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Reviews “Driftland: The Magic Revival is a bit of a unique beast, being an RTS in the old mould of 'build stuff in real time and send units around to do war' Age of Empires style, but with several tweaks that makes anything but the basic buildings unrecognisable.” 80% – STRATEGY GAMER. Video Game News, Community, Videos, & Reviews. Indie developer Star Drifters has announced console ports for Driftland: The Magic Revival. The 4X strategy and god-simulator game is coming to.
Released 18 Apr 2019
It’s been a while since we last touched uponDriftland: The Magic Revival, an interesting and very well produced RTS about mages waging war on floating islands far above a broken planet. I’ve been looking forward to revisiting it once the final version was released and the bugs ironed out, and now there’s only one questions that needs answering: how good is it?
Apr 23, 2019 Today’s Spotlight is Driftland: The Magic Revival, a real-time fantasy 4X by Star Drifters that recently left Early Access. The game is set in the realm of Driftland, ages after a cataclysmic. Reviews “Driftland: The Magic Revival is a bit of a unique beast, being an RTS in the old mould of 'build stuff in real time and send units around to do war' Age of Empires style, but with several tweaks that makes anything but the basic buildings unrecognisable.”. Build a kingdom you want to rule - city building and upgrades of its buildings, expanding their capabilities - economic, military or their magical power. Dynamic topography - Move and terraform floating islands of the shattered planet. Get to know the rich lore - 4 different races with unique skills, each one speaking their own language, and different points of view on the Driftland’s story.
Driftland: The Magic Revival is a bit of a unique beast, being an RTS in the old mould of 'build stuff in real time and send units around to do war' Age of Empires style, but with several tweaks that makes anything but the basic buildings unrecognisable.
Taking place in a world ravaged by centuries upon centuries of mage-on-mage warfare, the game sees young wizards -- the first born in several generations -- try to unite the many shattered continent remains that float above the planet's raging magma. Starting with a single castle in a land bereft of space, each wizard must expand and often defeat its foes throughout the course of every level.
As a classic fantasy setting, Driftland's humans are joined by the Dark Elves, Dwarves, and Wood Elves. All but the Wood Elves have campaigns available from the start, while the nature lovers require the player to have completed all three previous campaigns. Each of them has a different plotline, such as the Dark Elves fight for survival and the Dwarves internal quest for vengeance and family.
Thanks to the care given to all races, each of the factions feels rather unique, packing not only the usual visual and unit/building variety but also visually changing the land they inhabit. While human islands have a grassy terrain with normal chunks of grey rock underneath, Dark Elves have purple and black spiky spirals that mimic their black, spiky architecture -- a design decision that makes them very reminiscent of Warhammer's Druchii. They even get to build spiky palisades on the edges of their islands that stop other races from building bridges across and lends a very macabre look to their little bastions of floating rock.
Speaking of floating rocks and bridges, connecting islands is the butter of Driftland's bread. With every piece of the planet currently floating in orbit thanks to a powerful bit of magic, the main gameplay loop comes from building stuff on your very finite island perimeter, and then expanding to nearby islands to build even more stuff. All the staples of RTS are here, from houses and farms to blacksmiths and watch towers, and the bridge-building and island-taking offers a bit of a strategy by denying the enemy territory and creating bottlenecks they must go through to get to your inner lands.
The magic aspect of Driftland is most visible on that island management part. Wizards (and by extension, players) are able to move islands using wizardry, bringing them closer to their territory or away from opponent's in order to build bridges to add them to their empire. Players can also terraform islands to convert them to their species' needs, launch fireballs and ice storms, or take a gander in forlorn parts of the fog of war by simply tapping into their magic powers.
The main issue with Driftland comes from its relatively singular focus on expansion. The game's scope and ambition could easily support diplomacy, spying, and a more logistics approach to conquering, but it instead it rather doggedly follows the 'build more stuff, recruit a big army, attack the enemy' route of every single RTS in the last three decades. The game's pace is purposefully slow -- a huge boon, in an age where every single RTS foregoes strategy for APM and mindless rushing -- and levels can take easily 40 minutes or more to clear. Since the majority of the game can be reduced to 'slowly expand until you're big enough to attack the enemy', things can often feel a bit rote after a couple of missions.
