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Vampire Survivors review: an unquestionably compulsive treat until you reach the endgameStick your hand back in the crisps
Stick your hand back in the crisps
Vampire Survivors is an arcade-style survivathon about weaving through fields of enemies as your weapons automatically obliterate the oncoming hordes. It’s still about collecting upgrades until you’re the locus of an unstoppable death machine, and now that it’sleft early accessthat death machine comes in more colours and more flavours. There are new maps to conquer, new characters to conquer with, and new secrets to uncover. If you haven’t played since the early access launch then yes, it’s worth checking out the new stuff. If you haven’t played at all, then God yes, please check out all the stuff. Or like, most of it.
Vampire Survivors is still morish. Up to a point.
Launch Trailer - Vampire SurvivorsWatch on YouTube
Launch Trailer - Vampire Survivors
The core appeal remains the same: escalation. Within 30 minutes, if you survive a stage until its very end, you go from chucking out a mesley couple of daggers to a never-ending dagger hurricane being just one small component in your whirling armageddon arsenal. Basic armaments combine into evolved, superpowered versions of themselves that munch up monsters faster than kids let loose on British baked corn snacks. Every run earns you gold, which can be spent on permanent stat buffs that send you into your next run a little tougher.
Most enemies drop gems when they die, which you can hoover up for XP and an oh-so-satisfying sound effect. It only takes a few minutes before that sound becomes a constant rush in your ears; the power curve is palpable. It still feels generous, with occasional explosions of potency sprinkled along the way thanks to either chests that contain five items at once rather than their regular one, or the way you occasionally get to randomly level up ten times in a row. Go on, Vampire Survivors says, sometimes. Who cares if you’ve earned it. The final level throws a curveball that turns that generosity on its head, but we’ll figure out how we feel about that later.
One striking difference is that every level except the first one now gives you objectives in the form of a tome or two placed in far-off corners of the map. You don’t need to nab ‘em to complete the stage, but they do unlock new parts of the game: anything from a cheat sheet for weapon evolutions to a new system that lets you choose up to three powerful passive buffs, such as enabling crits for certain weapons or tripling the times they bounce. Those are juicy, but perhaps the most impactful addition is the unlockable map, which is handy for both tracking down coffins that unlock extra characters and for moseying over to leftover healing chicken drops when you find yourself in a pinch.
Having to track down those objectives, among others, also adds tension. Rather than noodling around in optimal XP-farming patterns of your own devising (such as the windy death balls I liked spinning up in my early access review), journeying out means sacrificing valuable harvesting time. It’s a welcome complication, figuring out a balance between farming and travelling. A light, undemanding pressure to mix things up a little.
The new stages aren’t the wide, open fields of the first level either. None of them radically change what you get up to, but they do mean you can derive some satisfaction from figuring out weapons and characters that suit, say, a stage where the enemies entirely come from above and below. Magical accordion, go go go.
I’ve reached the point that separates the Vampire men from the Vampire boys, and I have discovered I am but a boy. Vampire survivors sits in this strange space where for most of the game some work is required of you, especially at first when you figure out which weapons to prioritise, but for the most part you’re free to sit back and enjoy the ride. There are stretches that keep you on your toes, desperately twisting and turning down whichever ever-closing safety corridors your weapons happen to carve out, but that demands a different kind of cognition to ironing out problems with your build choices. It’s also still the case that runs can turn on whether or not you land those lucky power-boosts, and that a run that seems to be going splendidly can come crashing to the ground within moments - but all that only started to frustrate me when I came up against that final hurdle.
I feel like I’ve been coasting along down a pleasant hill only to find the finish line lies atop a secondary hill, with a bubble-blowing bastard lying in wait to shove me off my bike and laugh at me. The game I can play with one hand in a packet of crisps now wants me to sit up and study. Waah.
I was in it for the plinkety-plink rush of clattering into a huge pile of gems. I was in it for the five item chest boogie, the mindless yet mindful monster shepherding, the giant meteors and the rainbow scythes. Those are all still here, and you can push into further and deadlier territory than ever before, especially if you get far enough to unlock the endless mode, or the modifier that lets you keep upgrading weapons past their usual point. Vampire Survivors is a bigger, better playground now - albeit one with a bodyguard blocking the final set of swings.
