Vampire Survivors - Review

When Vampire Survivors first released, I saw the screens of it and wondered what people were getting all hyped up for. Now that the game is coming to Switch, I thought now was a great time to find out if the hype was actually worth it.

I would love to explain the story behind Vampire Survivors, but I am not entirely sure it has one, there are times when it appears to want to tell you something, but then just doesn’t. The basic loop of this game is that you pick your survivor and then explore locations, in order to find more gold or other survivors. The basic gist is fairly simple, but as the enemies become more and more numerous, the challenge ramps up. Survivors are often found in coffins with a horde of enemies surrounding them, busting the enemies and then the coffin will reward you with a new survivor. The survivors only difference is their starting stats and weapon, or lack of in once case. Once you have selected your survivor and drop into the map, getting xp from killing enemies, will let you pick from randomly selected power ups, which can make them start to feel familiar.

Speaking of familiar, the maps will only be interesting for the first few times you visit them, because after visit number 4, there is little else to see. As you can discover upgrades like the map, which highlights the placement of items across the maps, even that removes a lot of reason to explore. As the maps are repeating tiles, there is only so much to see of each, before they start to loop and while the enemies will distract you, there is only so many times you can go through the motions. Again, different characters with different starting abilities and then randomly chosen upgrades, will give you more to do in each one, but that only matters if you want to explore everything the game has to offer. Once you have ‘cleared’ a stage, you can start messing with some modifiers, which can change things up, one of them being the enemies you fight, but that is not made all that clear.

Something that the game does, and doesn’t explain why, is that there is a hard time limit to all the maps. For the main maps it is 30 minutes, for some of bonus ones its 15, but basically once the timer is reached, a being that looks like the personification of Death, will basically warp onto your character and take you down in seconds. The first time this happened, I honestly thought that I had stepped on a trap in the game, of which there are plenty around, but nope it is part of the design. I tried finding out what was going on, but like many other aspects the game is very poor at explaining what is going on.

One of the bigger questions for the Switch release was how would the game work, especially given it didn’t have the best performance out of the gate on Xbox. Having completed many, many runs to the full 30 minutes, I can say that things are mostly solid acrovss the board. The game had issues when power ups were awarded from treasure chests, if the screen was full of games, selecting done with often have the game pause for a moment, but that was really it. When the screen is full of enemies and my character was spawning countless attacks from all sorts of tools, the game ran fairly smooth. Honestly, just watch the gameplay below to see what I mean, its impressive how well the game runs when everything is happening.

The games audio score is fine, it has moments of nice and calm, but can easily become frantic when some waves appear. One of the stages had a relic called the Magic Banger, which kinda looks like a baked potato and it allows you to select the songs you want to play in any stage you want.

Vampire Survivors was an interesting game to play, rogue-lites are not my normal genre of choice at the best of times, but this one had enough hype behind it, I had to play it. Having now played it, I can’t really understand the hype, as the game is basically a fancy version of keep away, except its you keeping your character away from swarms of enemies. While there are a lot of characters, I never noticed a lot of difference in them, once they had power ups applied and while some maps have secrets to discover, the rules for triggering them are not quite clear. If you are a fan of repeating the same action over and over again, in order to get a better score or gear, then this might be the game for you. But if repetition is something you do not like, then after a few runs the game is going to become quite tedious.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by poncle

The Pros

+Once you have acquired some powerups, you can feel like a god as you lay waste to hundreds of foes

+The game runs really well across the board, with only some minor pausing in some menu screens

The Cons

-The locations really don’t matter much, due to their repeating nature and with the number of times you visit them

-The lack of explanation for a lot of things, makes progressing hard to do and feels more random than anything else