Seven years from Steam to PlayStation, on a game about a world that fell apart
Star Drifters put Driftland on Steam in April 2019 and then spent most of the next seven years doing other things, publishing and incubating other people’s games mostly. The console versions only turned up this year, Xbox Series X|S on 22 May and PlayStation 5 on 12 June, with Ultimate Games S.A. handling the conversions.
The studio is a small one in Warsaw, founded by two of the people who co-founded CI Games, which is the company behind Sniper: Ghost Warrior. Hold that thought for a minute.
The islands move, and that is still an idea no one else has taken
You are a Mage Overlord with one castle on one fragment of a planet that a mage war broke into pieces, and what is left of the world is floating because the survivors cast a spell to stop it collapsing entirely.
Everything after that runs on mana, and the first thing mana buys you is reach. You take hold of a distant island and drag it across the sky towards yours, bridge it, and then settle it or strip it or reshape the ground on it so your own faction can live there. Further in you get to destroy islands outright, which is as good as it sounds, and considerably better when there is an army standing on the bridge at the time.
Then you sit down to fight your first proper war and find out you cannot tell a single soldier what to do.
You set an objective. Attack that, hold this. The warriors and archers and mages sort out the rest between themselves and walk off to do it, and your heroes on dragons behave much the same way. No box dragging, no unit selection, no control groups. Star Drifters sell it as freedom from micromanagement and I would put it differently, which is that they drew a line around what sort of game this is, and a lot of players have walked up to that line over the years expecting it to move for them.
So the men who made sniper games built a strategy title where you cannot aim at anything. I find that funnier than I probably should.
73% on Steam, and the complaints have not shifted since 2019
73% positive from more than 1,400 reviews, Metascore 76. Mostly positive, which on Steam means liked rather than loved, and the gap is always filled with the same five things:
- The first hour throws every system at you at once
- Resources are placed at random, so what you need next may simply not be nearby
- Space is tight enough that upgrading beats building, which quietly narrows your choices
- Sandbox loses direction once your empire stops being under threat
- The absence of direct control stays a hard no for a chunk of players, and always will
The console release is the 2019 build made to work on a pad. It is not a remaster and the early game has not been touched, so every one of those is coming with it.
Which is why the pad version is the interesting one, at £16.74
Selecting units with a thumbstick is the reason real-time strategy has never settled on console. Driftland threw unit selection out in 2019 for reasons that had nothing to do with controllers, and the design landed somewhere that a gamepad handles without complaint.
TheXboxHub had it at £16.74 on Xbox at launch. I have seen one outlet quote a much higher console price, could not reconcile the two, and would check the store page on the day rather than trust either of us. On Steam it lists at $19.99 and falls a long way in sales, 80% and 85% off have both shown up.
Where I land
If you have a PC, wait for a sale and take the punt, because at a few pounds the only thing you are risking is an evening. If you are on console and you have spent years wishing someone would build a strategy game that fits a controller, this is the closest anyone has got, and the first night will still be work.
The version of this game with a fixed opening hour is not coming. Star Drifters moved on to other projects a long time ago and left Driftland to find its own people slowly, which it has, in fairly small numbers. I find that more interesting than frustrating, though I take the point of anyone who feels the other way round.
