Starting out with just one well-balanced ship that’s gifted to you, as you earn credits you can buy new ships and then customise them to your heart’s content.

Successfully completing missions allows you to engage in what I feel is the best part of Drifting Lands: managing a hangar of ships. Only by making effective use of every skill will you be continually efficient in battle. There are skills that allow you to dash forward through enemies and bullets, skills that emit a damaging blast to everything around you, and even skills that swiftly restore a chunk of your health. As you progress through the story, more advanced skills are made available for purchase, eventually allowing you to highly customise your skill loadout. Just like an action RPG, up to four active skills can be assigned for quick use, as well as two passive skills that are always in effect. Enemy ships will appear from all sides of the screen, forcing you to keep your wits about you at all times, and while you can only ever shoot forward, you have a few skills up your sleeve that grant you a great deal of combat versatility. Scrolling from left to right, the gameplay of Drifting Lands is the traditional bullet hell fare that has you shooting down enemy your enemies while trying to avoid the barrage of bullets and mines that they fire back at you. If you’re the type of player that just wants to get straight down to business though, you’ll do so safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to miss out on much by skipping the story scenes altogether. Like most games, the real draw of Drifting Lands is its gameplay, and that is where it shines. Told via static images and text boxes, it’s unfortunately not got the most gripping narrative in the world, but it gives context to the action, and also allows for the odd curveball to provide some gameplay variety.

In the case of Drifting Lands, the genres in question are bullet hell shooter and action RPG, as here, they’re blended masterfully to create an experience that’s accessible yet wonderfully deep.Īs you progress through Drifting Lands’ story, over 100 missions will eventually open up to you, spread across no less than ten difficulty brackets. Sometimes, a game comes along that has you wondering why multiple genres haven’t been combined before.

Drifting lands igg