Nova Drift - Review | casual-ben

Table of Contents

What is Nova Drift about?

Nova Drift is an action roguelike in space. Try thinking about Space Invaders, but modern with more ships, weapons, shield and way more enemies to fight. As of writing its still in early access, but it is steadily going to be one of my favorites. You start with base ship then for the first levels you choose a weapon, shield and body. With your base build starting you’ll now get upgrades to boost you further and further. How far can you reach into space?

What makes Nova Drift different?

As said in the Intro you start with choosing one of the different weapons types. The weapons to choose from are:

Blade – You throw a big ninja shuriken at your enemies
Dart – Sting like a swarm of bees!
Flak – Shotgun style for your usage
Grenade – Launch those grenades and let em explode
Pulse – If you are afraid of touching, then push those enemies away!
Railgun – Longing to be a sniper, then this is what you want
Salvo – More of a rocket type? Then let those swarms lose
Split Shot – Wanna shoot more? Then go machine gun with this
Thermal Lance – If you’re looking for a laser then this is choice
Torrent – Cthulhu will really like you with this
Vortex – Ever wanted to throw a thunder cloud?

That’s a boat load of weapon types. It all depends on you playstyle. Besides the weapons you can also choose which shield to choose. These are the available shield:

Amp – More like a weapon booster than a shield
Bastion – a physical manifested shield that will protect you
Halo – Those enemies will burn, if they get into this
Helix – You’ll zap em real good, if this get’s touched
Orbital – Next gen shield with floating orbs around you
Reflect – Enemy shots will just bounce off this
Shockwave – If this shield get’s destroyed, it will shot a big wave
Siphon – Suck those enemies dry and heal yourself
Temporal – Everything slows down around you
Warp – If destroyed you can jump to safety

So many options! And we are not even done yet 🤣 there is still your ship body! In combination with your weapon and shield this will result in the main strategy you will follow. The following ship bodies are going to be available to you:

Architect – Empower 1 Mega-Construct
Assault – More Weapon power the better
Battery – Shooting like a big bad ass ship with side way cannons
Carrier – Deploying multiple small crafts to sting your enemies
Courser – Like the Battery but less chonky and more speedy
Engineer – Gonna go for more constructs, the more the better
Firefly – Let’s do fly-by-shooting and bur with our exhaust
Hullbreaker – Shooting is for amateurs, just crash into em
Research – You don’t like mods? Just banish them
Sentinel – You like shield? Me too!
Leviathan – Big bad space snake monster!
Spectre – Stealthy sniper with a big boom
Stealth – Like playing like a rogue/thief, then you’ll like this
Viper – Bite and Shoot to poison those enemies

Wanna calculate the combinations? Wait until you see the possible upgrade paths and super mods you can get. Your brain will explode on the possibilities! It will take a long long time until you have seen and tried each combination! But with choosing these 3 basic mods, you are good to go and start a real run.

How to play Nova Drift

I’m not an expert in playing action based games. So controlling my ship is kinda hard at the start. But now after some runs done, Im getting better and better. We are pushed into enemy waves and with each kill, we get to collect experience points. 😉 I’m really liking the exploration of the different weapons, shield, ship bodies and upgrade mods. On our first video we did take a Flak as Weapon, Reflect as Shield and Assault as Body to explore the first run of the game.

In between some intervals we have to fight a boss. Those can be small, but also big like a station with lasers! 😳 After picking our weapon, shield and body, we get to choose between many many upgrades. We where going for a good amount of damage, but I think we neglected defense a little bit too much.

So sadly we died at the end 😅 but we unlocked new upgrades, a new ship and new mechanics! In total there are 60 unlocks to do! So much stuff to unlock, but also so many combinations I wanna try!

My Conclusion

A run can be pretty short, but it is so much fun, to explore and try different mechanics! My current goal would be to unlock everything and see all the different bosses. Really looking forward to play more!

Where to buy?

HumbleBundle (Affiliate Link)

If you like this you might like

If you liked Nova Drift then I think you are either into roguelike or action games ;). So here is a small recommendation list from me: Also, if you have any other recommendations of a game you’d like me to play, feel free to leave a comment here, or on my YouTube channel:

FTL: Faster than Light
Vampire Survivors
Neon Sundown

YouTube

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