Vtech Mucky Magical Wonderland is an interactive playset designed for young children. With its vibrant colors, engaging features, and educational content, it offers a world of fun and learning. This playset is specifically designed for children between the ages of 1 and 3. It features various activities that stimulate their cognitive, fine motor, and sensory skills. From buttons to push, levers to pull, and gears to turn, the Mucky Magical Wonderland offers endless opportunities for hands-on exploration. One of the key features of this playset is its interactive nature.

Driftland: The Magic Revival

Perhaps our first true “Less eXplored” game is Star Drifters’ Driftland: The Magic Revival. I call it our first “true” Less eXplored game because the intent of this article series was to highlight or revisit games that never received that much exposure from eXplorminate or the greater community and that is certainly true with this one. Hell, it released back on April 19th of this year and we still haven’t covered it properly.

Driftland is a real-time-strategy game where you’ll seek to exploit the procedurally generated islands that are the centerpiece of the Magic Revival. As a powerful mage, you’ll first use your power to connect those shattered islands to develop your empire. You’ll build houses, farms, mines, marketplaces, and other structures, all with the purpose of accumulating resources and using those resources towards the production of your armies.

Because at its most basic level, Driftland is a game about military dominance, despite what the multiple victory conditions might lead you to believe. What sets Driftland apart, other than its titular drifting islands, is its macro-management of your units. Instead of directing individual units, you give broad orders, i.e. attack this unit or explore this island, and your units obey.

Along the way, you can tame and ride various creatures, including dragons, and progress through a research tree of sorts called the Paths of Progress. You’re given the choice between four different races to play as, with some asymmetric strengths and weaknesses, but none of them are outside your standard fare. That being said, their units do speak different languages and their story-based differences are fleshed out in the single-player campaign.

We here at eXplorminate were going through a period of transition with Driftland released and have not yet given it the full review treatment. Has anyone out there had a lot of time with Driftland? If so, let us know and let me know what I could do to get better (see video below; you’ll know what I’m talking about). We still plan to give Driftland the full review treatment, so if you’ve had time with it and are interested in reviewing it for us, please let us know! We welcome community contributions like that!

In the meantime, watch me take it for a spin and maybe, just maybe, fall prey to some mean little Dwarves:

Do you guys have any suggestions for any 4X, strategy, or tactics game that we kinda glossed over or isn’t as well known as it should be? Let us know in the comments below!

Until next time, keep eXploring!

Rob founded eXplorminate, and quickly brought on Nate, as his passion for 4X needed an outlet. You can find Rob in just about every 4X game beta and 4X game forum, too. He’s equally obsessed with the strategy and tactics genres and constantly combs the internet for new and exciting titles in those genres. He’s proud to be a member of Amplitude Studios’ VIP program and the concept creator of Endless Space 2’s Unfallen.

REVIEW: Driftland: The Magic Revival

2019 is definitively a great time for resource management game and city builders, the revival of an entire genre. For this game, we are focusing on the revival of magic as the planet was shattered to pieces and so much magic was used to hold the pieces in the sky to prevent a cataclysmic event, that the magic users have all lost their powers for a few generations. Now that they are gaining back their abilities, all they seem to think about is going to war with each other!

Gameplay video

The magnificent post-apocalypse

The premise of floating islands is a refreshing idea, and Driftland delivers beautifully. Heroes ride atop eagles or dragons exploring the world, and magic can be used to bring an island closer to your empire and connect it with a bridge. Water cascades fall into oblivion, as you can see the lava of the planet’s center far below. What a gorgeous sight!

Everyone is a hero

Starting a new map can be daunting as the heroes do not necessarily start atop a flying mount, and your own buildings do not provide such aerial creatures. Before explaining the process, I will quickly complain about the semantics: Games usually categorize units as either common troops or heroes, unique characters that cannot be mass-produced. Driftland names all its soldiers and uses the term heroes for everyone, and thus I was sometimes confused with tutorial prompts or in-game text telling me that I should use heroes to accomplish some tasks, and at that time I couldn’t imagine that the game was referring to my basic soldiers, nor that they were also able to fly. It took me a while to understand that I had to capture wildlife nests on some islands, then connect them to my empire. My soldiers were then able to walk to these nests and mount the ravens that I had purchased, and suddenly I had a whole aerial army.

