EGX 2017: Floatlands Preview

Floatlands is an interesting little game. A lowpoly survival-exploration title currently in early development, Studio Techtrics’ first product takes place in a world that has been blown to shards.

Playing as robot on a procedurally generated world of floating landmasses, Floatlands allows players to build bases across any of the shards spread across the map. Each floating island has a different size and a different biome, including flora and fauna, offering a certain variety to play sessions.

It is hard to judge Floatlands, as the demo I played was rather sterile; it felt more like a proof of concept than a proper early version of the game. With most of the terrain being non-interactable and no building function easily accessible, what I did was basically walk a bit, break a few rocks and trees, and spawn a helicopter to fly around.

As soon as the game started, I was beside an NPC who gave me a quest to assemble a pickaxe. I went around bashing rocks and trees, crafted them into a pickaxe, and gave them to the NPC, which promptly completed the quest and left me with nothing to do. I walked around, saw a deer, touched the deer, didn’t attack the deer (because I’m not a terrible person), and moved away from the deer to walk around some more. After that, the developers showed me how to spawn a helicopter for the purposes of this demo, so I could fly around a little bit.

The truth is this game is too barebones at the moment to really be judged. Aside from random dropships that fly about and drop resource crates, there was nothing to be done. The robot can use a jetpack for small boosts, and must keep an eye on your energy level -- which acts as the hunger and thirst meters of other games. The controls are serviceable, with the chopper in particularly feeling straight out of Far Cry 4 -- which means it works, but has zero feedback to it. While Floatlands has an interesting art design, the shards themselves look mostly the same. Worlds are mostly empty, with a few buildings scattered about and very small floating “forts” rarely dotting the area, devoid of anything interesting but a wooden crate with some rather unexciting supplies.

Floatlands has recently been signed up by publisher Excalibur Games, of Euro Truck Simulator fame. Made by a two-man team composed of game director Domen Koneski and artist Mito Morvat Madyar, the game has a planned Alpha around October and a Beta in February. Final release date is, elementary, TBA, but you can keep track of the project here.