Summary
Driftland: The Magic Revival comes out of the gates with polish, solid ideas, great concepts and a competent execution…. but its far from ready and needs quite a bit of work still in early access
Lets starts with the good… and there is a lot of it, from visual design the game has competent and clean aesthetic, with a nice level of detail and great mix of “fluff” visuals, indicators within the gameplay elements, ui elements and even strategic zoomed out map icons. Everything feels polished and great. The animations are hit and miss, as could be expected from a smaller title with a smaller budget, but never feel bad, just limited.
Audio is competent and overall fitting, but here as well you notice the limits of the developers size, budget and resources where it just stops short of great, but again – never dips in “bad” or even “sub par”.
Where i find myself struggling with the gameplay is mostly in the balance and pacing. With the start of the matches being a frantic race for control and exploration of resources, it quickly stagnates and doesn’t resume when your economy, resource allocation, combat and research (still a work in progress) all grind to a halt and you simply stand around and wait making baby steps in any direction.
This isn’t helped of course by the fact that it takes quite a while to find your opponent in the floating islands, and that results in combat being less of a strategic element, and more of a reactive “lets see where their magical teleporter gate pops out of” affair.
This is in my eyes the part of the game that needs the most attention in terms of pacing and balancing overall. all the pieces are there, they just dont fit together that well yet.