Trust the AI

What also took me a long time to get used to was the indirect method of control: similarly, to the old RTS Majesty, units are not controlled directly but the player places a flag with a command, and if someone is not busy then they will do it. I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, I dislike not being able to micro-manage my troops, on the other hand, the AI is surprisingly one of the most competent that I have ever seen, and I could leave a lot of the busywork to automation. There are a lot of little things that make me say that.

Autonomy and directions

For one, heroes are actually quite independent and do not hesitate to explore a bit, collect resources, fight enemies, go back home once they are injured, and most importantly, prioritize helping defend the empire whenever there is an enemy attack. This means that you trust the AI to defend you while you are busy looking at another screen, although you should still build defensive towers for when your troops are too spread out to come back quickly. But then, it’s not always so nice, and enemy troops can also quietly leave the battlefield when they have low health; and when your troops are vastly outnumbered and still wait to be at critical health before leaving and get obliterated when flying over a well-defended territory, you can’t help but feel that a direct control scheme would have avoided this situation. Another issue is that it is not very intuitive how to coordinate a massive attack with all your troops at the same time rather than one at a time randomly deciding to go where you laid a flag.

Technically, all of this can be solved after learning the full extent of the game mechanics. Groups of troops are organized with pitch camps that can then aggressively raid an island. To pull your units out of a combat situation early, do not hesitate to remove the flags that directed them here. And finally, you can deal with units leaving by the skin of their teeth with your spells, slowing down enemy units or encasing them with ice. There are lots of fun spells to use, as long as you are in range from your main castle (this range can be extended in the tech tree), and you can pause the game at any time to aim carefully or chain attacks (although the different spells are on a cooldown). The indirect control scheme is not all that bad and it can help you manage your vast empire in a relaxed manner, but ultimately it also prevents late-game fights from being fun as cleaning up island after island becomes tedious. Even the nice exploration aspect of the earlier phase of a map becomes repetitive when playing several games in a row. All heroes are equally as competent and there are no unique situations that require a different approach every time.

Managing your empire

The resource management layer of the game has sort of the same strengths and weaknesses. A clear strength is the interface and also some degree of automation regarding where to assign the workers, and it can be changed on the fly without micro-managing every building – unlike upgrading them, which is a serious chore. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and I will first explain the resource system. Buildings, units or upgrades require several types of resources, harvested from the islands thanks to specific buildings tied to each industry. What Driftland does well is that selecting a new building to place shows helpful red or green marked areas rather than letting the player do something stupid, what Driftland doesn’t do well is to give life to these industries. They collect numbers, and you never see little people working and carrying the resources. I guess that it’s fine since the rest of the game is so pretty and after a while, you zoom out rather than having your nose at the doorstep of your citizens, but still, the resource management is a by-the-numbers affair and feels a bit dry. Then there is the main loop. You get gold from taxes, so you build cottages to house more citizens. But more citizens mean that you need to produce food, and so the citizens have to be assigned to the farms rather than assigned to stay at home (since obviously, they produce gold by rubbing their feet against a magic table at home). Since you don’t produce as much gold as you want, you place more cottages, but then, ah, you need even more farms. Beginning a map is always a bit tricky because of that, and it takes a while before you are freed from this loop and can focus on other things. (Also, some people don’t seem to know that you make money with gold mines, it’s not just collecting taxes) At some point your empire becomes self-sustainable and you keep producing goods without having to bother dropping new buildings every minute, but until then it’s a clickfest to upgrade all your buildings one level at a time. This is the part of the game that I hated the most, I would have rather preferred a tech tree that could upgrade all buildings of the same type at the same time.

