Driftland: The Magic Revival

This game is kind of interesting. Its a different take on the fantasy 4x genre. Its still like most RTS-type games. Similar to Age of Empires in that you build up a base building by building and manage resources in the same fashion, however, the only way to expand your territory is to bring floating islands closer together or use magic to connect them. Besides that its not the same at all. You don't control the units, so much as tell them where to go and issue commands to them(unless you play nomads apparently which I havent yet). I'm not entirely certain whehther I like this feature or not. You don't send villagers to mine resources, you just build structures that generate resources and assign workers, this wouldbe fine and dandy if there was a way to keep track of how many workers you have assigned to work and how many are idle so to speak, as of yet, I haven't seen any way to do this until you start losing resource income elsewhere as workers end up being reassigned. You can zoom in and out but so far I have not found a way to change to orientation of the screen away from the top down, isometric view it defaults in. The tooltips are somewhat lacking but there is enough of them to understand everything that's going on, they are just not very descriptive. The first tutorial mission is minimal, it explains the basics well enough, but not much else from what I have seen so far(I haven't actually completed the whole turorial yet so this may change). The screen text and icons are small, there is not very much detail unless you play zoomed in, however, doing so would cause difficulty when discerning what else is going on in your starting area. The game has multiplayer but I haven't tried it, as I've never been much of an online/internet/social gamer. It has Lan, but only if you have two machines with the game installed. Unfortunately, the game does not feature Hotseat, even though it should. Games with Hotseat are a dying species apparently.

So apparently this game is some kind of a spiritual successor to Majesty series of games, which I have never played before so this style of strategy game is new for me. Having said that, I find the game's RTS system to be refreshing. At first I needed some time to get used to not having direct controls on the units like any traditional RTS but eventually I got the hang of it and I think Driftlands is a fun and refreshing strategy game. So glad I discovered it on GoG first so I could buy it DRM free.

This game seems like it was designed around playing random maps. It's like Majesty, an indirect control RTS, with good art and a nice if a bit bland setting. It's a good game, just doesn't have so much depth once you've played a few times. Still worth picking up if you like Majesty (it's much better than Majesty 2, if you were wondering.)

For many years I have searched for a game, that scratched that itch, more "indirect" control style games like Majesty provided. Driftland prominently features economy and magic in its gameplay, with eploration and conquest taking the smaller part. Magic is strong and game-changing. Combat, heal and buff spells. Terrain-moving/creating/changing spells, portal spells and further utility. There are lots of different resources (some have to be found by a geologist (recrutable)), buildings (usually 2x upgradeable). I cant say much about the ai, I started playing on the preset difficulty (experienced whatever gamer) and found this to be a tad too easy. Give it a try!

I only play this type of games in single player for the story. So ... the idea with the islands is pretty good and the ressources are somehow balanced. But still the building pattern was always the same. Each mission felt more or less the same. There were some exceptions like the one where we had to fly with only one single island. The graphics are good enough I would say. The unit management could be better. Sometimes you do not have a good overview of all your units and their equipment. The story was pretty lame to play and I think the correct order of playing this is to play each mission for each race. So first you play first mission for all races then the second one. I did it like in all games: I choosed first faction and played all missions (1-5). This way there were massive jumps in the storyline etc. Similar to HoMaM 6 (or 7?) I think. Where you have to pick the correct order of missions by yourself. I played last missions in full speed mode on easy. Else I wouldn't be able to finish this game.