The ship doesn’t visually change based on gear, which creates less attachment to the loot. The game battles that by letting you turn gear into blueprints, allowing you to essentially reroll, but the conversion is expensive. On the flip side, gear is only good when it’s useful, and many of the weapon types don’t feel viable. My favorite part about the loot are the flaws on high-ranking gear: maybe it’ll break when you auto-retreat? Maybe it decreases loot levels? Flaws keep any one item from feeling like a silver bullet. On one hand, there are tons of different equipment types: weapons, shields, CPUs to augment abilities. The lootĪ game like this comes down to the loot, and the results there are mixed. Once you’re navigating between flying mines, shooting spawning ships, and evading giant laser beams simultaneously, you’ll get what Drifting Lands is about. If you’re ever unsure whether you’ll make it out of a level alive, you can manually retreat to escape with the gear you’ve gathered. The game offers 10 stages of difficulty, and many enemies fire revenge bullets after death. Each level throws waves of enemies at you in varying patterns learning patterns and enemy types is critical. That said, combat is Drifting Lands’ bread-and-butter (all the food references), and combat feels good. Though you unlock the ability to use more skills over time, there’s not much incentive to change once you find a set you like. You’ll also equip two passive skills, though it feels more like one since Automatic Retreat, the passive that keeps you from losing your ship when you die, counts as a passive. In addition to hardware, you’ll equip special skills to help tackle enemies.Īctive skills range from temporary shields and health restoratives to damaging explosions and aerial mines. Some ships are slow and tanky, while others are quick and delicate. You start by choosing one of three ships, which functions as the game’s difficulty modifier. This means you’ve got a bullet-hell shooter mashed up with loot grinding, constantly improving your ship with new equipment. The formulaĭrifting Lands mixes the formulas of games like Ikaruga and Gradius with Diablo. Many loot grinders can fall into this trap, unfortunately.īut you’re probably here for the bullets and the flying and the loot grinding. Drifting Lands features diverse characters, which is a plus, but feels secondary to gameplay instead of complementary. Though your main character dialog feels flat, the story is more interesting than expected for a loot grinder. As the story unfolds you find yourself in the center of religious feuds, illegal smuggling, and more. You work as a mercenary, running scavenger missions to help support The Ark, but also taking on quests from others as well. You’re a pilot on The Ark, a last bastion of human survival. A complex loot system mixed with the hardcore action rewards risky behavior and keeps the tension high, even with some technical missteps.ĭrifting Lands takes place after a cataclysm destroys the world. Balancing the quest for better loot and the core gameplay takes a special touch though, and Alkemi’s Drifting Lands found it. Lastly, even though the Blueprint service is listed as “Preview”, we treat the service as GA, which means even once a migration path is made available, we will continue to support the current Blueprint APIs for 1-3 years or until everyone has been migrated.For a while in the mid-2000s, the big trend was “RPG-elements.” Introducing experience points, leveling up, and increasing stats seems like an “easy” way to boost the life of any game. Most of the Blueprint UserVoice asks are either already implemented in Templates/Template Specs, or they are something we will address with above mentioned future improvements to templates/bicep and stacks. ![]() ![]() The GA (General Availability) ETA is set for March/April when the new underlying resource types (template specs and deployment stacks) are ready and we can migrate everything over. For authoring improvements, focus is bicep. Most of the Blueprint resourcing is going towards Template Specs ( video overview) and Deployment Stacks, which is what Blueprints are eventually going to use under the covers.
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