Some misshaps

All of Driftland’s problems were made all the more obvious in one of its early campaign levels. Right as I was struggling to build my empire, my coffers were emptied by having to repair my buildings from a constant dance of tornadoes and waves of enemy raids. Assigning my workers to gold would prevent them from farming, and the famine would cause riots. Assigning my workers to farm would keep them pacified, but I wasn’t earning any gold. In the end, I decided on several minutes of farming to build up my reserves of food so that I could sustain a few seconds of gold production, just enough time to place a new building (a defensive building or a farm). Rinse & repeat for what felt like several hours. Once I was strong enough to repel the enemy attacks, I sent my valiant flying heroes to explore and find the enemy camps. For some reason, they were not highlighted on this map, leading me to manually place flags all over the map to send my heroes. Even with the game sped up 4x, it was so slow that I was reading a novel while playing the game.

A lot on offer

Ok, that was one really bad mission, the rest were not that bad. The game weirdly sits in between “very well designed, automated and relaxing” and “tedious upgrades to click click click, too long and repetitive”. It’s hard to describe; I was sort of enjoying myself while regretting spending too much time in the game. Actually, you can expect to sink a large number of hours if you want to finish Driftland. There are four campaigns, skirmishes on randomly generated maps (you can fine-tune what you want more or less of), and even online multiplayer that can either pit you against other players or play coop. The campaign follows the story of four races: humans, dwarves and two types of elves. While the gist of the game is the same for each race, they all have slight differences as well as a unique look to each of them.

Technique

Graphically the game is gorgeous, and it runs quite well on older hardware with everything bumped to the max, although there can be slowdowns at times, but it’s still playable so I never felt the obligation to lower the graphics. The gameplay video with this article had more slowdowns than normally, due to the recording, so don’t judge the game on that alone. I was also impressed by how far you can zoom out and the icons have little numbers that let you quickly see what you need to see. From sliders to icons, the developers of Star Drifter made an excellent job with the UI! The first few steps in the game can be a bit overwhelming, but once I got used to it, it all felt just right.

Verdict

I had a good time with the floating islands of Driftland, and its indirect control scheme is well compensated by a great AI and a smooth UI. After an adjustment period, I saw how this game could be very relaxing while keeping a tight control on the flow of a huge empire. Still, while it’s overall well designed, the lack of direct control as well some gameplay loops will be a clear turn-off for many players. Truth is, Driftland does combat better than a vast majority of resource management games, so well that it feels like an RTS. But because of that, players expect it to handle just like a fast-paced RTS, which the game never attempts to be. As to me, it’s the sort of management game that I enjoy playing one map at a time, otherwise, it feels too long and repetitive.

Expand your magical kingdom — Driftland: The Magic Revival review

Have you ever wanted the power to build your own kingdom? Rally your citizens to gather resources in order to build infrastructure? Use powerful magic to transform and claim land as you see fit? Driftland: The Magic Revival puts you in the shoes of a mage as he works towards rebuilding Driftland after a catastrophe. It’s going to take time, planning, and effort, but you’ll do what it takes to get the job done.

Driftland: The Magic Revival is a combination of RTS and god games. You’ll be managing resources in order to build up your civilization while shaping the world around you with magic. The campaign consists of the stories of several races, including humans, dark elves, and dwarves. Each race has their own storyline, citizens, troops, buildings, and magic abilities. You start off playing as humans and must complete all of their missions before unlocking the other stories. Every mission gives you a small starting setup that you must expand upon in order to complete that mission’s objectives. Objectives can be anything from reaching certain population numbers to locating designated NPCs to obtaining important items to defeating other kingdoms and more.

When building upon your kingdom, living quarters and food production buildings are crucial. Living quarters increase the number of citizens that you have, which increases the amount of money that you earn per day. Since everyone needs to eat, you need to make sure enough food is being produced to feed them all every day. Each citizen only requires one food per day, which is easy to remember and doesn’t take much of a toll on your supply. Citizens have a daily wage as well, so making money at a fast rate is incredibly important.

