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If you like Subnautica and Raft Survival, you need to check out this upcoming crafting game

3K View2024-01-04

Driftopia

7.9

SurvivalCraftingAdventure

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SHOULD I PLAY DRIFTOPIA?

If you’re a fan of crafting and like survival games, this is definitely a title to watch! Driftopia is a crafting and survival game set on a world that’s almost completely covered in water. To gather resources, I had to swim through dangerous waters, search for goods underwater, and drift from one island to the next on my trusty raft. The current version of the game is pretty rough, but the concept shows a lot of promise, and since the game is still in beta, I’m not overly concerned about the bugs. These issues definitely need to be addressed before the full release, but Driftopia is still shaping up to be a very addictive game.

TIME PLAYED

I played around five hours of Driftopia, which gave me plenty of time to repair my ship’s engine, drift through the water, and explore as much as I could. I was also able to build a few crafting stations, craft some basic tools, and make a flag for my trusty raft. Most of the areas I explored were uninhabited, but I did run into a few monsters, including a massive mutated pangolin.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT DRIFTOPIA?

• Underwater exploration. Swimming and rafting are entertaining enough, but my favorite part of Driftopia was that I could dive underwater. Most of the time, I only found fish, plants, and various crafting materials, but every once in a while, I’d stumble across something incredible, like the bones of a giant sea monster. Driftopia’s world is already pretty massive, and the ability to explore underwater made it feel that much larger.

• Survival mechanics that aren’t overly stressful. If you like crafting and foraging for resources, but don’t like constantly monitoring your health bar, Driftopia will be right up your alley. It does have survival mechanics, like a stamina wheel and a hunger bar, but they drain very slowly, so I didn’t have to put much effort into managing them. There are monsters to fight, but they’re contained to specific areas of the map, so they’re easy to avoid.

Not only is it easy to avoid death, but the consequences for death aren’t severe. As a test, I let my health bar drain to zero, and after a brief on-screen message, I was transported back to my raft with about half of my health refilled. I like more intense survival games, but sometimes, I just want something chill, and that’s exactly what Driftopia is.

• There’s a photo mode. I absolutely love taking pictures in video games, so I was thrilled to discover that Driftopia has a built-in photo mode! I was able to snap pics on the surface and pose for portraits underwater. I could change the angle of the camera with my touchscreen, which made it easy to set up the perfect shot. The mode doesn’t have extra features, like filters, but it’s still a lot of fun to play around with.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN DRIFTOPIA?

• It’s very buggy. I had a lot of fun with Driftopia, but my play session wasn’t smooth sailing. I ran into all kinds of bugs, ranging from minor issues, like clipping through walls and floors, to major problems, like non-functioning buttons and items that vanished from my inventory. At one point, a giant monster walked through the sky and attacked me while it was still midair. Thankfully, it’s still in beta, so the devs have time to take care of the bugs before the game comes out.

• It gets off to a slow start. Driftopia is a laid-back, relaxing survival game, and I like that, but it takes a little too long for things to get going. It took me around thirty minutes to finish the first quest, which is way too much time. One of the things I like about crafting games is the constant sense of progress, and the early sections of Driftopia don’t deliver that.

• It could use a better tutorial. According to the update log, Driftopia has a tutorial island, but I never came across it. I started the game on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and from there, I had to make sense of things on my own. It’s not that complex, so I was able to figure it out, but I would have appreciated a quick overview of the game’s basic mechanics. If the game does have a tutorial area, the game needs to do a better job of guiding the player towards it so that they don’t miss it like I did.