Nova Drift Preview

By now we are all used to roguelite progression systems where you gain persistent upgrades and augment your character throughout each play session. Nova Drift brings these aspects to the top-down arcade shooter with an interesting setup.

Nova Drift in its current form is a space shoot ‘em up that channels Asteroids with a sprinkle of Geometry Wars and The Binding of Isaac. The wave-based shooting sees you wiping out enemy ships and earning experience. Levelling up provides you with a vast array of decisions to make pertaining to how you play and your effectiveness.

The initial few level ups see you making your initial defining choices such as, weapons ranging from missile salvos to an almost melee focused pulse weapon, hull options that range from pure assault to defensive tanking and shields that equally offer offensive burning through to defensive reflection as choices.

As you progress, you can change these initial options as well as add mods to your build. These are where how you play opens up drastically as they can alter everything from fire rate and thruster speed to hull strength and the amount of projectiles you fire. Each type of mod is its own mini-tree of future options too, with your initial choice opening up further mods that can appear later.

The big pull of Nova Drift seems to be how much variety there is in this build system and the speed in which you can experience the game. The game is designed so each session is short. You gain levels rapidly allowing you to experiment with your build. This is further reinforced by the fact you can choose to reroll the upgrade options you are shown during level up so you can more precisely focus your build.

The developers promise much more to come in the lead up to the game’s full release, with their roadmap detailing new hull, weapon and shield options along with many more mods and enemies. New challenge mods and modifiers that you can apply to the game are also on the way along with a full campaign mode.

Even at this early stage, the game is a lot of fun and there are a lot of interesting builds to play around with. If you enjoy roguelite titles and quick arcadey shoot ‘em up experiences then Nova Drift is definitely something to keep on your radar!