプレイする機会が出来たのならそちらをお勧めしたい。 シナリオを進めていくとグレードが１－１０の順に開放されていく。3までプレイしてみたがかかった時間は決してスムーズとは言えないが9時間くらい。ずっと同じようなステージ、同じ敵、能力値が違うだけの同じ装備、なぜか装備品についてる能力値アップ（これにより一つの装備を外したら連鎖的にすべての装備が付けれなくなるといった状況になった）、使い勝手の悪いそれぞれの武器とただただ時間がかかるだけステージ。スキルもあるにはあるが使い勝手の良いものを強化していくみたいなことは出来ずよくわからない使いずらいものが増えていくだけ。爽快感が全くなく強くなった実感もないので敵を蹂躙もできずただただ作業的に進んでいくだけのSTG。 ハクスラとは？強くなるとは？RPGとは？STGとは？を一度考えさせられるゲーム。