Similarly, some of the issues I had with the Early Access version have been fixed, but not all. Resource balance is good enough now that you no longer expand so quickly you dig yourself into a grave, and you are no longer blindly attacked out of the blue in the lowest difficulties, giving you time to actually enjoy and focusing on base building without overpowered enemies knocking on your door. Or Bridge. However, the game still insists on a very cumbersome and indirect control scheme for heroes and soldiers. Driftland uses a system similar to the old Majesty games, where units are not controlled directly, but directed with flags instead. You can mark areas for attack/exploration/investigation/etc by paying 10 gold and even pay extra to make something a priority, but characters still furiously refuse to run, ever, even when the very existence of their home is on the brink of destruction. It is ridiculous concept, in which you cannot give any orders to your hired soldiers without shelling out for every single action, and even after paying them, they will still treat an attack on their home as nothing short of a minor inconvenience.
Similarly, the actual gameplay area looks dreadfully bereft of life, given no one is rendered outside heroes and soldiers. Without peasants and workers moving about, kingdoms look dead which detracts from the gorgeous islands bobbing and rocking under levitation all around them and waterfalls plunging over the edges into nothingness below. Keepassxc 2 5 12. This ‘under’-crowding should make things easier to read, but it is often hard to understand what is going on given the many units and GFXs going on at any one time.
On the bright side, the UI is surprisingly good, and does a great job of organising the many spells and buildings in a comfortable manner. Graphics and polish are really good, delivering a presentation far above the standard of indie titles and suitable for an almost AAA game, with a soundtrack and voice acting to match. In fact, the music is one of the most surprising portions of Driftland, thanks to its amazing score -- each faction has their own soundtrack, and the sung hymns of the Dwarves are wonderful compositions that sometimes reminded me of Tolkien's excellent Durin's Song.
There is something special about magic. The idea that one could easily lift a whole building with their powers and fling it across an incoming army is the kind of power fantasy games are apparently born to fulfil, yet one that rarely -- if ever -- happens. That is especially true of strategy games about magic, where their mystical, boundless capabilities more often than not are reduced to gimmicks and meaningless buffs but luckily, Driftland bucks that trend; not in a flashy way, but by making magic an everyday part of the gameplay. If you are looking for a polished, novel strategy game involving magic, look no further.
A very polished and intriguing real-time strategy game that sometimes gets a little too routine.
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12 Sep 20208Centuries of conflict was all they knew. Among huge armies and gigantic castles, quarrying wizards battled each other for control of the planet; a world ravaged by war, the strain so great that it finally split the crust into smithereens. The remaining mages put their differences aside and came together to keep the pieces from falling apart, but in the process drained the planet of its magic. Now, generations later, children are starting to be born with wizardry in their veins, and the world slowly regain hope. With the return of magic, however, came the return of war, and war… war never changes.
You are one of those new sorcerers -- now a grown-up mage -- which must put the world in ruins back into place piece by piece. Moving the islands with magic and connecting them with bridges, you must keep your people fed during your inexorable conquest of every piece of land.
Driftland: The Magic Revival is an RTS title by newcomers Star Drifters, a Polish indie studio made up of about a dozen people. Taking place in the floating islands that were once the planet’s surface, the game tasks you with defending your castle as you slowly accrue nearby territory and expand your empire.
The actual gameplay takes place in small islands that can be moved around with magic and connected by bridges. Each island has a very finite amount of space, meaning further islands are essential for expansion both in terms of resources and building space. Each floating piece of terrain also increases your population limit and contains a random chest with rewards, increasing the appeal to annex them as fast as possible.
