Nova Drift turns Vampire Survivors into a recipe for glorious space combat

Over on Cheap Digicam TikTok, there’s a lot of talk about recipes these days. Recipes in this context are congregations of specific camera settings that can generate very specific film-like effects in digital photographs. Want a bloomy 1970s sunset or a cityscape with bokeh pearls the size of snowballs? Good news. There are recipes for that.

I spend quite a lot of time on Cheap Digicam TikTok, so it’s probably inevitable that I’ve started to see these kinds of recipes hiding within other facets of life too. Most recently I’ve been thinking of Nova Drift as a source of really great recipes. Nova Drift is an arcade space blaster in which you shoot everything that moves and level up regularly. And when you level up, you get to change some aspect of your ship, of your abilities, of who you’re going to be out there in the universe for the next five hectic minutes.

And within this heaped muddle of upgrades and perks I’ve started to find friendly routes through the choices on offer. I’ve started to uncover recipes. For weapons, I often want that powdery scatter of rockets that zooms in on enemies, leaving bright contrails. For ship hulls, I want the one that grants extra drones that will swarm around me and annoy my foes. For the shields, I want the type that burn any fools who come too close — and burn me too if I overdo it. Beyond that? Beyond that it gets really tricky to decide, and that’s all part of the fun.

This recipe stuff has kept me so busy that it’s taken me a day and half of playing to realize that Nova Drift is based on the Vampire Survivors template. Of course it is, and really it’s pretty obvious. Head out there, blast enemies, collect XP and then regularly cash that in for a choice of abilities that makes blasting enemies and collecting XP much easier. Meanwhile, dial it up visually and in terms of the damage you’re unleashing as you go, until you’re basically playing Choose Your Own Firework Display.

All fine, but Nova Drift isn’t just Vampire Survivors. At first, I looked at its bright ships coasting across 2D arenas, facing off against fiercely differentiated foes, and I thought I was in for the petri dish experience offered by the best twin-stick shooters. Not quite. I’m inclined to say that Nova Drift looks back beyond Robotron: 2084 toward the likes of Asteroids and even Spacewar! There’s the same thrust-based movement and the same compact arena, and you’re required to master a directional boost to really excel. Hark, though: There’s just a touch of air hockey in here too, as an enemy explosion sends you ghosting over the flat surface of the universe, temporarily out of control.

Lovely. And beyond that, it’s all about the unlocks. New game modifiers, which make things harder but shower you with more rewards. New enemies, like the brilliant alien freight train, just itching to rupture its segmented body and spill its contents all over the nearest nebulae. New hulls, weapons, and shields. New modifiers for all of those things. You can get a weapon with projectiles that split into little pieces when they hit something. You can get a thruster that burns enemies up if it even so much as grazes them, or a drone that accelerates to a target and blows up when it’s out of health, rather than just quietly expiring by itself.

Beyond that lies stuff I haven’t even encountered yet. There are mysterious “super mods” and “wild mods,” which I can’t wait to muddle with. There are weapons that superficially seem to do me more harm than good — what’s their whole deal? Then there’s this little bit of folk poetry I just read in the upgrade list while playing, and which I will be turning over in my head all week: “Global damage increases as your speed does.”

We’re back to recipes, then. And as anyone who deals with recipes of any kind will tell you, success isn’t just about how many ingredients you can shove in. Rather, it’s about how everything is balanced. In the kitchen, that means going easy on the garlic once it’s first shown its teeth. On Cheap Digicam TikTok, it means not completely blowing out your bright colors and cinderizing the shadows. And in Nova Drift, it means that the carnage is never allowed to become genuinely unwieldy. One simple example of this thinking will do. While your ship can use the wraparound screen, disappearing off the left side, say, and appearing back on the right, gunfire cannot: When it goes off screen, it’s over and done with. Nova Drift wants action, but it doesn’t want it at the expense of readability.

Somehow, through all these different elements, Nova Drift gives me space warfare the way it’s written up in something like Light, the gorgeously doomy sci-fi novel by M. John Harrison. Like Light, Nova Drift takes you to a universe in which quantum physics has pushed ship-to-ship combat into the realm of the truly eldritch. It’s a realm in which ships blink out and disappear into K-space, and where entire wars unfold with great consequence, and yet are somehow bundled into less than a second of human time. Nova Drift is beautiful and dangerous and full of surprises, in other words. And that’s not a bad recipe in itself.

Nova Drift was released Aug. 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, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.