Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is an action roguelike by poncle in which your goal is to survive an endless onslaught of enemies for 30 minutes. The game has gone viral in recent months, garnering over 87,000 reviews on Steam. The price point has probably helped a lot, but I like the slapdash Castlevania romhack aesthetic and items like floor chicken and feel this is a really underpriced gem.
It only has directional controls. Weapons fire automatically, and in a lot of respects it feels like an auto-clicker. I wasn’t surprised to hear poncle has a background in gambling machine design, the way the game is designed, both in terms of waves and the lootboxes.
If you like that sorta thing, you can get sucked into it and there is an interesting depth of strategy for timing and weapon combinations. Throw in various unlockable modes, like hyper mode which dumps even more enemies, and a speed mode which doubles the clock speed so you can complete a full run in 15 minutes, unlockable characters, multiple stages, and weird secrets and there’s a lot to play with in this $2.99 package.
If you like this type of game AT ALL it is certainly worth a try. I got into this because my partner, who only plays maybe 1 or 2 games a year, got addicted to it. He maxed the cheeves available at the time and has since moved on, but I’m still plunking away at my own cheev list, I try to do at least one run a night.
Vampire Survivors 1.0
It’s hard to explain why Vampire Survivors is so fun. It has casino engineering, that’s definitely part of it.
Version 1.0 came out this month and it has every quality of life updated I wanted plus a bunch of extra things. I’ve got uhhh 30 hours in it, but only about half the cheevs because they kept adding stuff. I leave you with this top review:
and people still buy COD every year for $100 lmao
Still Survivin’ in v1.7
HoloCure gave me an urge to return to some of these games, and the really good ones are such a wonderful blend of chill and stress.
I like hanging out in the library on with a character like Poe Ratcho (comes equipped with garlic) and doing a wrecking-ball close-range build that lets me plow through enemies for 15 minutes. It’s super satisfying.
This game continues to be updated. It now has a coop mode and more stages, characters, etc. in addition to two DLC. I have both DLC, and I can’t remember what they add. There is just so much stuff here. I’ve played several of these types of games by now, including ones that didn’t stick like Brotato and Halls of Torment, and this one has yet to lose its charm.