That expansion impetus, however, is held back by the one major problem Driftland has: horrible balance. It is very easy to expand too quickly and quite hard to rein it in once it’s done, leaving you in a very precarious position that takes a long time to recover from. That does not depend solely on your rate of acquiral, as the game’s resource flows change at a whim -- food suddenly goes scarce even with most of an island real estate dedicated to its production.
This would be somewhat simple to solve with careful building if the construction area wasn’t extremely restrictive and misbehaving. The game allocates arbitrary spots for erecting structures, and their size does not always equate to the amount of space lost -- a small cottage can easily take up a medium portion of the land, completely negating essential terrain that clearly could house another construction if it was up to the player. This restriction makes the core gameplay loop extremely frustrating, as you feel constantly reined in by developers decisions and what seem like unpredictable hard limits.
The other major problem comes in the way of combat pass, which truly managed to ruin my enjoyment of the title. In my first 28 minutes with the game, I was attacked three times -- before the tutorial was even done and I had no idea how to defend against anything, there were already marauders attacking buildings and people inside my territory. I could not discern where they came from or how to possibly stop them, which significantly soured a so far satisfying experience. Later, when testing other difficulties, I played an Easy match and was attacked twice within the first 10 minutes -- one of them by a firearm totting barbarian that almost killed my only hero. A direct fireball intervention of my own turned the tide, but the fact such a senseless thing could occur during the game’s warm up phase on the lowest difficulty is ridiculous.
The aforementioned fireball is part of Driftland’s most well executed feature: magic. Spells have a satisfying effect to them, dropping with thunderous force and exploding into flames when a fireball or blinking into existence among splintering shards as an ice blast, delivering an audiovisual feedback that feels meaningful and right. Unfortunately, their damage and cost are a bit on the unhelpful side, meaning that while you can accrue a lot of uses during peace time, they rarely serve to properly make a dent in serious engagements.
This is especially important as magic is your only way to actively affect gameplay: in Driftland, units are not controlled directly, but directed with flags instead. You can mark a chest or enemy for exploration or attack, respectively, or flag an island to be scoured for unidentified resources, and the heroes will make their way there at their own pace. You can even increase the “reward” and pay extra gold to make something a priority, but that feels cumbersome and useless given characters furiously refuse to run at all times, even when the very existence of their home is on the brink of destruction.
And destruction, suitably, comes often. Driftland: The Magic Revival is a simple RTS, in the sense there is no diplomacy or trade to worry about -- there is only war. Your one and only goal is to control all islands on the map, to the detriment of every other faction out there. There are four factions to choose, from which only the Humans and Dark Elves are available right now. They have different stats and models, but all work towards the same objective: conquering Driftland for themselves.
The faction models do look quite different, and it’s one of the games strong points. In fact, the whole art design of Driftland is lovely, and the opening cinematic is specially surprising, its gorgeous visuals accompanied by a powerful narration and booming score to deliver a bombastic introduction to the lore of its universe. The game’s graphics also do not disappoint, with islands bobbing and rocking under levitation and waterfalls plunging over the edges into nothingness below. Aside from the visually dead kingdoms, barely bereft of citizens and looking more like abandoned ranches, the game world looks quite good.
While the UI is surprisingly good and does a great job of organising the many spells and buildings in a comfortable manner, the actual screen can be hard to read at times.It is often hard to identify an enemy within your territory, which coupled with the lack of precise notifications and the fact a barbarian raider can destroy a building in a minute leaves you very little time to react. However, that was the only technical drawback I saw in the release -- it is quite good for an Early Access title, and none of the few bugs I encountered were anything but slightly inconvenient.
In the end, Driftland: The Magic Revival is a game with a lot of potential, but severely held back by its atrocious balance. It’s production values are miles above what is usually found in the indie scene, and deliver a promising experience that fails just short of being satisfying. Given the game just launched on Early Access and the developers look quite active and passionate about the project, I have no doubt its shortcomings can be fixed before release.
Driftland: The Magic Revival entered into Steam Early Access on November 29th, 2017. At the time of publication, Version 1.0 could take anywhere from 6 to 12 months.