The Haunted Hoard: Vampire Survivors (PC)
Vampire Survivors is a game where hundreds upon hundreds of monsters come single-mindedly charging towards you and the most satisfying way to defeat these hordes is standing in place and pressing nothing. It’s not like you could attack much if you wanted to, you only control the movement of your character, but that character will automatically do the attacking themselves, and as you kill creatures, collect the gems they drop, and root through the treasure chests left behind by the bigger ones, you can gradually build yourself into a powerful meat grinder your foes hopelessly throw themselves against to no avail.
Vampire Survivors is a rogue-like where you try to survive for usually around 30 minutes, but the more specific name for the genre it occupies seems to still be up for debate. Some people call it a survivors game mostly because of this title popularizing it even though that sounds close to the often more grounded and realistic survival genre. Others call it a “bullet heaven”, a deliberate contrast with bullet hells since in those games you need to find the small gaps between screen covering attacks whereas here you are the one that eventually fills the screen with your attacks. Autobattler sort of nears the truth, but you do need to do a lot of the walking around yourself, meaning it’s not quite like autochess games where you just pick and improve what goes into battle and watch the results. Horde survival might be the closest to accurate even if it might sound like it includes any game where you get attacked by wave after wave of foes, but it is at least direct and doesn’t require additional context like bullet heaven. Regardless of what you might call it, the emphasis is on making good use of those thirty minutes to build your strength up and add new attacks to your output, a player having to think and react well enough to reach that point where they can sit back and watch all their hard work pay off with the enemies not even able to get close to you anymore.
When you start a run in Vampire Survivors, the first thing you do is pick a character that will determine what you begin with. While some characters may move at different speeds or have a somewhat unique gimmick, mostly characters are differentiated by what weapon they start with even though the weapon is not exclusive to the character. Antonio for example comes with the whip that lashes out in front of him periodically while Imelda has the magic wand that will automatically fire a little magic bolt from time to time at the nearest enemy. A character like Gennaro gives you throwing knives that launch where you’re looking whereas Poe’s passive Garlic instead harms enemies who get too close to the old man. After you’ve managed to kill a few baddies and collected the experience they’ve dropped though, you’ll be presented with a random line-up of weapons and upgrades you can select. They can be additional weapons, all unleashed automatically alongside the rest of your arsenal, or they can be passive boosts like increasing your attack speed, defenses, and health. Figuring out synergies becomes an important tool for success, something like the Holy Water vials that drop in from above at random spots all the better if you can invest in more projectiles, wide areas of damage, and longer lasting attacks so the holy waters can become a hailstorm of lingering puddles of holy fire that easily waste away your foes. You can only select one item per level up though and there is a limit to how many you can buy this way, although you can also select improvements to the items independent of synergies so a fully upgraded weapon will be quite powerful regardless of what other upgrades you’ve collected in the run.
Eventually, you’ll start to uncover extra forms for weapons unlocked during a run by acquiring the right items alongside it. The slow throwing overhead axe can be improved into a set of scythes that launch in all directions, and the rotating bibles that make a barrier around your character can be turned into a permanent twirling barrier rather than one that comes and goes. You can’t rely on everything you need showing up when you need it and making the wrong choice may mean you die before you can set up these combinations, but that is how Vampire Survivors ends up being rather thrilling despite the fact the game is doing all the attacking for you. You are building up your warrior into a more powerful killing machine while trying to carefully weave around the waves of foes coming your way, and since some weapons are influenced by your position, you are even making decision making on what to target despite the fact you don’t press the button to unleash the strikes. Treasure chests supplement this process as occasionally much tougher monsters appear and take some time to wear down, the reward being a treasure chest that offers a free upgrade to something you already have. However, at times the chest may provide more bonuses than usual, the exciting mystery adding a moment of hope and a more focused short term goal than just constantly leveling up. Power ups can be found for a quick aid as well like an orb that draws in all experience gems or a screen wiping rosary, but levels can also contain relics for unlockables if you search about, the otherwise often almost irrelevant environment made to be more than a battle arena by such searches.
At first, just trying to survive and figure out the various synergies will be your main focus, but even if you die early, each run you’ll gain some gold that can be spent to improve your general performance. Entirely independent of the characters you select, you can purchase general upgrades to things like strength, defense, experience gain, gold earned, and other helpful baseline elements that benefit from the boost. Even with the upgrades purchased though you usually won’t be able to sleepwalk through a run, especially if you start pursuing the wide range of unlockable content on offer. The initial lineup of stages for example is a bit humble, a wide open forest, a library that is one long horizontal hallway, and Gallo Tower which is that but a long vertical stretch instead. However, as you collect relics, experiment with the characters, and discover combos, you can get more conceptual levels that can require you to focus on things beyond just building up your own power. What little story there is can be sort of discovered as you unlock more and more as well, Vampire Survivors normally just about trying to find a single vampire and pretty much facing every other common horror monster but the one the game is named for, but with the game usually not wanting to ever turn away from pure gameplay, the moments it does suddenly introduce some strange lore to follow can be a captivating break from the norm you came to expect.
