First impressions can change in mere moments – either for better or worse. Playing an anticipated new release to find that it suffers from poor performance and input lag can be disheartening. Conversely, you may play something that doesn’t look too hot only to find a new favourite – and that’s always a minor pleasure in the murky world of gaming. With all that said, Driftland: The Magic Revival is one of those rare times where dismay gives way to a sigh of relief.
This fantasy themed strategic battler released on PC back in 2019, making this console release more than belated. After making a choice of jumping into the campaign, the customisable freeplay mode, or the in-depth tutorial, you’re presented with something that very much looks like a typical PC strategy game. Small fonts, tiny icons, a control system clearly meant for a keyboard and mouse – all these things combined made me believe this was a straightforward conversion that simply mapped the controls to a joypad and called it a day. I scoffed, only to then find the option to increase the UI size. Now we’re talking. Then, by the time the tutorial ended, the purpose of every icon spread along the top and bottom of the screen made sense. More menu navigational tricks can be discovered in due course too, adding a welcome sense of mastery.
Set in a floating world torn apart, a new generation of magic users – varying from humans to dark elves – seek to rebuild their respective scattered realms. This is achieved by using powerful magic to pull floating islands together, not only giving more land to build on, but also expanding a kingdom’s reach. A map can see as many as 64 floating islands spread across it, smothered by the fog of war, and victory can be achieved by claiming a set amount of islands, wiping out rival factions by focusing on army building, or by discovering randomly placed mausoleums and fighting off the spectres within to gain control.
All the while, you’ll need to gather wood and stone to build new structures, manage your population – which rarely approaches triple figures – and keep a very careful eye on your expenditures. If your buildings cost more to run than your income, you’ll soon go into debt and will be unable to even create essential bridges to connect islands together. I learned the hard way about financial income, failing to build either a gold mine or a marketplace – where resources can be bartered – in good time, which meant scrapping around an hour of play and starting again. In other words, there is a learning curve present.
Like all good strategy games, Driftland: The Magic Revival provides a lot to focus on, making it instantly engaging. That’s after wrapping your head around the basics, at least, which shouldn’t take much more than thirty minutes. You need to ensure that citizens have access to food, build watchtowers to defend against dragon attacks, explore each piece of land by sending out explorers and geologists, and start to assemble an army for when your kingdom inevitably collides with another. Armies are never huge, only consisting of a couple of units per troop, but they can be expensive to maintain, preventing you from conquering quickly. This is a methodical experience based around starting small, balancing the books, and gradually expanding.
Help is provided by an overseer, while the side of the screen shows a rundown of important events, and anything urgent – such as buildings with no workers – has an exclamation mark next to them. As the music changes when being attacked, it’s always clear when your kingdom is in danger. If troops take a while to reach their destination, spells are at hand to help prevent a valuable building from being destroyed. Some are fun to use, including a swarm of insects and summonable stone golems that are far more proficient in battle than standard infantry.
Every faction has its own buildings and army types, giving a reason to experiment. From the outset, there are three five stage campaigns to choose from that’ll give a taster of each, with a fourth campaign to unlock. Depending on how quickly you expand and which of the three winning conditions is in play, a campaign chapter can last 2-3 hours. Even if you set the difficulty to its lowest in the freeplay mode and choose the minimal ‘capture 30 islands’ winning condition, you’re still looking at around 1-2 hours to complete a single match.
Suffice to say, Driftland will serve you well once you take the time to learn its controls and rules of play. It isn’t the kind of experience that instantly springs to mind when thinking of the console kingdom, and that only serves to make it all the more magical. If you’re up for something slow-burning that doesn’t pander and lets you make mistakes and learn from them, give this a try.
Star Drifters’ Driftland: The Magic Revival is out now on Xbox Series with a PS5 version coming soon. Published on consoles by Ultimate Games.