Whenever my parents would take me to see a movie as a child, I almost always bolted to the row of arcade games lining the perimeter of the lobby. I tried every game at least once, but the one I always returned to was Raiden Fighters. Fast forward nearly 20 years and that same wonder I felt playing Raiden Fighters as a child was rediscovered with Drifting Lands, the most recent game by Alkemi, a small independent French gaming studio. Drifting Lands is cut from a different cloth than the older Raiden Fighters, but they both share the same core principle — that it's very satisfying to blow up waves upon waves of baddies.
Drifting Lands is an hybrid of classical horizontal shoot’em’up with a lot of strong gameplay elements coming straight from the action-RPG genre.
Citizens of the Ark live together or die together. They are the few survivors of worldwide devastation that wiped out billions of humans and robots. Together they piece together ships and try to make a living in space, but now they are under attack and must continue to fight for their survival.
Languard at Fextralife writes, "Alkemi’s Drifting Lands is a 2D shoot-em-up (or shmup, if you’ve not encountered that term before) that takes place in a post-apocalypse Earth. Make no mistake, despite what the developers say about this game, it is 100% a shmup. Now this is not a bad thing, as it is a very good shmup, but the marketing focus on avoiding that label is a bit puzzling; despite the customization the gameplay does boil down to improve your ability to shoot the hell out of things. Semantics aside, this is a very fun game with a few minor flaws and one really annoying element. Is it worth your time overall? Let’s answer that question."
