Vampire Survivors Review (SpaceCouncil)
Smash TV meets Castlevania
More accurately, Vampire Survivors is a semi-auto battler/bullet hell roguelite with RPG elements.
Gameplay
What that means in English is that it's a game where one currency is held over between runs to buy passive upgrades and new characters. Each run you will level, obtain weapons and items which are all lost upon death — gameplay wise, you only have control of movement. The weapons auto-fire on cooldown, so it's not the top-down shooter/hack n' slash it may appear as in the videos. The items provide passive augments to either the character themselves or the weapons per run.
Contrary to what I just said but dependent on the weapon, there is some level of “aiming” involved. Weapons such as the whip only fire sideways in a small arc. Otherwise weapons like garlic have an area of effect that surrounds the character, it damages enemies and causes slight knockback, so it's generally used as a defensive weapon. Other weapons like the Runetracer or Fire wand, especially early in a run, require you to hover near, and allow enemies to chase you in order for you to kill them and have them drop the XP gems close enough where you can obtain them without getting damaged. Weapons like that auto-fire towards the nearest enemy and will bounce and pierce through enemies making them rather formidable later on, but a bit cumbersome in the early game. Beyond the normal leveling and... not exactly like weapon ascension in Dark Souls but not entirely removed from it, weapons can also evolve provided you have the associated items that aid it — only learned through discovery. You'll need to collect the gems to actually level, none is earned from killing enemies themselves — powerups can be found such as the vacuum to aid in this process.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786701003
Each character is able to obtain and level six weapons and items each run. Once those slots are filled no new items will drop and you'll be forced to level them. So it's important to choose a strategy early on in how you want approach the stage. The game is in early access at the time of writing this, however there are multiple stages as well as bonus and challenge stages already present with the dev roadmap ahead introducing more. The Mad Forest for example is wide open and you're able to freely move, but the Inlaid Library is essentially a horizontal hallway. In addition to different enemies, the structure of the map forces you into altering the way you approach the stage.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2786701020
The Gist:
There's not a lot going on in this game, but it's got an extremely satisfying gameplay loop — the proverbial “just one more run...” adage is quite applicable. If games still had boxes, you could write that on it as a quote from some random website.
At this price point it's very difficult not to recommend, unless you just don't like auto-battlers, dungeon crawlers or bullet hells. Granted, if you have a strong dislike of all of those genres you might not like this game. Through I'm willing to bet if that were true, you're probably not reading this.
If you've found this review helpful, consider following my curation — Station Argus