On Cheap Digicam TikTok, there is a lot of talk about recipes these days. Recipes in this context are congregations of specific camera settings that can generate very specific cinematic effects in digital photographs. Do you want a blooming '70s sunset or a cityscape with bokeh pearls the size of snowballs? Good news. There are recipes for that.
I spend quite a bit of time on Cheap Digicam TikTok, so it's probably inevitable that I've started seeing these types of recipes hidden in other facets of life as well. More recently I have been thinking about Drift Nova as a source of really great recipes. Drift Nova It's a space arcade where you shoot everything that moves and level up regularly. And when you level up, you can change some aspect of your ship, of your abilities, of who you will be in the universe for the next five frantic minutes.
And within this tangle of improvements and benefits, I began to find friendly routes through the options offered. I have started to discover recipes. For weapons, I often want that scattering of rocket dust that zooms in on enemies and leaves glowing trails. For ship hulls, I want one that grants additional drones that swarm around me and annoy my enemies. For shields, I want the kind that will burn any fool who gets too close, and burn me too if I get too close. Beyond that? Beyond that, deciding gets really complicated, and that's part of the fun.
This recipe has kept me so busy that it took me a day and a half of playing to realize that Drift Nova is based on the vampire survivors template. Of course it is, and it's really quite obvious. Go out, destroy enemies, collect XP, and then regularly exchange it for a variety of skills that make destroying enemies and collecting XP much easier. In the meantime, mark it out visually and in terms of the damage you're unleashing as you go, until you're basically playing Choose Your Own Fireworks Show.
All good, but Drift Nova it's not just vampire survivors. At first, I looked at its shiny ships sailing through 2D arenas, facing off against fiercely differentiated enemies, and thought I was in for the petri dish experience that the best twin-stick shooters offer. Not quite. I'm inclined to say that Drift Nova look back further Robotron: 2084 towards people like asteroids and even Space war! There's the same push-based movement and compact field, and you must master a directional push to really excel. But listen: there's a touch of air hockey here too, when an enemy explosion sends you ghost-like across the flat surface of the universe, temporarily out of control.
Beautiful. And beyond that, it's about unlocks. New game modifiers, which make things more difficult but shower you with more rewards. New enemies, like the shiny alien freight train, eager to break apart its segmented body and spill its contents into the nearest nebulae. New helmets, weapons and shields. New modifiers for all that stuff. You can get a weapon with projectiles that break into small pieces when they hit something. You can get a booster that burns enemies even if it brushes against them, or a drone that accelerates towards a target and explodes when it's low on health, instead of just silently expiring on its own.
Beyond that there are things I haven't even found yet. There are mysterious “super mods” and “wild mods”, which I can't wait to mix with. There are weapons that superficially seem to do me more harm than good. What is the problem? Then there's this little folk poem I just read in the upgrade list while playing and will be running through my head all week: “Overall damage increases as your speed increases.”
So we return to the recipes. And as anyone who deals with recipes of any kind will tell you, success isn't just about how many ingredients you can include. Rather, it's about how everything is balanced. In the kitchen, that means being careful with garlic once it first shows its cloves. On Cheap Digicam TikTok, it means not completely blowing out bright colors or charring shadows. and in Drift NovaIt means that the slaughter will never be allowed to become truly unwieldy. A simple example of this thought will suffice. While your ship can use the wraparound screen, disappearing on the left side, for example, and appearing again on the right, gunshots can't: when it leaves the screen, it's over. Drift Nova it wants action, but it doesn't want it at the expense of readability.
Somehow, through all these different elements, Drift Nova I get space war the way it's written in something like LightM. John Harrison's wonderfully pessimistic science fiction novel. As Light, Drift Nova takes you to a universe where quantum physics has taken ship-to-ship combat to the realm of the truly supernatural. It's a realm where ships flicker and disappear into K-space, and where entire wars unfold with huge consequences and yet somehow come together in less than a second of human time. Drift Nova In other words, it's beautiful, dangerous, and full of surprises. And that's not a bad recipe in itself.
Drift Nova It was released on August 12 on Mac and Windows PC. The game was reviewed using a download code purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. Additional information about Polygon's ethics policy can be found here.