So Vampire Survivors is a continuation of the roguelikes genre which I personally experienced when I first played SNKRX. Vampire Survivors expanded on the idea introduced by SNKRX and blew it up 1000%. Diving right into it, we have upgrades available to us that you can buy by earning coins, and you can earn coins by playing the game.
I would say my favorite powerup is area, and when combined with garlic and any ranged weapon, if you also up your damage, it makes you close to unkillable. I say close to because I’ve still ended up dying, one reason being I get too prideful and brave and end up doing something stupid. Speaking of powerups, you have to unlock them as you progress through the game and get better, and I’ve found that compared to SNKRX at least, this game is a lot more fun and has a lot more unlockables to boot.
170 powerups and 203 beasts to find, I will say that is plenty. Full disclosure I do have the Emergency Meeting, Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari DLCs, so your number with the base game may be smaller than this. Now digging into the actual game itself, you have over twenty characters to choose from, but I’m going to do one for this review that I’ve never played before, Suor Clerici, which is, judging by its name, a cleric, reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons which I often play.
For the stage, I’m going to try to beat “Dairy Plant” which has been quite a difficult stage for me personally, but that’s the good thing about this game, its difficult in the later stages but it starts you off easy, so it gets more difficult over time, which keeps the game interesting and challenging.
So once you’re in the game, you are told a little bit about how it works (can’t show it here since I’ve played it before), so it has a tutorial system but there’s really not much to know about the game. You fire automatically once your cooldown ends, with the weapon firing dependent on how it works. Guns and swords etc. will fire in the direction you’re looking at the time, while others like throwing potions are just a random location around you. Every time an enemy dies, they drop a jewel that you have to pick up, and as you pick them up, you fill the top bar, and once its filled up, you’ll get a screen like seen below which means you’ve leveled up and therefore get to level up one of your existing powers or get a new power.
One of the things I wished this game included was a way to upgrade how many items you could fit in your storage, because its the same number for all characters, that number being 8, and you’ll know how many slots are taken by the top left icon, right below the blue potion (also called Santa Water). As the dialog says, you do have the chance to get 4 options instead of 3 (which is the default), and the higher your luck, the better chance of that happening. I will select Magic Wand for the moment.
In the game itself, you have a clock in the center-top that tells you how long you’ve been in the game. Now, there are no waves in this game technically speaking, really the longer you live, the harder the enemies get, which can end up introducing new enemies to the realm. You also have a health bar right below your character, and you can move using WASD or arrow keys (like a true gamer does). On the top left corner, you can see your inventory at a quick glance and it shows you how many slots you have left with semi-transparent boxes. Finally near the top left corner you have how many kills you’ve gotten along with how many coins you’ve earned and your current experience level.
These areas you have to watch out for. When I first picked up this game, I knew jack about this, and now I’m passing this wisdom on to my readers, try to not go to these areas unless you can escape a circle of jellyfish or octopuses (either or). That, or just kill them all in one go (don’t actually try this, its difficult believe me).
Sometimes you’ll kill an enemy or just wander throughout the map (the maps in this game are HUGE and honestly I’ve never found the ending boundaries of it, though they do exist) and you’ll just find a treasure chest sitting there. These are pretty cool goodies that can give you multiple new items or upgrades in one, and there are different tiers of chests. Generally speaking the level of the chest decides how good of stuff you get (and the number, with the most common chest giving a single item).
You can make money quick with chests just starting out, you can see I got a free wand upgrade, so that’s nice. One thing to note is that upgrades to existing items don’t take up space, only brand new items do, and you can’t get rid of an item once you’ve added it, without starting a new game of course.
Believe me when I say these stonehenge-looking creatures are so easy to kill, if you do the garlic and damage increase combo, you can literally just walk through them and harvest gems, its rather beautiful. Nonetheless they’re pretty easy to kill, and you learn that pretty quick when playing this game.
One good thing to denote is that there are emeralds, which are green and give you twice the experience and very rarely rubies, which are red and give you 3x the experience, definitely pick those up.
Now when you pause the game, by default, you wont see the world map, but you can unlock the world map by finding it on the map in question you’re playing on. Notably, you can only unlock the next stage by completing an objective in the previous stage (which is usually staying alive for X number of minutes). Also noted here is the sidebar, which you can look at anytime and shows you your status including your max health (at one point mine was at like 300 something, it was insane, and I had my favorite garlic combo). The map will show you where you can find items and where special secret things (the question mark) are, hence why the map is an unlockable on every stage, but you can also just stumble upon said items through the magic of walking around the huge map. You are the tiny yellow circle you see in the photo. One thing I wish this game had was a minimap implemented, but its not the end of the world.
When you live long enough, you’ll start to get rushed, and the rush cooldown gets less and less with every second that passes until every two seconds you get rushed. Sheesh…talk about difficult
If you press the “Show Guides” button then go back to your game, you’ll get arrows on your screen telling you where things are, and “Hide Pickups” will hide those from the game, such as on the guides and the “Grimoire” is actually a weapon evolution cookbook, so this game is very advanced and in my opinion, very replayable. You’re never done with it really.
The books are actually powerups you can get for free! They’re usually easy to get, unlike the maps, which make you fight an entire boss to get it, which is pretty cool, but you can die pretty easily if you aren’t prepared. Items are always in the same location on a stage, which does suck, but its not the end of the world. When you find one, you’ll get a prompt that looks like this.
Now one thing I don’t like about this game is that to quit you have to go into “Options” then hit “Quit” which I think personally would confuse people at first glance.
The rushes ended up murdering me, well, not only that, I also got surrounded too much and walked through one too many people. There are no revives, and there is no healing system. You either have to find food around the map, or buy the self-healing powerup on the main menu. The only exception to the revives if if you buy the 10,000 coin revive powerup which allows you to come back once with 50% of your HP, which if your HP is high isn’t too bad, could even be the default, but if its the default or lower, it could screw you over very easily.
Whenever you hit the quit button, you do get an overview of how you did on the game, such as number of enemies defeated, what level you got to (which is your experience) and how long you survived. The statistics are very nice and I love to see them. I do wish you could see them in a history window however of your most recent runs.
Now to end this review off, lets talk about the soundtrack, the one thing you can’t deduce from photos. It is awesome, absolutely awesome. Each stage has different music, and while it does play on a loop, it appears designed to be looped and you don’t really notice it. The music doesn’t change depending on the situation which is a missed opportunity in my mind, however it still sets the scene and tone correctly, because its all awesome epic battle music. On actual sound effects, certain items such as the lightning ring are realistic but have their own unique issues, with my specific example being when the lightning hits the ground, it makes an unusual and unnatural sound. Finally on the sprites, what’s there to say? Its a 2D game, so graphics are for being a 2D game, quite enjoyable, and the sprites are made beautifully, nothing like what I could cook up.
With all this said, that’s the game ladies and gents, Vampire Survivors. It is a great game, and I highly recommend it, its only $4.99 for the base game on Steam, but its also available on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox and even Android and iOS. Hope you enjoyed!