Other buildings that are important are the plethora of resource collectors such as stonemasons, iron mines, coal mines, lumberjacks, diamond mines, and more. These collect their specific resources at a steady rate per day, which increases when you have more people assigned to that location. Each building can only have five citizens assigned to it at first, but upgrading them increases that by five each time. Buildings have a max level that they can reach though, so you can’t upgrade infinitely. Upgrading is very helpful because it allows you to collect more resources within the same structure. You want to minimize the number of structures you have because each structure costs a set amount of gold to maintain per day. Upgrading doesn’t change this cost at all, which I think is a great idea. Not having to worry about increased maintenance costs due to upgrades is a weight off your shoulders.

The world is covered by the fog of war and the only ways to dissipate it are by building structures, which remove some of it, or by sending units out to explore. Buildings can only be placed in clear areas, so you aren’t able to put them anywhere you want. Exploration units only clear the fog in the area around them and it only lasts for a short time. I wish that the fog would stay gone permanently after you’ve cleared it once, as it would help immensely being able to look over every area that you’ve explored before. Expanding your kingdom helps remove the fog, and one of the best ways to do that is by exploring islands that are near the ones you occupy. Once the fog there is gone, use your magic to pull the island closer. When it is close enough, you can build a bridge to it and enable your ground troops to reach the island. This gives you access to the resources of that island, gives you more space to work with, and even gets you closer to other nearby islands.

One of my biggest issues is the way the units respond to your commands. The game boasts that you don’t have to give specific orders, but instead give general goals for your units to complete. At first this seemed like a good way to remove micro-managing and give you more time to perform other actions, but it has its downsides. For example, when I command my units to explore, only one of them goes to that area. I have to request multiple explorations in order to get more than one unit to head to an area. Fighting is even worse; there were many times where I sent units to battle and only one or two would go. I would command an attack on enemy units again in order to get the units in battle some backup, but nobody would come to their aid. Sometimes one troop would answer the call, but it felt like it rarely happened. Meanwhile I’d look over at my kingdom and see multiple soldiers just wandering around aimlessly when they should be fighting. There’s no way to move individual units specifically, which I see as a huge problem. It could somehow just be an issue with me, but I haven’t been able to get my forces to follow my orders. The game does mention that the units have their own free will, but there’s a limit before that becomes a hindrance.

Thankfully the free will aspect doesn’t affect building assignments. When you assign citizens to buildings by using their respective slider, they stay there and work without question. I think I’d have a fit if they had the chance to abandon their job site. You can adjust how many people are working on earning each resource on the fly and it updates immediately. This speedy change is a blessing, and so is the ability to fast forward at will. Fast forwarding is perfect for when you have a good production rate going and want to power through saving up resources.

There are a lot of resources to manage, structures to build, and area to cover, so you have a lot to keep track of. Planning strategically is crucial to avoiding going broke, starving your citizens, or having your kingdom destroyed by enemies. You can’t just build constantly and suffer no consequences. The hardest aspects of the game are the free will insubordination of your units along with the resource management. On the bright side, the fantastical tone of the music and world design are a treat. You get the feeling that you are helping the people of this land. That being said, Driftland: The Magic Revival is an interesting RTS and god game mix. If you like resource management, building up a small society, and using magic to alter the world, then this might be the game for you.

One of the key features of this playset is its interactive nature. It includes a talking monkey character that guides children through different activities. With the touch of a button, children can hear songs, rhymes, and phrases that introduce them to numbers, colors, shapes, and more.

This not only enhances their language development but also helps them learn basic concepts in a fun and engaging way. The Mucky Magical Wonderland also encourages imaginative play. It includes a slide, a swing, and a treehouse for the monkey character to explore. Children can use their imagination to create their own stories and adventures, promoting creativity and storytelling skills. Furthermore, this playset is designed with safety in mind. The materials used are child-friendly and durable, ensuring the playset can withstand the enthusiastic play of young children. It also has rounded edges and no small parts, eliminating the risk of choking hazards. In conclusion, Vtech Mucky Magical Wonderland is a fantastic playset that offers both fun and educational value. It provides young children with a world of interactive play, stimulating their learning and motor skills. With its interactive features, imaginative play opportunities, and safe design, it is an excellent choice for parents and caregivers looking to engage their little ones in a world of wonder and exploration..

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