Admittedly, as you start to unlock things like tarot cards and more to make runs even easier to mold to your liking, Vampire Survivors can start having runs that have lulls. When you are so strong you don’t have to work anymore to wipe out the threats coming your way, you’re kind of just left to wait until either beefier baddies show up or you reach that 30 minute mark and Death himself floats out to conclude your run. Thankfully there are ways to eventually speed things up so you can try to get through the lulls faster, but these moments where everything is pretty much set and you’re waiting for the end do fall somewhat on the enemies’ shoulders. Whether its a bat, skeleton, werewolf, milk elemental, cherub, eyeball, floating chair, or robot, most enemies are just going to move straight towards you. Even if they can fire off an attack like some energy blasts, your attacks destroy them, so it’s not hard to get to the point you invalidate the attacks and a foe like the undead mage just joins the rest in being cannon fodder. For the most part, the differentiation in appearance usually just alerts you that you’ve moved onto a foe with a bit more health who will deal more damage if they touch you, but the larger monsters who drop treasure chests are at least formidable enough that you have to work a little harder to avoid them and focus more on defeating them lest they keep pestering you. Curiously, many enemies in Vampire Survivors look like they’re ripped almost straight from a Castlevania game, and this actually extends beyond just the monsters. Weapons like the Cross, Holy Water, and Axe function similarly and look almost the same, and enemies like the “Twin Snakes” are clearly the very unique skull towers known as Bone Pillars in Castlevania. Having a case here or there like the floating medusa heads isn’t too strange, but then Musc Musc looks remarkably close to the unique look of the Ectoplasm enemy in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. Konami didn’t seem to mind the near plagiarism though considering the game has actual Castlevania DLC available, but it is a curious touch that leads to some monsters looking more interesting than standard horror monsters to fall to your incredible strength. The game does have a bit of a flippant sense of humor, not taking much of the situation seriously, so skirting copyright doesn’t feel too out of place alongside some of its stranger stages and the often humorous bestiary entries.
The main drive for continuing to play Vampire Survivors seems to be that everpresent sense you can build up towards something. It exists on the smaller scale in a run as you figure out the weapons and upgrades you want, but there are rewards for doing well with every character, for doing well in each level and its harder hyper variant, for finding special interactions, and even once you get the unlocks for those actions, they can start leading to brand new activities. There are the Adventures that take away all your tools so you have more focused growth based on a very loose narrative, there is co-op where you can work towards being powerhouses with other players, and even the DLC has a good deal of extra characters and secrets. It is a game you can technically get hundreds of hours out of while still doing productive work towards getting something new, but the auto-attacking nature of the action does make it feel more like something you return to when you have some downtime or don’t want to do something too committal. It’s not going to test your skill much, reward strategy heavily, or add any deeper meaning to the action, the entertainment value certainly there but it can feel more like playing a game of catch compared to a more structured sport with hard-earned victories and memorable moments.
THE VERDICT: Vampire Survivors expertly taps into a basic human urge to make progress. Each run you’re trying to build yourself up so your automatic attacks can sweep through the monstrous hordes with ease, but finishing that round of play is just a single rung on a ladder to continuing to unlock more interesting tools, options, and areas. It’s easy to remain productive and set short term goals be they getting a treasure chest from a big baddie or trying to hit one of the unlock conditions, and Vampire Survivors keeps rolling out new surprises that can make it hard to step away. The play can definitely slow down at times and the shallow base the action is built on can start to show a touch, but Vampire Survivors is aiming to provide an easily repeatable loop that may not be too substantial compared to something more involved but can still provide easy satisfaction.
And so, I give Vampire Survivors for PC…
A GOOD rating. Vampire Survivors can be pretty creative and silly at times with some of its more out there ideas for a special area or new character, but it also does play it safe a little in that it remains pretty committed to its central formula. Your role is mostly going to be as the person moving the character around and making some decisions on what tools to give your automatically attacking hero, but it feels hard to get a truly memorable run out of a game that wants to stick rigidly to a formula. You do get that thrill in the moment of reaching the apex of your power and watching enemies futilely throw themselves against an aura of screen covering attacks, but it starts to become a bit of a commonplace outcome the more you play provided you think a bit each time you level up. You’re satisfying an urge for success but not really able to pin it on truly exceptional skill or planning on your part, and such power isn’t so rare that it feels like a notable outlier. A game like The Binding of Isaac might be a good point of comparison, that game featuring some truly powerful combinations but they’re rare and while dependent on luck to some extent as well, you do have to work much harder to get to them and most of your time with the game will be trying to succeed with your skills as a player. Vampire Survivors gives you a ramp to take and you do need to build up to it through your own action, but it’s often quite passive and the game shies away from deeper differentiation between enemies and heroes. This is all mostly to say why it doesn’t get a higher rating though since some people have truly allowed its addictive nature to influence their opinion, but Vampire Survivors definitely does a good job constructing its fundamentals to work towards that consistent satisfaction.
As this potentially difficult to name genre expands out from Vampire Survivors, expect to see games that tweak with the formula to provide those memorable runs or outcomes with a more personal touch. As the one inspiring future video games though, Vampire Survivors does at least have a very strong understanding of how to make the core concept work. Your attacks are automatic, but what you’re working towards is in your hands, the player figuring out what mixes well, how to work towards unlocks, and then getting to see some new little addition that tweaks things just enough to be interesting even if they don’t expand outwards into more adventurous territory. Vampire Survivors can definitely provide tens of hours of play and an enjoyable experience that’s easy to return to, but it still feels like just the start of what we will see from this style of action game.