I just ran into this on my feed and it looks really cool, definitely worth talking about. It just came out of early access yesterday and is getting great reviews on Steam so far.
Check out the trailer:
Basically, it’s a 2D shoot 'em up (and a real purdy one at that) but you can pick your ship/playstyle and you can collect loot as well. This process is sort of supposed to let you tweak your difficulty to your own skill, which is cool since I used to love 2D arcade shoot 'em ups but I doubt I’d be able to get very far in one these days. Here is the web page for more details.
http://www.drifting-lands.com/#gameplay
Has anyone played this yet? I’m putting it at the top of my wishlist…
Here’s where I would put that Leonardo “you have my attention” gif if I weren’t so lazy, and on a phone. That looks pretty cool, definitely keeping an eye on it.
Here you go buddy, I got your back.
Thank you, that scratched an itch I couldn’t quite reach.
I’m a bit burnt out on loot-chase games, but this looks at least potentially worth keeping an eye on.
Parts of this remind me of the stuff I loved in Tyrian, but for whatever reason, the side-on games never appealed to me as much as the top-down ones, and moreover, this looks a little more bullet hell than Tyrian ever did. . .
But if someone here gives it a shot and vouches for it. . . :-D
This kind of reminds me that I haven’t played an Rtype or Gradius style game in ages. Bookmarking for future look for sure.
There’s a demo available on Steam so you can check it out yourselves, it seems a little slow to begin with but there are a ton of difficulty levels available with the full game so maybe that sorts itself out fairly quickly. I’m probably a bit used to SHMUP games being rock hard from the start.
I have wanted a game like this for ages and will absolutely get it and try it out once I get to the home-place!
This makes me think about how hard advertising is for games at this point. I saw this game on steam and blew it off because I didn’t think it was interesting, but then I see this post and realize “Oh, this is actually the Raptor game I’ve dreamed about forevers.”
Just too much stuff coming out to know what’s going on anymore.
I played this a bit last night. A few comments:
- The demo is okay, but doesn’t really do the game many favors. The demo runs through the first 10 waves or so, and is pretty easy (even for a chump-SHMUP like me); Also, trying to advance past level 10 in the demo simply hangs the game at a black screen.
- In the spirit of Diablo (3) - the cutscenes and writing is not great.
- The UI is awful via controller.
- Hoo-boy! a lot of tiny tutorial text that I didn’t actually read. I hope nothing important was in there… (like how to shoot… I only used skills for the first level before realizing that RT actually fires your main gun)
- The loot system is curious - they took a page from Darkspore, where you don’t actually get to really look or examine the loot during the actual combat sections. You look at them during the downtime between levels. They really could have adopted the “push-your-luck” idea from here though. If you die/are defeated during a wave, you lose any loot gathered… giving rewards for chaining the waves would have been nice. Instead you have a loot chase without the immediate feedback loop.
Actual game play seems… fine? After the first 10 levels, difficulty can be stepped up to unlock the sequence of levels (levels are gated by difficulty), and I immediately was destroyed. I went back to the first section and did some cash/weapon grinding.
An interesting mix – it hasn’t grabbed me yet, but I am willing to play a bit more.
That sounds weird. Maybe I’ll just roll the dice and buy it.
I got it and played a bit, probably just a bit past @glimjack.
On paper I thought it would be something I would really like but in practice I’m not sure I do. It’s very repetitive. The levels feel randomly generated. You see the same enemy patterns over and over again and there isn’t really anything to cause playstyle variation (like the random attributes Elites have in D3). As you proceed, enemies get stronger, but so do you, and the rate seems even enough that unless I play a level significantly outside my ship level, I don’t really notice anything changing.
Over time, you unlock skills that remind me of D3s Ability Runes system. At first you get the basic version of each skill, and then you get to unlock variations on the skill, each with a different focus. The skills are quite fun to try to use well, and trying out new builds might be the thing that should be driving the variation (though I’m not terribly good at choosing to try a new build just to experiment).
You also level up your ship itself by choosing from 3 stats. You’ll need to up all of them to equip later weapons, plus their effects aren’t that different from each other, and finally the stat effects are so minor per level they’re hardly noticeable, so it doesn’t feel like a terribly meaningful system.
It looks like later on you get to unlock more advanced versions of the ships. Maybe these come with new skills that up the variation even more? I’m not sure if I’m going to continue playing, but if I do I’ll report back if it significantly improves.
