Driftland: The Magic Revival

[Ross Scott]

Genre: Strategy

Year released: 2019

Ross's rating: Unrated

Link to game: https://af.gog.com/game/driftland_the_magic_revival

Free to play: No

GaaS: No

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[Spoing]

I've played it and it's agressively mediocre. Every building has an upkeep in gold, gold is gained from having population not being assigned to resource gathering. As a result half of your population is tied up supporting the upkeep of the buildings, creating a very slow buildup. You can use upgrades and goldmines to smoothen it out, but its still very slow. I played through 90% of the campaign (got stukc on a mission where you cannot kill more than 25 enemies). You have no idea how strong your soldiers are, you cannot control them directly, they retreat way too late meaning you can waste your high level heroes if you attack too early. So all I did was build up a super economy for 30 minutes, then make a bunch of max upgrades heroes, and then throw them at the enemy. Which isnt that fun.

 

Whats really cool though is that you can turn an island in a mobile fortress using a portal to connect it to your base and then putting towers on it. You can then use magic to move it around.

[Do0my]

actually bought the game after finding it here. Not the best rts ive ever played but still pretty interesting and enjoyable. No regrets

[JackTrevor]

I bought this as I read that it was a game similar to Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, one of my all-time favorite games.

 

And after getting the true ending achievement, don't waste your time or money with it.

 

It is Majesty gameplay wise and I do like the set-up of the world, which takes place on a planet that was literally blown apart by wizards and the remnants of civilization are living on islands floating in the stratosphere. And said wizards still exist and can use their powers to create new islands, move existing ones closer to their base and even blow up enemy islands. It's a cool premise that is letdown in every way by the game itself.

 

It is exceptionally mediocre in every way. The music and the sound effects are very generic (although I didn't hear any of it as I was having headset issues at the time), the story has NO voice acting and is told through massive text boxes, all the factions have the bare minimum changes to not be copy-pastes of each other, and the graphics are decent, they suffer from the weird washed-out 3D look that modern 3D game developers overuse because they didn't ask anyone if it looked good. And while the gameplay loop of Majesty has it's flaws, it made up for it with the charm and vibrant nature of the setting that Driftland has none of.

 

This game is so not worth it that I always feel obliged to warn people about it. Not the worst thing I've played but you're better off with other games, which is a massive shame at the end of the day.