Drifting Lands - Review
Side-scrolling shatters have always been a fun distraction for me, but even after all of these years, they have not broken out of their form. They are fun, and they present. Certain kind of intriguing challenge for us to play with. They are mastery systems laid bare, asking you to learn movements and actions to the extreme so you can fly through a hail of bullets and come out the other side unscathed. It’s no wonder that there are a huge number of side-scrolling shooters that also fall into the “bullet hell” genre, characterized by maze-like arrangements of bullets for you to try to navigate through with split second timing. They are the epitome of control, often giving you only a few pixels of clearance to squeeze through.
Drifting Lands tries to take these established formulas and turn them on their ears by injecting loot and leveling elements to add layers of complexity to the formerly simply design. Before you just had to dodge and shoot, but now you have to manage a cargo-hold/inventory, stat points, color-coded inventory, damage and attack types, all with the change to accidentally lose it at any moment and be thrust back to the beginning of your journey. It seems that along the way towards adding replayability and complexity into the game, they simply went too far.
Monolith - Review
Roguelikes are a genre that we’ve written about many times before, and will no doubt continue to revisit for a long time coming. In some ways, it is the perfect genre for an independent game, as it has an inherent sense of replayability to it that other genres lack. Level design is still important, but by allowing the gamer to slot remade rooms together at random instead of having to design each level by hand makes for a significantly easier creation process. And players are far more forgiving of repeated assets and gameplay in roguelikes than they are in a first person shooter or adventure game.
Monolith takes lessons from its predecessors (The Binding of Isaac) to blend the room-by-room, top-down roguelike gameplay with "bullet hell-esque" boss fights, and the marriage is a remarkably happy one. Your little ship can flit and soar across each room, dodging shots and tearing apart your enemies. You feel capable, partly because it isn’t a particularly difficult game, with a high baseline of health that lets you tank way more shots than most roguelikes do out of the gate, and it’s relatively easy to restore your health pool, or even expand it later on in the dungeon.