Mow down thousands of night creatures and survive until dawn!
- Release Date: 20th October 2022
- Developer: poncle
- Publisher: poncle
- Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, Mobile
- Version Played: PC
Vampire Survivors, at its core, is a very simple game. You walk around a top down 2D world while your weapons automatically fire and take out tens of thousands of enemies. What makes this game work are its roguelike elements. I’m usually not a fan of this genre, but Vampire Survivors has made me realise that I just hate the feeling of losing progress, something that Vampire Survivors manage to avoid.
The typical roguelike nature is where you’re slowly working forwards until you get a run where you reach and defeat the final boss, only to have to start again with some minor changes. In Vampire Survivors, it feels like you’re playing an arcade game that evolves over time. Each session has you defeating increasingly more powerful enemies up until you reach half an hour, when a powerful creature comes and kills you. Typically.
Each character has their own starting weapon which auto fires and killing enemies will cause them to drop experience orbs. Level up and you can pick from a selection of three items (picked at random): upgrade a current weapon, pick a new weapon or pick a stat altering item. Get a weapon to max level and have the right item and you can evolve the weapon into a more powerful version.
Boss monsters will drop treasure chests, which contain upgrades and gold. Once you’ve finished a run, you can use gold to buy permanent upgrades – more damage, revives, health regeneration, more powerful enemies and so on. To be honest, the grind for gold to get these unlocked really did feel like a chore, knowing that I was just unlocking stuff to be able to have a good run. And when you do get all this, and you learn how to upgrade weapons, you can become super powerful, to the point where towards the end of a run, you can just walk away.
Thankfully, there’s still a lot more to the game once you reach that point. There’s a ton of secrets to find, more weapon combos, bonus levels and just an immense amount. Some unlockables will tell you how to get them, while others only give you hints. It’s enough to keep you occupied for an extremely long time. Even outside of the unlockables, there are also secret weapon interactions – I had one that could generate power ups, and another that activated the rosary power up (kill all enemies on the screen) three times.
One thing that is evident from the weapons, especially early on, is the massive Castlevania influence. The first character has a whip, and other early weapons include a knife, cross, holy book, holy water and axes, all working in a similar fashion as the sub-weapons from classic Castlevania. They do get far more creative over time, form simple stuff like garlic that attacks in a small circle around you to cats that eat items and get more powerful, fireworks, and bouncing furniture.
And they’d not all, you can also unlock “adventures”, these are essentially smaller, remixed versions of the games where you have to start from fresh, with a smaller cast of characters and some unique mechanics, story and side quests. Plus DLC (free and paid) on top of that, perfect for slowly having a quick go every now and then over a long period of time.
Great
